151–160 of 329 posts
Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.
Is that the paradise? And Adam's apple might not be an apple, but some important electronic devices that Adam accidentally broke? OK I know it sounds crazy...but it's fun to link legends with science.
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Life arose on Earth really fast after the surface stopped being magma. Since Mars cooled down faster the idea is that it could have spent 100 million of year developing bacteria which were then seeded the Earth as soon as there was liquid water there.
While in general the argument may hold that life evolved too fast, your numbers are off. 100 million years is just about the minimum estimate for the emergence of life on Earth . If Mars has a longer timeline it should be closer to 1 billion years between solidification and emergence of life.
Kurd Lasswitz wrote "Two Planets" in 1897, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39598983 > Lasswitz's Martians differ little from man physically, but ethically, intellectually, scientifically, and socially they are the prototype of the ideal human being. They seek to educate man, asking in return only air and energy to supplement the diminished supplies in their own, older world. The story revolves around a group of…
Possibly worth also including just how controversial Wernher von Braun is. Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans' desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
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What does that have to do with the comment you're replying to? Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?
> I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. He was the Nazis' best rocket engineer, responsible for, among other things, the V2s that devastated much of London. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.
The V2 killed more (enslaved) people who were building it than it did in its attacks. It was only 'successful' as a propaganda weapon.
...And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the heads of every allied airforce, and all of their immediate subordinates and sub-subordinates should have been dancing the hemp fandango.
I'll also point out that a lot of Nazi military officers and civilian leaders and industrialists, despite significant involvement in the regime's crimes were not found guilty[1] in those trials.
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[1] Even in the Soviet-ran ones - and as every loyal comrade knows, the courts of the glorious Soviet Union are the fairest, most humane, and most merciful justice system the world has ever conceived, especially when it came to the question of judging fascists.
Of course it had an Earth-like environment. Hasn't anyone ever read Edgar Rice Burroughs?
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You jest, but I seriously believe we are likely martians. Early panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of astrobiological questions about origin of life and LUCA complexity. To be clear, Mars’ descent into inhospitality was totally natural and the result of a smaller planet with stripped atmosphere just outside the habitable zone as the Sun cooled. I doubt Martian life developed to be multicellular. But I bet when we go…
But then how did life get on mars?
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Mars had 3/4 billion more years to develop, compared with the Earth. Mars formed first, and cooled first due to its smaller size. One of the outstanding problems in astrobiology I mention is that the Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya, and the oldest fossils of presumably DNA based life (since it matches existing life we can study) was 3.7Gya. Mars was hospitable ~4.5Gya. So either life emerged IMMEDIATELY on Earth…
At this point, given how much Mars had been roved, why hasn’t some fossil record been discovered yet? At the very least, I would expect something akin to chalk left behind by proto-diatoms that had calcium carbonate skeletons.
yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
Going up a few basis points would be like increasing the odds 1,000,000x. I'm not opposed to the idea that life began on Mars, and, I don't know, through some mass ejection a chunk of lifelike stuff landed on earth and seeded it. But it seems like a much harder path to take than to just form life on Earth from the start.