181–190 of 193 posts
Wouldn't it be bad if life forms are found in Mars, according to this? http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
Would that mean that this water have a very high salt content since it is not frozen?
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Interesting. I read that in Jeff Goldblum's voice as well. Were there any missions that lifted off Mars and came back to Earth ?
No, we don't have the capability to land something on Mars with enough fuel for it to take off again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Manufacturin...
Does anyone else think that the form of life found on Mars would most likely be completely distinct from what is found here, down to the molecular and cell level?
Does anyone else think that the form of life found on Mars would most likely be completely distinct from what is found here, down to the molecular and cell level?
Additionally, electrochemical gradients as a means of storing and using energy, and amphiphilic bilayer based membranes both seem to be incredibly fundamental, it would be more surprising to see life that was based on other principles than to see life that shared the same design. As for everything else, who knows? It's likely there are a ton of alternative design choices for a lot of different aspects of cellular machinery on up to large scale structures of plants, animals, fungi, etc.
But overall I'd rate some of the more "out there" notions of things like silicon or sulfur based life, or merely carbon-based life that was utterly different from our nucleic acid/protein/membrane based life as being comparatively unlikely.
Does anyone else think that the form of life found on Mars would most likely be completely distinct from what is found here, down to the molecular and cell level?
On the other side we should consider the possibility that space is porous to life. That life is able to travel between bodies or on bodies that pass through the vacuum of space. In this case we should expect that while there may be independent origins of life, within relatively short distances a certain kind of biochemistry might come to dominate.
Add to this the quite important role that exogenous organic chemicals likely played in the emergence of life on earth, in the case where life arose here and on mars independently. It is probably more likely that life would emerge through roughly the same processes wherever it emerges, therefore in roughly similar environments and using roughly the same building blocks (organic molecules constructed in space and deposited through impacts) we might expect it to have similar forms. I would say that Titan is likely to have something entirely different to earth life - owing to it's very different environment...
The first I have heard of Don Juan Pond ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_Pond ) although I wouldn't say it looks like a swimming pool ( http://www.lakescientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/don-... ). Edit: Here is an article from brown that also draws parallels between Don Juan and Mars: https://news.brown.edu/articles/2013/02/antarctica
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One possibility, perhaps very unlikely and perhaps somewhat likely, is that Earth life could actually survive and adapt to Martian conditions and subsequently destroy existing Martian life. That seems almost comically improbable, but given that we've found that lichen can survive in the vacuum of space for a year and a half [1] and the mere existence of life on hydrothermal vents and inside Chernobyl[2], I think we c…
If there is life on mars, then it would be highly adapted for the Martian Climate over millions of years. It's unlikely that Earth Life would be able to out-compete them.
Another way to look at it is that Mars seems to have almost no biodiversity, so it's possible that martian life forms may be well adapted to their environment, but not for competition. Terrestrial microbes have evolved in an utterly brutal competitive environment and they've been shown to adapt to extreme conditions, so it's not unthinkable that they may have a substantial edge over martian life.
Maybe. Just a laymen, so I could be totally wrong.
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The amount of armchair condescension on HN is appalling. According to the reddit AMA, NASA does do some amount of sterilization before going to Mars, it is enough to justify the exploratory mission. More sterilization would probably take more man hours, more $$$, which would delay the mission to account for an (estimated) low probability of finding water. It seems like they've chosen to iterate instead of getting it…
"The amount of armchair condescension on HN is appalling." So true. It's surprising that some commenters, above and nearby, don't stop to think that a decades-long, multibillion-dollar exploration program, with dedicated conferences (e.g., http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/ ), journals (e.g., http://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/agu/jgr/journal/10.10... or http://www.journals.elsevier.com/icarus/ ) and scie…
The first I have heard of Don Juan Pond ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_Pond ) although I wouldn't say it looks like a swimming pool ( http://www.lakescientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/don-... ). Edit: Here is an article from brown that also draws parallels between Don Juan and Mars: https://news.brown.edu/articles/2013/02/antarctica
Not so long ago it was stated frequently and with certainty that there was no liquid water on Mars. That there could be no liquid water on Mars. Which having read into the topic I thought was obviously non sense. Now every one is like there's water on mars, we've know for a while - you can see the flows. In fact we deliberately don't go to places likely to be wet for fear of cross contamination. I feel like I have be…