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New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

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Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#231

Post by mkl »

aeonik wrote: post #199
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong too. While geothermal heat is going down, it's doing it very slowly and has very little impact on surface temperature. Earth was on average significantly colder in the past, to the point of there being several "snowball earth" episodes when the entire surface froze over. That's no longer possible, strictly because the Sun is warmer now. Mars was somewhat warmer before, but that was not because of geother…

What? I thought the geologic record showed that it's been hot most of the time, punctuated by a few ice ages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#...

Evidence of a Snowball Earth phase is not definitive, but that graph doesn't go back far enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huronian_glaciation

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#232

Post by bmitc »

gloryjulio wrote: post #227
bmitc wrote: post #220

I dislike complaining about titles, but I really wish articles, especially a national laboratory, would be more honest about titles. This makes it sound like this is the new "smoking gun" that Mars was so-called Earth-like early on. However, it was my understanding that this was already known. The largest known waterfall was already previously known to be on Mars at one point, and it was already known that Mars had o…

Just a curious question, is Earth's core cooling off like Mars?

I sure hope not. I would assume it's a rather dynamic situation of various periods of different relative behavior. We're certainly at its mercy though. My understanding about Mars is that it is just a much smaller planet than Earth, and it's core composition was slightly different (?), and so the core couldn't keep up and just slowly stopped "slushing around" and cooled off. That's my very loose understanding of the situation without digging into references. A quick search also seems to imply that it was the collision of Earth and another planetoid (not sure of the right name), the collision that created our rather relatively large and close Moon, injected a huge amount of heat and energy in Earth, basically re-smelting it. Plus the Moon constantly tugs and pulls on the Earth, which also probably adds to the core dynamics.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#233

Post by Qem »

dotnet00 wrote: post #171
sgt101 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? simples. If life is definitively detected on Mars there will never be another mission to determine if life is present on Mars. So what clever scientists have figured out is that they need to do all the science that they want before checking for life.

I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there. The prestige of either potentially studying alien life, or of having the ability to set foot on the fundamental origin of life on our own planet would be even more historically significant than Apollo.

> I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there.

Nope. More probable for it to get quarantined, for fear of cross contamination. IIRC NASA purposefully doesn't land craft on the locations with conditions closer to habitability in Mars today, fearing stowaway microbes from our probes run amok and eradicate any extant martian biota, just like rabbits and other critters brought by Europeans wrecked ecosystems in Australia.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#234

Post by TheVespasian »

the_af wrote: post #229
TheVespasian wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of t…

> the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche [...] we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers [...] but mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil. There's the thing about temporal closeness and impact on actual politics and ideology. Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large…

> Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world.

Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods. These terms we use (rightwing, fascist) are new terms for ancient political dispositions. If I describe someone as imperialist, patriarchal, sexist, antisemitic, and racist, am I more likely to be talking about the Nazis, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Abbasids or the Puritans?

> Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers

My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#235

Post by knighthack »

throw4847285 wrote: post #166

Sometimes I wonder if Sci-fi has done more harm than good. It provides conclusions that people so badly want to prove true that they will look for any evidence, however meager, to bolster their arguments. Maybe there was life on Mars, but the main motivation to believe that right now is that many people have read about it in fantasy books. Much more devastatingly, Sci-fi has driven what technology people develop, and…

> "...It provides conclusions that people so badly want to prove true that they will look for any evidence, however meager, to bolster their arguments."

You argue from the position that Martians 'must not be real'.

Why is your conclusion any better than those who argue that Martians could be real?

Science works upon evidence. If so:

a) there is some evidence to support the existence of prior life on Mars;

b) it is not the scientific case that life on Mars is impossible/implausible

So why do you so strongly hold on to your own dogma, and chastise the conclusions of others as mere 'fantasy' and 'sci-fi'? You are no smarter than everyone else, by merely being contrarian.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#236

Post by shrimp_emoji »

the_af wrote: post #229
TheVespasian wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of t…

> the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche [...] we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers [...] but mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil. There's the thing about temporal closeness and impact on actual politics and ideology. Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large…

> None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship.

It's also funny to brand Caesar as an evil dictator. He was a revolutionary with very benevolent tendencies, both toward the masses and to his enemies. Dictatorships like Sulla's, which came before, were the brutal ones. What the people back then saw Caesar as was as a populist hero fixing a crumbling, broken, and corrupt system. Later, the people of the Empire would think back of the Republican era as one of horror and chaos -- because that's what you get with mob rule.

It's all very relativist.

I think, in the far future, people will regard the Nazis as a point on a continuum and all current governments today as not that far away on that continuum -- not like we do, thinking Hitler was the devil.

Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances. Maybe it's more productive to regard that environment as "evil" than raising people up to Anti-Christ status when the environment churns them out. In Caesar's case, that was a broken senatorial system and a provincial military system not designed to deal with how large and ambitious Rome started getting; in Hitler's, it was how brutally the European powers treated Germany after WW1 and the nearby rise of communism.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#237

Post by seoulmetro »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #215
psunavy03 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet.

I think it’s actually pretty darn stupid that we aren’t running one way missions.

Feels like a conspiracy when you run into these super simple, realistic use cases of generic but progressive ideas.

Things kids can think up, that we can most certainly do that would put us insanely ahead but ... we just don't?

Like, why do we visit the moon but not have people stay there at all? Why are there no structures there?

Why do we ignore the Earth's mysteries a lot and go directly to Mars?

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#238

Post by mkl »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #8
bsima wrote: post #2

yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points

Or, why aren't Martians from Earth. As much as I like the idea conceptually for movies. That life on Earth came from Mars still doesn't explain how life started on Mars. It just moves the location, the mechanism is still tbd.

> Or, why aren't Martians from Earth.

Mars's gravity is much lower, so it's much easier for an impact to accelerate rocks to escape velocity.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#239

Post by markus_zhang »

trenchgun wrote: post #174
markus_zhang wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tree of knowledge - thats obviously a syntax tree. Garden of Eden was a simulation. Getting into computing could crash it.

OK, so they messed with the tree and caused a segfault...

Re: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

#240

Post by dullcrisp »

jjk166 wrote: post #226
pdonis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. Absurd. For starters, by the standards of the nuremberg trials, there's no way in hell he would be convicted. For comparison, among the men actually acquitted by the nurembur…

> Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power

Are you saying that supporting Hitler before the war should have been a war crime?

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