Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: StarSlayer on December 18, 2014, 02:42:11 pm
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Curiosity finds methane on Mars, interesting implications. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141216-mars-methane-curiosity-space-science/) It will be cool to see how this plays out, obviously the life on Mars possibility is the infintely cooler one.
In case the folks are unaware of the safety game (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=safety+game) and thus my title makes no sense.
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Between this and the reinterpretation of the Viking experiments in light of the perchlorate levels in Martian soil, there's a growing body of circumstantial evidence for at least the potential for Martian life. For me, more than anything, this highlights the frustrating weakness of even our best, most advanced interplanetary rovers - a human being on Mars, with even basic equipment, could style this debate in the positive on a few hours, assuming he got the right sample. Much harder to prove the negative, of course, but again, significantly easier with a human checking hundreds of samples at ten (or more) times the robots pace.
Get humans to Mars, is what I'm saying. :D
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I just can't see life still being present on Mars. Surviving organic materials and fossilized microorganisms? Sure. But Mars today is too cold, has no atmosphere, and no water on the surface. Unless you want to sell me on it surviving underground somewhere, Europa remains the best candidate for extant life in the Solar System.
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I just can't see life still being present on Mars. Surviving organic materials and fossilized microorganisms? Sure. But Mars today is too cold, has no atmosphere, and no water on the surface. Unless you want to sell me on it surviving underground somewhere, Europa remains the best candidate for extant life in the Solar System.
My issue with blanket statements that life cannot live on Mars without technological support is that it is based on life on Earth, as such we understand life on Earth reasonably well, we do not know however know all permutations available, remember we have life in frozen deserts on Earth, hell there is life that lives around deep ocean thermal vents spewing boiling hot sulphur with no access sunlight. While compared to what we know of life it is improbable, it is a long way from impossible, sure *if* it exists it will probably be in the bacteria scale and complexity but it would still be life.
Remember
* While cold the planet is not absolute zero
* While inhospitable to humans there is an atmosphere
* The planet does receive sunlight and so there is an energy source
* While radiation levels compared to Earth are high is is not impossible for life to exist, even by Earth norms at the bacterial level you would simply be looking at a higher rate of mutation.
* The planet is also believed to at some point in its past have been much more hospitable, this is unlikely to have been a rapid change which would allow evolution to kick in
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The Cardinal Rule about Science?
Most prescribed theories and concepts today will be psuedo-science hogwash tomorrow.
If we do find life on Mars, it will change the game how we view alien life, already constant exoplanet discoveries and analysis are generating more questions, head scratching, and confusion than answers.
Unless you happen to believe Science is like Creationism and that it can't evolve (which is actually more true than many would admit).
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Well, yes, science certainly advances and 'evolves', but I would strongly disagree with that characterization of it...
Most theories today will be just as good a hundred years from now, and for as long as humans are still around and doing science. Remember, what a theory is is a model which attempts to explain some phenomena for the purpose of having predictive power over it. New observations and insights via improved technology may change the model, but whatever it changes to must explain and be consistent with the old observations as well as the new. Hence the new theory must still contain the essence of the old one. E.g. Newton's model of gravity treats it as a force obeying the inverse square law. Einstein replaced this with a geometric interpretation which is shown to be more correct. Is Newton's theory wrong? No. His model is imperfect, as all models are, but the theory is still just as useful as it ever was, and Einstein's reduces to it when you take the appropriate limits. And we know Einstein's model isn't fully correct either, and suspect it will be replaced by some quantum mechanical model which will allow us to explore even broader conditions.
The alternative, which can and does happen, is that a theory or something close to it is found to be completely wrong. This usually happens when we missed something very profound, either by sheer stubbornness or lack of adequate observations (e.g. steady state model, aether, spontaneous generation). Similarly, new ideas are often rejected at first even when they are later shown to be correct. (E.g. white dwarfs and black holes, initially thought way too crazy to be real entities.) But these are the exception, not the rule. Science isn't much like trying to build a house, demolishing it, and building it again. It's more like building a house while constantly checking and throwing out the bad materials. And sometimes you do need a renovation, but you usually don't destroy the whole room. You clean and then add to it.
Anyway, methane on Mars -- this is super cool. We'd of course seen these before from orbit, but characterizing the source was very difficult as the emissions covered a large area and didn't stick around long. I'd never have guessed that (apparently?) they are this highly localized. Whether biological or geological (obviously hoping for the former), it should prove to be very interesting.
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I just can't see life still being present on Mars. Surviving organic materials and fossilized microorganisms? Sure. But Mars today is too cold, has no atmosphere, and no water on the surface. Unless you want to sell me on it surviving underground somewhere, Europa remains the best candidate for extant life in the Solar System.
Haven't you watched Mars Needs Moms? :P
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Similarly, new ideas are often rejected at first even when they are later shown to be correct.
Plate tectonics is another well known example. I own a 1970s book on geology and it barely mentions it as a thing.
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Plate tectonics blows my mind, something so huge and so obvious with so much good strong evidence supporting it is such a recent development, I remember it was still controversial when I was in grade school.