New Mars Forums

Gennaro, I don't think there'll be any problem distinguishing truly martian life (i.e. arising from a separate and independent genesis) from terrestrial life which may have been introduced later.
    As Dickbill has explained, and rather well as usual  , there were countless ways for Earth-life to evolve differently. Thus, purely indigenous martian life has an essentially zero chance of being based on the same pattern. If we discover life on Mars based on the same 20 amino acids, 19 of them laevo-rotatory as they are here, and with the same total bias in favour of dextro-rotatory sugars, we will know beyond doubt that we're looking at terrestrial life.

    But of course, if that's the case, we may never know for sure which planet first produced this form of life, since it could have been transferred in either direction my impact debris, as well as one-way on poorly-sterilised probes!

    The most awe-inspiring scenario involves finding life which is based on different amino acids and sugars, with a different DNA structure, or perhaps no familiar DNA-type structure for information transfer at all!
    Then we'll know that life has arisen independently on two planets in the same solar system and we'll be almost assured that life is everywhere in the universe.
    But sadly for frothing-at-the-mouth rabid terraformers like me, such a scenario is simultaneously the best and worst of worlds. A wholly martian form of life will turn Mars into a no-go zone as the I.S.A.M.B. (International Society for the Advancement of Martian Bacteria) and the world's greenies shift into overdrive and make it a Planetary Park.
    I'll love the little martian bacteria too but I'll find it very hard to let go of my beloved Blue Mars!!
                                                             

Yeah, Mars is having dust trouble by the look of it. Something to keep close tabs on.

    Interesting photo of Mars doing a waltz across the sky!

    Yayyy !!!  Aussie scientists at the CSIRO do it again! What a great bunch of people they are.

    (What's with the koala-bear-claws thing, Cindy? )
                                                 

Earthman, I think you're probably right that "we put life on Mars".

    Life is indeed remarkably tenacious, as you point out. Here on Earth we go to enormous trouble to create sterile environments in Operating Rooms, using state-of-the-art disinfectants and elaborate sterilising procedures. Nevertheless, infections are common and becoming alarmingly more frequent as our antibiotic armoury rapidly depletes.
    A probe crashing into the martian regolith, disintegrating as it buries itself in the surface, has a good chance of introducing dormant bacterial spores into the soil.
    It only takes one bacterium to find shelter, raw materials and moisture and the process of reproduction can begin in earnest; a process endowed with the staggering power of the geometric progression, with one bacterium becoming two bacteria, then four, then eight, then sixteen etc. etc.

    This of course ignores the natural cross-contamination called impact transfer, mediated by the exchange of crustal material by asteroid impact over the eons. The advantage with this means of contamination is that it was occurring when Mars was warmer and wetter, too, and more able to nurture stray bacteria than it is today.
    An established biosphere of bacteria on the surface and/or underground on Mars would, in my opinion, be almost impossible to eradicate without remelting the entire crust in a catastrophic collision of some kind.

    I've paddled this canoe before, so I'll shut up now!!
                                                         :;):

The more I learn of Benjamin Franklin, courtesy of Cindy, the more impressed I become at his wide-ranging intellect.
    When the vast majority of his fellow travellers were immersed in the everyday matters of 18th century life, he was anticipating the 'Green Revolution', which we have achieved, and longevity enhancement techniques, on which we are presently at work. He even speculated on the nullification of mass and gravity as an aid to transport, something still in the realm of physicists' wish lists!

    A 21st century man indeed, born out of his time.   

Now we need Osama behind bars (or better yet, strung up like the barbarian he is) along with his evil little Egyptian weasel of a side-kick, Ayman Al-Zawahiri!

    A great day for the Iraqi people who can now move forward to a better future, free of the spectre of Saddam forever.
    Hearty congratulations also to the coalition forces, especially the U.S. 4th Division troops, for a job well done! As a news reporter said today, this can only do the coalition cause a lot of good. He went on to say that if the world had followed the French and German line, we'd still be dealing with a Saddam Hussein living in a palace laughing at the U.N., rather than found hiding in a hole like the rat he is.
    Saddam can now be tried for his crimes by an Iraqi court and, with any luck, hanged for what he's done.

    Before they hang him, though, there's now a good chance we'll learn the truth about his WMD programs. It doesn't look like he'll have the guts to resist intense interrogation for long!

    What wonderful news for everyone ... what a great day!!
                                           

Is this reporter for real?!!
    America is going to do what? ... When?
    Return a sample from the Moon by about 6 or 7 years from now?
    In the same length of time or less, America went from John Glenn's Mercury flight to Armstrong and Aldrin's stroll on the lunar surface. And almost everything in between was so new that nobody had ever done anything like it before; everything had to be researched, devised, planned, built, tested and launched ... from scratch!

    Returning samples from the Moon is old-hat. The USSR did it a third of a century ago.
    Here we are in 2003, having landed a rover on Mars 4 years ago, and we're going to have to wait until 2010 before the once pre-eminent space power on Earth can get its backside sufficiently in gear to bring us some Moon rocks!!! .... AGAIN !!!!!!!!!!!!

    Well please excuse me if I fail to get too excited about that. If this represents the proposed pace of space exploration from here on, I'll be long dead before the next boot-print on Luna, never mind Mars!
                                                     ???   

I did some googling on this because I think it's interesting to think about what a magnetic reversal would really be like.
    My gut feeling was that such a reversal would likely be a minor inconvenience, in relative terms, rather than a major disruption of life on Earth. Too many reversals have occurred over the ages and yet life has continued largely unperturbed. If the many species known to depend on Earth's magnetic field were so 'over-adapted' to that field that they couldn't survive any significant disturbance in it, we would have seen multiple and frequent extinctions in geologically very short time-spans and those extinctions would correlate with magnetic reversals. That hasn't happened.

    I was pleased to see my intuition vindicated in opinions expressed at This Site.
    It's a great site for those who want an accessible description of most of those aspects of magnetic pole reversals which seem to interest people.
    Byron, it looks like this is derived from the TV show you mentioned. I wish I'd seen it!
                                           

[I was amazed to see that the magnetic field was essentially stable (no flips) for just about the whole of the Cretaceous period! I'm very much looking forward to future work from Dr. J. Marvin Herndon in relation to his hypothesis on uranium fission in planetary cores. It may help us to understand why reversals can be so infrequent in one era and yet so frequent in others. And I still wonder whether the situation with Mars' magnetic field (or lack of it! ) may be better understood if we apply Dr. Herndon's ideas to it.]

We have a Toyota and the damned thing's indestructible!
    I guess making Mars probes is a bit harder than making good cars.
                                             

You're very welcome here, Wgc!
    I, for one, look forward to hearing more from you.
                                                           

Hi Clark.
    I've never seen any reference to the 'Mars-size' impactor, which is our current best explanation for the existence of the Moon, perhaps actually being Mars itself.

    As far as I know, all the computer-simulations of the impact event which give us roughly the 'correct' outcome (i.e. position, density and constituents of the Moon as we see them today etc.), also result in the destruction of the impactor itself.
    The core and much of the mantle of the impactor sink into the proto-Earth, adding to the size of the iron core and increasing Earth's density and gravitational field. A remnant mixture of upper mantle and crustal material from both bodies sprays out into space, ultimately coalescing to become the Moon.
    Personally, I can't conceive of a scenario whereby Mars itself could have struck Earth, created the Moon, lost much of its water to Earth, ricocheted off on a modified path, and taken up residence where it is today. (But then, I thought we'd have people on Mars by now ... so what do I know, right?! )

    A similar but perhaps less violent collision, though, might go a long way toward explaining the lower, younger, relatively crater-free northern hemisphere of Mars. A major collision might also help to explain Mars' axial obliquity and its comparatively eccentric orbit.

    So many questions; so few answers!       

Ha-ha !!
                    :laugh:

    Good point, Rex.

Cindy, I think you may well be right about 'tight-rope walking going on'.
    I'm not sure what the game is but there are inconsistencies in the way NASA carries on; the most recent one being their claims about being interested in looking for life, particularly on Mars which is the most obvious place to look, and their failure to place life-detection equipment on the large MERs!
    I think Mars has abundant life, if not on the surface then at least under it, and I'm inclined to believe Dr. Gil Levin when he says his Labeled Release experiment on Viking discovered some of that life.

    Whatever the logic behind it, it seems to me that NASA sees some advantage in playing down the Viking results as inconclusive, deliberately avoiding any further search for life on Mars, while pretending to be enthusiastic about exobiology.

    If Beagle 2 crashes, I've got a sneaking feeling nobody at NASA will be terribly upset about it. It's almost like the longer they can delay unequivocal proof of life on Mars, the better they appear to like it (?).
    But why?!
                                            ???

[For God's sake, somebody please tell me it's nothing to do with fundamentalist bible teachings!!!
                                                                  ]