New Mars Forums

I'm afraid I've never been able to find any reference to nitrogen on Mars apart from the 2.7% in the atmosphere.
    It's always been at the back of my mind that this dearth of nitrogen would be the biggest impediment to terraforming. Obviously, KSR could find no way around the problem either without resorting to shipping the stuff in from Titan!

    We may be reduced to liberating as much nitrogen as we can find from nitrate beds in the regolith (if there are such deposits! ), but essentially having an almost all-oxygen atmosphere of say 350 millibars.
    That's if it's feasible (or even desirable) to do such a thing. An atmosphere with that much O2 at that pressure may be too problematic, I'm not sure.

    We really need the two MERs and Mars Express to find lots of nitrogen for us because otherwise creating a shirt-sleeve environment on Mars might be impossible.
                                       

I don't buy the Tesla energy-weapon thing. It sounds like Tesla was grasping at straws towards the end and may have deliberately made insinuations that the 1908 incident in Tunguska was his doing, or at least that he had already built the kind of machine which could do such damage. I suspect he was a troubled man in his later years, having already had a nervous breakdown.

    The most plausible explanation I've read for the Tunguska explosion is that a 30 metre diameter stony meteor, travelling at about 15 kms/sec, self-destructed at an altitude of some 6 kms.
    It seems there is a perfectly reasonable cause for the catastrophic disintegration of such an object. Apparently, when a meteor hits the dense lower regions of the atmosphere at high velocity, it receives an enormous shock - akin to the effect experienced by a diver doing a belly-flop off a diving board. In addition, the inside of the meteor is intensely cold from its journey through space, while its exterior is heated to very high temperatures by friction with the upper atmosphere. Such a temperature differential sets up stresses in the rock, making it more susceptible to the effect of the shock wave.

    The sudden, explosive disintegration of the Tunguska object would have released all of its enormous kinetic energy (energy of motion) in just fractions of a second. Much of this energy would have been in the form of heat - a fireball very much like that of a nuclear detonation.
    Rough calculations indicate Tunguska experienced an explosion with maybe 60 times the energy of the Hiroshima fission bomb! i.e. Equal to a powerful hydrogen bomb in magnitude.

    Good evidence that the meteor was stony came from studies of the trees near ground-zero, which were found to have fragments of stone in their scorched bark. The stone's composition was found to match that of known stony meteorites.

    There are various credible eyewitness accounts that describe a fiery object blazing a trail across the sky before the explosion, and there's the hard evidence of the stone fragments in the trees. These two facts are persuasive showstoppers for the notion that Tesla had anything to do with the incident.

    It looks like another urban myth has bitten the dust! 

    Incidentally, it's been speculated that if the stony meteor in question had arrived just a few hours later, it would have exploded over western Europe, perhaps over Paris or London. The consequences of that don't bear thinking about. 

Well, you may have been duped on that one but I read in a Sunday newspaper today that real paintball hunting does go on in unusual circumstances.

    Somewhere near Las Vegas (I think they said), men with paintball guns hunt naked women. It costs thousands of dollars to join the hunt and the women are paid large sums of money for their trouble - I believe it was $4000 if they aren't hit but only $1500 if they are. (Or figures in that region.)
    There have been complaints that such behaviour might encourage unstable males to attack women for real in less controlled conditions.

    Aside from any psychological considerations, what worried me was a report from one of the women describing how painful a paintball hit on bare flesh can be. She said the impact had broken the skin and drawn blood!
    Maybe it's not the harmless game it's made out to be.

    Perhaps we should take a leaf out of Josh's book and insist that all participating male hunters must, at least once, be stripped in turn and hunted by women with paintball guns!
                                     :;):

Hi BGD and Dickbill!
    Thanks for the interesting responses.
    You are both absolutely correct when you say that nobody knows for sure whether there is life on Mars or not. Aside from the Viking LR experiment, the results of which are hotly disputed, I have nothing to go on but probability. I do admit that probability and fact are two totally different things.

    But I have seen enough to say I believe life on Mars is almost a certainty. I cannot be 100% sure but, to my mind, the probability is very high ... say, 95%+.

    Dickbill, we do know one or two things for sure: There is life on Earth. There has always been transfer of crustal material from Earth to Mars and Mars to Earth. Hence, the conditions must have been sufficient for life to develop on one planet or the other but, for now, we can't be sure which one.
    Let's say life originated on Earth 4 billion years ago. There is credible evidence that many places on Mars at that time were warm and wet. Rocks liberated from Earth's crust by frequent impacts would have been arriving at Mars often. Statistically, the probability is extremely high that many of those rocks would have contained dormant but viable microorganisms, some of which would have found their way into the Martian regolith and prospered.
    I put it to you that once the Martian crust was contaminated with bacteria from Earth (even just one bacterium), those bacteria would have spread quickly across the surface or, at the very least, throughout the subsurface pores and spaces in the regolith. I put it to you also that those microorganisms, replenished after even the worst planetary disasters by fresh arrivals from Earth over the ages, would have survived and evolved up to the present day.
    If Mars was the planet which first gave rise to life and we are actually Martian, the situation is essentially the same. I believe Mars will still harbour the descendants of that original genesis somewhere - more likely underground than on the surface, for obvious reasons. (Though Dr G. Levin almost has me convinced that even the near-surface of Mars probably contains bacteria.)

    Even if both Earth and Mars produced life independently of each other at about the same time, life based on different systems and/or different amino acids, it seems likely to me that we are either an 'amalgamation' of the two systems or the victors of a battle for survival between the two that raged on both planets eons ago.
    Otherwise, we would have found an entirely different life system here on Earth by now, living side by side with our own RNA/DNA system. Why? Because life-bearing rocks from Mars would have been raining down also on this planet for billions of years.
    This is the least likely scenario in my opinion. I tend to think that life more likely arose just once in this star system and migrated between the planets. I justify this reasoning by using Occam's Razor to select the least complex explanation for what I see before me.

    In summary, I think we'll find Earth-type life on Mars .. probably underground, though just possibly at the surface too in certain more hospitable regions. At the moment, I can't see how we could determine which planet it originated on. But that may be because I'm not smart enough! Maybe you, Dickbill, can see how it might be done one day in the future(? ).
    Again I concede that none of this is fact. However, I think the logic is compelling and I'll be surprised if it isn't vindicated by future discoveries.

    BGD, in response to your question, the 150kgs of so-called 'hospitable' material from Mars would logically be the smaller part of the total amount of rock arriving here from Mars because it has to fulfil certain requirements in order to qualify as 'hospitable'. We have only a few kilograms of known Martian crustal material in our possession. The probability is that this would not be 'hospitable' material.
    Even so, a couple of the 'Martian meteorites' do seem to contain evidence of fossilised life forms which appear to have left chemical and mineral signatures not inconsistent with what we'd expect from Earth-type bacteria. [i.e. Polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and magnetite crystals very similar to those produced by terrestrial bacteria to orientate themselves in Earth's magnetic field.]

    What do you think? Convinced yet?   

I note that BGD and, to a lesser extent, Dickbill are somewhat skeptical that Martian lifeforms could have reached Earth in viable form. This is simply incorrect.
    For an interesting summary of our present thinking on this subject, have a look at this article.

    Certain conditions are prescribed in order to classify meteorites from Mars as being suitable (or 'hospitable') enough to allow any organisms in them to survive the journey to Earth. These conditions are:-

    It is concluded that, on average, 150 kgs (330 lbs) of 'hospitable' Martian material falls to Earth each year.
    It is estimated that if there are Martian microbes in these rocks in the first place, approximately 7% of them will survive as viable organisms when they get here!

    It seems a similar mass of Earth rock arrives on Mars each year, too. And again, 7% of the organisms therein are likely to be viable upon arrival. Of course, conditions being what they are on Mars today, the article cautions that far less of the dormant terrestrial microbes are likely to find a niche in which they can prosper ... at least in the present epoch. But it should be noted that Earth bacteria reaching Mars, say, 3 billion years ago may well have found a much balmier environment.

    In summary, I say again that everything I read tells me Martian microbes, if they exist (and I firmly believe they must), have certainly arrived intact here on Earth on a regular basis since time immemorial.
    There is no point whatsoever in mounting time-consuming Sample Return Missions and building expensive containment facilities to protect ourselves from contamination.
    Martian bugs are here among us now!!
    And they evidently don't look any different from Earth bugs because nobody has recognised them as alien!

    I think it's time we all woke up and smelled the coffee. You can't quarantine Martian material ... it's too late!
                                       

Perhaps in space exploration more than any other human endeavour, we need a long-term program with incremental, carefully planned improvements in our capabilities.
    This is a perfect example of one of the main drawbacks with democracy, the 'election horizon'! Most politicians can't see past the next polling day. And they can't resist short-term political gains at the pork barrel, either!
    It seems to me that some of us here at New Mars would make a better job of space planning and budgeting than most of the organisations we see before us today.
                                       

[Just wait until I become dictator of the world, guys. 'Crikey'! You'll see some space exploration then!!!      ]

Hi Rustyplanet!
   If it's the same one Byron and I bought, you'll just love it!!
                                       

I think LilMartiandude23 is underestimating the gravitational acceleration on Mars.

LMd23 writes:-

    Here on Earth, when you drop something it accelerates downwards - gaining 9.81 m/s every second.
    On Mars, the corresponding acceleration is 3.73 m/s every second. Still a very respectable figure.

    Using the volcanic scenario to illustrate the point, what happens on Earth and on Mars if a volcano blasts a hunk of lava 100 metres (328 ft) into the air?
    On Earth, the lava (ignoring air resistance) will fall to the ground in about 4.5 seconds and will be travelling at about 159 kms/hr (99 mph) when it hits.
    On Mars, lava falling from the same height will take about 7.3 seconds to reach the surface and be travelling at about 98 kms/hr (61 mph) when it hits.

    As you can see, LilMartiandude23, there's no chance of Martian lava hanging about in the air. Martian gravity is really quite effective and astronauts will have to be just as careful when climbing or traversing dangerous terrain as any explorer here on Earth. A fall could be just as lethal.
                                           ???

Where's Earthfirst's July 4 post?   ???

RobS, you never cease to amaze me!
    What a fascinating post!!   

    I normally enjoy alternative histories but this one is almost too poignant to bear. Your speculative Russian lunar efforts could have made such a profound difference to the present-day situation. Things could have been so much better than they are: Moon bases, Mars missions ... Wow!
                                  

You can't be serious, Seth!!

    What the hell is wrong with Cassini??!!!!     

Can anyone think of a nice conspiracy theory to account for the apparent scarcity of Saturn V blueprints?
    I mean is there any reason (e.g. the perennial national security angle) why NASA and/or the U.S. government might prefer such blueprints to remain conveniently 'misfiled' and difficult to locate?
                                     :;):