[HN Gopher] New findings point to an Earth-like environment on a...
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New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars
Author : geox
Score : 226 points
Date : 2024-05-01 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (discover.lanl.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (discover.lanl.gov)
| bsima wrote:
| yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis
| points
| WillAdams wrote:
| Well, that was H. Beam Piper's premise in his "Terro Human
| Future" and "Paratime" stories --- see the wonderful novella
| "Omnilingual" and see the story "Genesis":
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18105
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| Anyone remember the title of the short where they explore an
| ancient martian city and find a periodic table that serves as
| a Rosetta stone?
| WillAdams wrote:
| That's "Omnilingual"
|
| See the nicely updated version at:
|
| http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| Oops, sorry for the spoiler
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Life arose on Earth _really fast_ after the surface stopped
| being magma. Since Mars cooled down faster the idea is that
| it could have spent 100 million of year developing bacteria
| which were then seeded the Earth as soon as there was liquid
| water there.
| digging wrote:
| While in general the argument may hold that life evolved
| too fast, your numbers are off. 100 million years is just
| about the minimum estimate for the emergence of life _on
| Earth_. If Mars has a longer timeline it should be closer
| to 1 billion years between solidification and emergence of
| life.
| Symmetry wrote:
| You're right that my numbers are off. I'd bee thinking of
| the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment 3.8e9 years go, but
| there's some suggestive evidence there was liquid was on
| Earth's surface 4.4e9 years ago. And the earliest
| bacterial fossils are from 3.5e9 years ago, though
| goodnesss knows how long it took bacteria to make
| colonies that ended up making fossils to survive to the
| present day.
| tehlike wrote:
| All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Yeah I never liked the panspermia as a solution to how life
| started so quickly on Earth because it just kicks the can
| down the road. But hey it has been speculated that DNA may be
| almost 10 billion years old
| https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html. But
| this is just a thought experiment, I am unsure if we know how
| long it takes for DNA to double, nor do we know if the rate
| would be constant over time. For example if proof reading
| mechanisms evolved later thus slowing down the rate of
| change. But it's fun to think about. Too bad Google search is
| so useless I used to be able to go down these Rabbit holes
| finding all sorts of information but now it's almost
| impossible, Google just gives superficial AI answers these
| days
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| Recall that no one could reconcile billion year ages for
| the earth with it not having cooled far more - until the
| discovery of radioactivity.
| c22 wrote:
| If we can demonstrate that life moved from Mars to Earth then
| the most likely explanation for life on Mars is that it also
| got there from somewhere else.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Going up a few basis points would be like increasing the odds
| 1,000,000x.
|
| I'm not opposed to the idea that life began on Mars, and, I
| don't know, through some mass ejection a chunk of lifelike
| stuff landed on earth and seeded it. But it seems like a much
| harder path to take than to just form life on Earth from the
| start.
| Insanity wrote:
| Asteroids as originators of life, that impacting both, would
| be the more likely "root cause" of having life on both
| planets
| c22 wrote:
| Even more interesting would be the discovery that life
| developed on Mars _and_ on earth. And whether that happened
| around the same time or at different times.
| tivert wrote:
| > yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis
| points
|
| I bet there's some non-life explanation, probably having to do
| with weird chemistry that happens on Mars over long periods,
| but is not so significant on Earth.
|
| The article says the Earth-chemistry that creates these
| minerals involves the oxygen in the atmosphere, but it doesn't
| seem plausible to me that Mars's atmosphere was ever
| oxygenated. It took billions of years for the Earth's
| atmosphere to become oxygenated, and it sounds like Mars lost
| most of its atmosphere fairly quickly.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Someone else brought up that superoxygenator salts form in
| the upper layers of the soil due to the high UV radiation on
| the surface. It's possible the oxidation here is due to those
| superoxygenators but the original manganese is due to the
| ancient lake. So basically manganese is embedded in the rock
| while there's a lake, then the lake dries up as the
| atmosphere disappears. And finally the UV gets strong enough
| to create oxidizers in the soil which react with the
| manganese.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It seems very low likelihood that a life-bearing chunk of Mars
| arrived and seeded life here.
|
| What are the chances that some type of single-cell critter(s)
| from Mars were robust enough to:
|
| 1) Survive the trip here with the extreme cold of space, AND
|
| 2) Survive the searing heat of entering earth's atmosphere, AND
|
| 3) Survive conditions on earth, when they were adapted to the
| martian environment
|
| And that's all premised on a meteor strike on Mars ejecting
| something with enough velocity to not only escape Martian
| gravity, but then miraculously happen to score a direct hit on
| earth (a miniscule angular target to hit).
|
| This combination of low probabilities seems to result in an
| explanation of lower probability than the alternative (life
| originating on earth) that it's attempting to explain, and of
| course life originating on an earth-like Mars in same time
| frame it would have needed to develop here (or maybe also did
| develop here) doesn't add much more than historical interest.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Curious why there is much less interest in the Pleiades,
| which is made of all of our same material and is very likely
| a "fork" of earth formed after the original mass that later
| became earth and moon colliding with another body in early
| history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis
| neverokay wrote:
| Why don't we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy
| peasy.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Mars is big, fossils are small.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly
| available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on
| Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops
| with them.
|
| Layered sedimentary rocks like the ones pictured in
| https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-
| fin... are probably good candiates.
| XorNot wrote:
| The trouble is that while common, we still had to explore
| our whole planet pretty thoroughly to find them.
|
| We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right
| now.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's fair. I'd expect knowing where we're likely to
| find them on Earth does at least help inform our few Mars
| landers' choice of landing sites, though.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Would orbiting satellites with lidar sensors be able to
| find suitable candidate sites for digging?
| tokai wrote:
| I don't remember where I read it, but somebody wrote that a
| geologist with a hammer could do more science in an afternoon
| than all our mars probes have done combined. Its hard to do
| science with a rc car, even if said car is cutting edge.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| That's true. Look at how many time SG-1 got into an issue
| even with the MALP. That's with a much quicker wireless
| connection too.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sounds like a great opportunity to rewatch one of my all
| time favorite episodes, "Revisions" (s07e05)
| prox wrote:
| What if we send a humanoid drone next?
| Filligree wrote:
| Give it a sufficiently advanced AI, and that might work.
| WilTimSon wrote:
| Current AI isn't ready for that yet, though. What's
| available to us couldn't even be effectively used for
| research on Earth's out-of-reach places, much less on
| Mars. In some years, however... That would be curious.
| emporas wrote:
| Is it possible to fly on such a thin atmosphere? Doubt it.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Humans can also take on new research objectives on the fly
| while rovers/probes can only ever do what they were designed
| to. The difference in flexibility, capability, and speed are
| vast.
| gilbetron wrote:
| If you took at fairly smart person, give them a set of Earth
| maps, and had them pick one spot where they could fake landing
| a rover, and let them travel within a few hundred meters of
| that spot and drill, like, 100 spots, I wonder what the odds of
| them finding a fossil?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| land on a travertine deposit
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travertine
| Symmetry wrote:
| For half the history of life on Earth there were no
| multicellular animals at all[1]. Given how quickly life on
| Earth arrived I wouldn't be surprised if there were bacteria on
| Mars. But given how long it took Earth life to develop
| Eukaryotic cells I'd be surprised if Mars ever developed
| something as sophisticated as an amoeba. Still, Bacteria do
| leave fossils like stromatolites and some scientists even think
| some Mars rock parts look sort of like bacteria fossils[2]. But
| those are more ambiguous than little skeletons or shells.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001#:~:text=In%2
| ....
| neverokay wrote:
| That's the part that still boggles my mind. How could there
| not be some kinda micro bacteria on all these planets.
| meindnoch wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobacterium
| baja_blast wrote:
| Given how long it took for Earth to develop multicellular life,
| Mars was probably pretty dead before it could take off(although
| it's very likely microbes still exist on Mars). But who knows,
| maybe Earth was late to the multicellular party, but I doubt
| it. If Mars did somehow evolve to multicellular life before
| Earth it's very likely that the multicellular would have been
| seeded to Earth via asteroids with something akin to a martian
| tardigrade
| jancsika wrote:
| Why don't we just teach kids music by having them buy a cheap
| $3 plastic recorder and simply glue a mic to it that connects
| to a 13-minute-and-48-second delay line which feeds into to an
| expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones that they wear
| during all practice sessions?
|
| Easy peasy. :)
| neverokay wrote:
| If it's the only option at the moment, sure let's do it.
|
| Beethoven's ear trumpet.
| fallat wrote:
| We need a hero.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Isn't that what Perseverance does?
| aixpert wrote:
| OR could 20m deep drilled core samples recovery remnants of RNA
| based live??
| forgingahead wrote:
| *Barsoom
| pjmlp wrote:
| Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after
| messing up Mars.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You jest, but I seriously believe we are likely martians. Early
| panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of astrobiological questions
| about origin of life and LUCA complexity.
|
| To be clear, Mars' descent into inhospitality was totally
| natural and the result of a smaller planet with stripped
| atmosphere just outside the habitable zone as the Sun cooled. I
| doubt Martian life developed to be multicellular. But I bet
| when we go we'll find fossils of algae colonies and
| cyanobacteria, and maybe even some living remnants underground.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| But then how did life get on mars?
| alex_young wrote:
| Blew in from Europa
| bena wrote:
| Exactly, panspermia isn't an answer, it's kicking the can
| down the road.
|
| The only thing panspermia can tell us is that it's ok if we
| can't find evidence for the genesis of life on Earth.
| wddkcs wrote:
| All science is the process of kicking the can further
| down the road.
| b800h wrote:
| Excellent comment. Kalam cosmological argument.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Which is an important advance because genesis of life on
| Earth is getting harder and harder to answer as we gather
| more evidence. Pushing it to another environment (and
| longer time frame) does in fact solve a number of
| problems.
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| What evidence? Do we no longer figure ~4by bp?
| bena wrote:
| I'd say it just ignores any problems.
|
| However, haven't we roughly recreated the process in a
| lab in the last couple of decades?
|
| And we may never have _the_ answer because we simply can
| 't know because no one was there because nothing was
| there. But there's a plausible enough explanation that we
| don't need to invoke the extraterrestrial and all of
| _its_ problems.
|
| And I think that's part of the appeal of panspermia, it
| makes life extraterrestrial. And if it is
| extraterrestrial in origin, then it could have happened
| elsewhere. Whereas if the genesis of life is contained to
| Earth, then the chances go down that it happened
| somewhere else.
| Insanity wrote:
| I get your point, but the idea that life originates on
| Asteroids and populates planets on impact is, imo, likely.
| It does shift the question to "how did it start there" :)
| fullstackchris wrote:
| do asteroids even have all the elements / compounds
| necessary to support the building blocks of life?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes. In fact some have surprisingly complex organic
| chemistry--amino acids and everything.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Apparently, yes.
|
| But they don't have nearly as many opportunities to react
| as in a hot planet with an atmosphere. So pushing that
| life started there instead of only recognizing it's a
| very unlikely (but still possible) possibility isn't
| sustained by evidence.
| adrian_b wrote:
| They have the chemical elements, but they do not have a
| source of energy that could create life.
|
| For the appearance of life, a planet with a hot interior
| and volcanism is necessary, so that minerals that are
| stable only at high temperatures in the interior are
| ejected to the surface, where after cooling down they are
| no longer in chemical equilibrium, providing the energy
| necessary to drive the synthesis of organic
| macromolecules (by producing through chemical reactions
| with water reduced compounds like dihydrogen and carbon
| monoxide, which can reduce the abundant carbon dioxide
| and dinitrogen to eventually generate amino-acids).
|
| The solar energy cannot play any role in the appearance
| of life, because harvesting it requires systems that are
| much more complex than those that appear naturally in the
| inorganic minerals and fluids.
|
| While the Earth had certainly all the preconditions for
| the appearance of life right here, it is likely that Mars
| also had them in the beginning.
|
| What another poster has said is plausible, i.e. the only
| reason for supposing that life could have been brought on
| Earth from another place is that life has appeared rather
| quickly on Earth, even if this is an event with a much
| lower probability than all the other events that have
| occurred after that during the evolution towards more
| complex forms of life, which have required billions of
| years to happen.
|
| If life has been transferred to Earth from elsewhere,
| Mars is the only plausible source, because it had the
| conditions necessary to generate life long enough before
| Earth and because fragments from Mars have been
| frequently transported to Earth, where they fall as
| meteorites, after being ejected from Mars by impacts that
| happened there, which is easier than from other planets
| due to the lower gravity.
|
| Despite the fact that it is not impossible, I doubt that
| life has been brought from Mars, but it is indeed
| puzzling that life seems to have appeared very quickly on
| Earth.
|
| There are also facts that are hard to explain by the
| hypothesis of transfer from Mars. If that happened, than
| the forms of life that have been transferred must have
| consisted of at least one kind of autotrophic "bacteria"
| and at least several distinct kinds of viruses, to
| explain all the existing living beings as their
| descendants.
|
| There is considerable evidence for the fact that the
| current genetic code of the nucleic acids is the product
| of a long evolution process. In the beginning there must
| have been a simpler code where many more combinations
| were equivalent and which encoded no more than 10 amino-
| acids, perhaps only 6 or even only 4 in its original
| variant. So very ancient "bacteria" may have
| superficially looked like modern bacteria but they must
| have had a quite different metabolism. In the hypothesis
| where life has moved between planets, there would be an
| open problem of when had the transfer happened during
| this early evolution of the genetic system.
|
| On Earth there has remained no survivor with a much
| simpler genetic code (though there are a few examples of
| only slightly simpler genetic codes than the canonic
| variant). Perhaps the earlier living beings were
| completely uncompetitive with the modern ones, so they
| have been eaten or they have starved to death. In the
| case of a transfer from Mars, it would also exist the
| possibility that only living beings with a complex
| genetic code had survived through a transfer and the
| others had remained on Mars.
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| After going back through all the elephants, life started
| with Great A'Tuin.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It's turtles all the way down . . .
| adastra22 wrote:
| Mars had 3/4 billion more years to develop, compared with
| the Earth. Mars formed first, and cooled first due to its
| smaller size.
|
| One of the outstanding problems in astrobiology I mention
| is that the Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya, and the
| oldest fossils of presumably DNA based life (since it
| matches existing life we can study) was 3.7Gya. Mars was
| hospitable ~4.5Gya. So either life emerged IMMEDIATELY on
| Earth and did a complexity speed run before slowing down
| and remaining stagnant for the next billion years or so, or
| it emerged on Mars first and Earth was seeded once it was
| cool enough.
| jerpint wrote:
| How does earth get seeded?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Look up ALH-84001. The debate about whether the
| structures inside this Martian meteorite are fossils is
| too long for a HN post. But in analyzing the rock it was
| shown that the during the entire trip from when it was
| blasted out of Mars to when it fell in Antarctica would
| have been survivable for rock boring microbes. Not just
| theoretically, but hard evidence. There are structures
| that would have been destroyed if the rock was heated
| enough to sterilize, but they survived the trip. Hundreds
| of tons of rock like this from Mars land every year.
| Qem wrote:
| Related talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekJQUS7WP78&t
| =57s&pp=ygUPS2lyc...
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > Hundreds of tons of rock like this from Mars land every
| year.
|
| 277 _total_ Martian meteorites -- with the largest
| weighing 14.5 kg -- is not hundreds of tons yearly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's how many have been conclusively classified as
| Martian out of "the 72,000 meteorites [total] that have
| been classified".
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite)
|
| That's obviously not the actual total that have ever made
| it here.
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-
| meteorites/fac...
|
| > Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000
| kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each
| day.
|
| That has been going on for _billions_ of years. If the
| 277 /72,000 proportion holds that's a _lot_ of material.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| While I recognize your logic, and even mostly agree, the
| point still stands that it cannot be conclusively and
| definitively said (as least as far as we've been
| alive/can tell) that _hundreds of tons_ of Martian
| meteorites fall to Earth _every year_. Or even _tons_ at
| all.
|
| Tons of meteorites in general, sure -- but not from Mars.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It is likely given these numbers at least some _tons_ of
| Martian rock land here annually, which makes the seeding
| of life concept feasible. I 'm on board with "not
| _hundreds_ of tons ", but it's a lot closer estimate than
| 277 _ever_.
|
| (48.5 * 365) * (277 / 72,000) = 68 tons per year as an
| _extremely_ speculative estimate here, ignoring entirely
| probable variances in what hits us (much of which is
| sand-grain sized) versus what we identify... and again,
| any estimate here we have to multiply by a few _billion_
| years.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| If there were extra-terrestrial intervention, it would
| only have needed to be a one-time event.
|
| And it wouldn't be technologically hard to do it such
| that no trace remains over those timescales.
|
| So, yes, that's "crazy". On the other hand, it's
| unfalsifiable in the absence of other theories.
| adastra22 wrote:
| There are much saner theories for panspermia.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Like? You're coming across as very dismissive for no
| reason.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There are meteorites on Earth which very likely
| originated from Mars. They're believed to have been
| launched into space by an impact, eventually finding
| their way onto Earth. If we're looking for the most
| realistic options for panspermia to have occurred, they'd
| be due to a natural event of this sort.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'm not arguing against that.
|
| I'm just saying unfalsifiability is a bitch, and it's
| hard to find hard evidence on geologic timescales.
| williamcotton wrote:
| The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. It
| is not on someone else to disprove such a claim.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Volcanic eruptions throwing rocks into space. A large
| impact throwing a huge number of rocks into space.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Your numbers give Mars an extra ~800 million years.
| Nothing even close to 3/4 billion.
|
| Besides, deciding what was inhospitable for early life is
| an exercise of noisy assumptions. I'd bet the error
| margin is larger than that difference.
| Shatnerz wrote:
| 3/4 billion = 750 million, no?
| caseyy wrote:
| Long billion vs short billion?
| williamcotton wrote:
| Didn't the "long billion", aka a trillion, stop being
| used sometime in the early 20th century on British
| English, if not earlier?
| b800h wrote:
| Some of our books in UK school in the 1980s listed 10^12
| as a billion. That doesn't mean it wasn't officially
| changed in the early C20th though.
| Teever wrote:
| ?????????
|
| 800 million is greater than 3/4 billion?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Maybe he misread it as 3-4 billion?
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I misread it that way too. Fractions aren't commonly used
| for things like millions, billions, etc.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 3/4, as in the fraction 3 out of 4, 75%, not 3-4
| dwaltrip wrote:
| To be fair, 3/4 billion is an unusual way to write that.
| Much more common is 750 million, or even 0.75 billion.
| xattt wrote:
| At this point, given how much Mars had been roved, why
| hasn't some fossil record been discovered yet?
|
| At the very least, I would expect something akin to chalk
| left behind by proto-diatoms that had calcium carbonate
| skeletons.
| adastra22 wrote:
| How would we know? It's not like like we have a geologist
| over there with a rock hammer breaking open rocks to look
| for fossils.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Yet.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I think it's actually pretty darn stupid that we aren't
| running one way missions.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| I think there have been less than 100 drill holes by
| curiosity and perseverance the deepest being ~3" and none
| of those samples have returned to earth. Not sure how
| deep any potential fossil layers might be but that
| doesn't sound like a lot.
| vel0city wrote:
| There's been less than 150 miles of Mars roamed by mostly
| small rovers that often could barely do more than take
| pictures and do some basic soil chemical analysis. Do you
| expect to see obvious dinosaur remains with an RC car
| with a small shovel driving around in Kansas for 100
| miles, especially if you don't even know what a dino even
| looks like?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > At this point, given how much Mars had been roved
|
| I mean maybe its a lot compared to 20 years ago but in
| absolute terms? It's practically nothing, isnt it?
| somenameforme wrote:
| Other posts answered, but only if you already know the
| answer. The rovers we've used on Mars have done an
| _extremely_ superficial job of scouring the planet. The
| most recent rover Perseverance has, to my knowledge, the
| most capable drill with a max depth of 2.4 inches. [1]
| And the drill is used extremely sparingly because it
| tends to break quickly, as it did on Curiosity. And of
| course it can only drill, not excavate /cleave. The first
| humans on Mars will likely provide more information in a
| week than decades of probes and rovers have.
|
| [1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-
| perseverance-rovers-...
| Qem wrote:
| They don't carry petrographic microscopes, nor dig deep
| boreholes.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Drilling a couple of inches into the surface a handful of
| times isn't going to find any fossils.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya
|
| There is much uncertainty about this. The early Earth was
| a volatile place with a lot of raw materials and energy
| available, and a lot of chemistry happening. I wouldn't
| rule out that _some_ part of Earth may have had the right
| conditions for life right from the beginning. Certainly
| if we expect life to be able to survive a ride on a piece
| of ejecta from Mars, it 's plausible to imagine it
| surviving in some boundary niche amidst the heat and fury
| of the Hadean Earth.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wouldn 't rule out that some part of Earth may have
| had the right conditions for life right from the
| beginning_
|
| Even if it was, it wouldn't have survived the impact that
| created the Moon.
| jl6 wrote:
| Bear in mind that hypothesized impact is estimated to
| have occurred around the 4.5Gya mark. That's still a lot
| further back than 3.8Gya. And I still wouldn't
| categorically rule out microscopic life/life-precursors
| surviving the event somehow.
| paxys wrote:
| That still doesn't answer the question. How did life
| start on Mars?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| That's a different question though, and you're right that
| this wouldn't be answered in the scope of this
| discussion.
| Intralexical wrote:
| The longer time period would be partially offset by Mars
| having over three times lower surface area than Earth,
| though.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Complexity speed run to stagnation isn't suspect at all,
| thats exactly what you'd expect when there is suddenly a
| new environment to exploit for life. Mutations are always
| happening. At some point a subpopulation will emerge that
| has a lucky few mutations that grant it an edge relative
| to others in fitness, then it will dominate the
| environment until the factors that confer success either
| change, or these mutants fall short of a more fit upstart
| mutant population. Its something you see play out even
| today, when an invasive species is introduced to a new
| environment where its traits serve it well, and quickly
| outcompetes native species.
|
| Its also why we better be damn sure the mars sample
| return is absolutely sterile lest we contaminate our
| planet with extraterrestrial microbes.
| kerhackernews wrote:
| Couldn't it just be that simple life isn't rare as long
| as the conditions exist for it to form. It took a very
| very very long time for even oxygen producing life to
| form after that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I remember seeing somewhere a graph where someone plotted
| the "complexity" of life vs. time, I think on a log plot,
| and found a straight line. The line goes to (log) 0 around
| 5 billion years before the formation of the solar system.
| The inference from this admittedly dubious exercise was
| that life originated somewhere before our Solar system,
| spread here, and continued to evolve here.
|
| I think it was maybe from this source? https://www.scienced
| irect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What definition of "complexity" lets it be linear across
| the Cambrian Explosion?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Size of genome, I think. Not clear how they estimate that
| for deep time.
| caseyy wrote:
| Maybe Earth? Who knows? Lots of good sci-fi has been
| written about it. I recommend J.P. Hogan's "Inherit the
| Stars", which starts with evidence of human spaceflight
| predating known history and goes on interesting directions.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I heard somewhere that life started on Mars, but it was all
| male. Can't seem to find the reference.
| sinkwool wrote:
| so aliens _did_ build the pyramids!
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| What is your actual mechanism for life getting to Earth from
| Mars?
| pjmlp wrote:
| I guess we can somehow bind an asteroid, alongside a
| spaceship crashing in.
| somenameforme wrote:
| We already know the meteorites from Mars probably do make
| their way to Earth on occasion. [1] From there, imagining
| some primitive life managing to hitch a ride is easy. Even
| quite advanced life, like tardigrades, have demonstrably
| survived days of exposure to outer space, and successfully
| procreated afterwards. [2]
|
| [1] - https://www.space.com/mars-meteorites-on-earth-
| mystery
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#Survival_aft
| er_expo...
| e44858 wrote:
| > Martian meteorites experience shock pressures of less
| than 30 GPa on ejection from the Red Planet
|
| Is that enough energy to boil the living things that
| might be in the rock?
| Qem wrote:
| Early solar system had plenty of impact events happening.
| Mars has less gravity than Earth, so it's easier to eject
| material from there. Picture a comet or asteroid hitting
| early mars. Most ejecta falls back to Mars, but still tens
| of thousands of rock fragments are ejected into space, in
| random directions. Some fraction of them are likely to
| reach Earth a few years later, potentially carrying any
| microbial stowaways present in Mars by then.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > as the Sun cooled
|
| Huh?
|
| The Sun has consistently gotten hotter with age.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Thank you for the factual correction. It's the geothermal
| (aerothermal?) heat that has decreased by more than the
| sun's increasing luminosity, resulting in net temperature
| loss.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| 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 geothermal, but because it used to have a thicker
| atmosphere, and that retained heat better.
| aeonik wrote:
| 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_reco
| rd#...
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Indeed. Something we have in common.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Normally I wouldn't complain about downvotes, but telling
| me I've got uglier is a bit cruel. I'll get over it...
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Probably, we tried Earth first, realized there were huge
| freaking dinosaurs on it, decided to wait it out a bit,
| watched that comet hit, was like, "yay! now we can go!"
| Tade0 wrote:
| Since the formation of both Earth and Mars (approximately the
| same time) the Sun's output actually increased by ~33%.
| ordu wrote:
| _> as the Sun cooled_
|
| Sun becomes hotter with time passed, not cooler.
|
| _> Early panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of
| astrobiological questions about origin of life and LUCA
| complexity._
|
| Does it solves questons or just moves them to another planet?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'd go one step further and say that life began in the
| protoplanetary disk, explains how quickly life established
| itself on Earth.
| btbuildem wrote:
| That would be pretty fascinating.. technologies long lost, and
| now we look at eroded past of where civilizations once
| flourished
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| jetbooster wrote:
| Sounds like Assassin's Creed lore
| pjmlp wrote:
| Could lead to an interesting plot.
| hgs3 wrote:
| For a time the "Adam and Eve" twist ending was actually
| overused in many science fiction stories so much so that it
| is now pejoratively discussed in books on writing [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_God_story
| trenchgun wrote:
| Tree of knowledge - thats obviously a syntax tree. Garden of
| Eden was a simulation. Getting into computing could crash it.
| kloch wrote:
| > n 1976, while Van Flandern was employed by the USNO, he began
| to promote the belief that major planets sometimes explode.[30]
| Van Flandern also speculated that the origin of the human
| species may well have been on the planet Mars, which he
| believed was once a moon of a now-exploded "Planet V".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Flandern#Exploding_pla...
| uptown wrote:
| My favorite theory is that Mars is what Earth will eventually
| resemble.
| moose44 wrote:
| Link not working for anyone else?
| gku wrote:
| Alternative source: https://phys.org/news/2024-05-earth-
| environment-ancient-mars...
| baja_blast wrote:
| One thing that has annoyed me is in the 1970s the Viking landers
| did experiments to check for the presence of life on Mars known
| as the Labeled Release experiments
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_exper...
| which dropped a nutrient solution with radioactive Carbon-14 to
| detect if there was any off gassing to detect if anything
| metabolized the soil. And both experiments showed positive
| results but it has been dismissed since chemical reactions could
| not be ruled out. But here is the thing, the experiments then did
| a sterilization control where they heated up the soil to 320 F
| for 3 hours and attempted the experiment again and no gasses were
| detected which is something you'd expect to see if the gasses
| were produced by microbes and not chemical processes.
|
| Now is this a positive detection of life? No because other
| possible factors can not be ruled out. But what puzzles me is why
| we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and
| detect life? After the Viking missions we never conducted any
| further experiments that could rule out any other possible
| chemical reactions to get closer to confirming the presence of
| microbial life.
|
| So I would say with the Labeled Release experiments coupled with
| the seasonal Methane detections strongly imply that there is
| still microbial extremophiles on Mars.
| tivert wrote:
| > But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any
| further experiments to try and detect life? After the Viking
| missions we never conducted any further experiments that could
| rule out any other possible chemical reactions to get closer to
| confirming the presence of microbial life.
|
| According to Wikipedia, the radiation levels are too high:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Cosmic_radiation
|
| > Even the hardiest cells known could not possibly survive the
| cosmic radiation near the surface of Mars since Mars lost its
| protective magnetosphere and atmosphere.[63][64] After mapping
| cosmic radiation levels at various depths on Mars, researchers
| have concluded that over time, any life within the first
| several meters of the planet's surface would be killed by
| lethal doses of cosmic radiation.[63][65][66] The team
| calculated that the cumulative damage to DNA and RNA by cosmic
| radiation would limit retrieving viable dormant cells on Mars
| to depths greater than 7.5 meters below the planet's
| surface.[65] Even the most radiation-tolerant terrestrial
| bacteria would survive in dormant spore state only 18,000 years
| at the surface; at 2 meters--the greatest depth at which the
| ExoMars rover will be capable of reaching--survival time would
| be 90,000 to half a million years, depending on the type of
| rock.[67]
| baja_blast wrote:
| People have said the same thing many times yet we keep
| discovering extremophiles thriving the some of the most
| hostile environments. And in 2020 they conducted an
| experiment on the ISS that exposed Earth bacteria to direct
| cosmic radiation for 3 years and it turns out they survived
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-
| dis.... And this was just Earth bacteria that did not evolve
| under these conditions, any remaining microbes on Mars would
| have developed adaptions to survive in such conditions.
| Qem wrote:
| So we just need to find a recently excavated impact crater, a
| few thousand years old, and send a probe there, to inspect
| freshly exposed layers.
| deelowe wrote:
| Read the wikipedia link and it seems there are credible
| explanations for what is going on:
|
| > "With unsterilized Terrestrial samples, though, the addition
| of more nutrients after the initial incubation would then
| produce still more radioactive gas as the dormant bacteria
| sprang into action to consume the new dose of food. This was
| not true of the Martian soil; on Mars, the second and third
| nutrient injections did not produce any further release of
| labeled gas."
|
| > "Albet Yen of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has shown that,
| under extremely cold and dry conditions and in a carbon dioxide
| atmosphere, ultraviolet light (remember: Mars lacks an ozone
| layer, so the surface is bathed in ultraviolet) can cause
| carbon dioxide to react with soils to produce various
| oxidizers, including highly reactive superoxides (salts
| containing O2-). When mixed with small organic molecules,
| superoxidizers readily oxidize them to carbon dioxide, which
| may account for the LR result. Superoxide chemistry can also
| account for the puzzling results seen when more nutrients were
| added to the soil in the LR experiment; because life
| multiplies, the amount of gas should have increased when a
| second or third batch of nutrients was added, but if the effect
| was due to a chemical being consumed in the first reaction, no
| new gas would be expected. Lastly, many superoxides are
| relatively unstable and are destroyed at elevated temperatures,
| also accounting for the "sterilization" seen in the LR
| experiment."
| baja_blast wrote:
| > This was not true of the Martian soil; on Mars, the second
| and third nutrient injections did not produce any further
| release of labeled gas
|
| But that's probably because martian microbes are less
| tolerant of high temperatures when compared to Earth
| microbes. But, yes I am aware there are other non life
| factors that could have resulted in a positive detection. But
| my point is why would we never follow up with further
| experiments to test for possible chemical reactions?
| sgt101 wrote:
| >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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| logrot wrote:
| So we messed up Mars, almost done with Earth, where do we go
| next?
| tehlike wrote:
| To infinity and beyond.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Saturn. Best place for heat and raw materials.
| trentnix wrote:
| We?
| spurgu wrote:
| You know, us lifeforms.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| "Messed up Mars" = Rendered into a dry wasteland where maybe
| there might be fossils of microscopic life
|
| "Messed up Earth" = Making it very uncomfortable for Humans,
| causing large losses of life in poorer parts of the world,
| causing mass extinctions, but otherwise life will go on
|
| Comparing the two is peak climate alarmism
| blackmesaind wrote:
| To the Sun. Just have to make sure we go at night, when it's
| off.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It really was Earth all along...
| caseyy wrote:
| I can just imagine Elorp Munk building a space company on Mars
| a billion years ago to colonize the frozen and inhospitable
| Earth. Bringing over some germs and then failing to establish a
| colony... that could make for some great sci-fi.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| I wonder if there'd be any good way to confirm or rule out an
| ancient Martian civilization. Would Martian surface
| structures be able to last a few billion years? Or would
| Martian processes be able to make all of them disappear? And
| how about underground structures?
| walterbell wrote:
| Kurd Lasswitz wrote "Two Planets" in 1897,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39598983
|
| _> Lasswitz 's Martians differ little from man physically, but
| ethically, intellectually, scientifically, and socially they are
| the prototype of the ideal human being. They seek to educate man,
| asking in return only air and energy to supplement the diminished
| supplies in their own, older world.
|
| The story revolves around a group of German scientists who, when
| seeking the North Pole, come upon a Martian settlement there.._
|
| A young German reader of "Two Planets", Wernher von Braun, would
| develop ballistic missiles for Germany/USA, rockets that launched
| the first US space satellite and the NASA launch vehicle that
| took Apollo to the Moon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
|
| _> Leo Szilard, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front
| for aliens from Mars, used this term. In an answer to the
| question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond
| Earth (called the Fermi paradox) despite the high probability of
| it existing, Szilard responded: "They are already here among us
| - they just call themselves Hungarians."_
|
| The group included Erdos and von Neumann.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Possibly worth also including just how controversial Wernher
| von Braun is.
|
| _Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as
| escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans '
| desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
| alwa wrote:
| And if we've come that far, we may as well mention Tom
| Lehrer's classic song "Wernher Von Braun," which, along with
| the rest of his work, Lehrer so generously released into the
| public domain:
|
| https://tomlehrersongs.com/wernher-von-braun/
| hinkley wrote:
| That song shows up in For All Mankind.
| pc86 wrote:
| What does that have to do with the comment you're replying
| to?
|
| Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the
| extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like
| a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the
| other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well
| be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is
| accurate?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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.
| nwienert wrote:
| Genuine question - unless he was directly involved with
| the genocide, was he not doing the exact same thing the
| allies were doing? It's not a war crime to participate in
| a war for your country.
|
| The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians in
| mass numbers.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Many would consider those war crimes also.
| dylan604 wrote:
| yes, but that side "won". so the important take away is
| that if you're going to commit war crimes, you must win
| the war to avoid being charged
| perihelions wrote:
| The atrocity is that von Braun's V-2 factory was an
| extermination-through-labor camp. About 12,000 people
| were forcibly worked and tortured to death to produce
| those weapons--numerically more deaths than V-2, as a
| weapon, caused in Britain. von Braun was aware of this,
| complicit in this, oversaw parts of it as a high-ranking
| SS officer: his Wikipedia entry quotes a survivor
| testifying "von Braun went to the concentration camp to
| pick slave laborers".
| pc86 wrote:
| Assuming this is true (I have no reason to believe it's
| not) it's clearly a damning indictment of von Braun
| himself. And it calls into question his accounts, so it
| seems like odds are he was "actually" a Nazi as opposed
| to someone affiliating with the party to avoid punishment
| or execution.
|
| I still don't see what that has to do with the original
| comment that mentioned him. If we're talking about him in
| depth, absolutely mention it and dig into it. I guess the
| thing I'm having trouble reconciling in my head is the
| need to, upon a passing reference to someone orthogonal
| to the main point, say it's "worth including" that
| they're a controversial figure. The controversy seems
| irrelevant to me. It seems to border on virtue signaling,
| this need to say "oh by the way, Nazis are bad" when that
| (objective fact) has nothing to do with anything.
|
| I see your other comment and I get the point you're
| trying to make but I don't think it has anything to do
| with speaking respectfully or with any sort of courtesy
| about a Nazi, just about trying to make a point.
| joshuahutt wrote:
| I can see your point, but I think it's worthwhile to
| understand the full context, even if it's irrelevant on
| the surface.
|
| I wasn't familiar with von Braun before reading this
| thread, and I appreciate the extra info. Complex figure.
| Maybe even a really bad guy. But, also interesting that
| his work was useful in getting us to the moon.
|
| Maybe we can all appreciate that dichotomy.
|
| Even more interesting to note, is without your initial
| pushback, I wouldn't have read more detail about him, so
| I owe your resistance to actually exploring this facet of
| the man's alleged history to getting me to actually read
| a bit about it.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians
| in mass numbers._
|
| Yes, agreed. I'm not arguing that the standards of
| Nuremberg were actually the right ones.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| A significant chunk of the adult male population of Nazi
| Germany was involved with the genocide. Hitler made sure
| there was blood on as many German hands as possible. In
| retrospect the Allies were _extremely lenient_ [0] on
| Germany and Japan and they probably could have punished
| them way, way worse.
|
| As for Allied war crimes, many of those were only
| criminalized after-the-fact. For example, the
| justification for nuking Nagasaki was "well, there's a
| factory nearby, so that's a valid military target".
|
| [0] For example, "fiduciary duty to shareholders" was a
| valid excuse that saved several businessmen at Nuremburg,
| despite them running forced labor camps that were
| deadlier than Auschwicz.
| vkou wrote:
| The damage the V2s inflicted on London paled in
| comparison to the destruction of continental European and
| Russian and Japanese cities.
|
| The V2 killed more (enslaved) people who were building it
| than it did in its attacks. It was only 'successful' as a
| propaganda weapon.
|
| ...And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the
| heads of every allied airforce, and all of their
| immediate subordinates and sub-subordinates should have
| been dancing the hemp fandango.
|
| I'll also point out that a _lot_ of Nazi military
| officers and civilian leaders and industrialists, despite
| significant involvement in the regime 's crimes were not
| found guilty[1] in those trials.
|
| ---
|
| [1] Even in the Soviet-ran ones - and as every loyal
| comrade knows, the courts of the glorious Soviet Union
| are the fairest, most humane, and most merciful justice
| system the world has ever conceived, especially when it
| came to the question of judging fascists.
| octopoc wrote:
| > And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the heads
| of every allied airforce, and all of their immediate
| subordinates and sub-subordinates should have been
| dancing the hemp fandango.
|
| That's a very good point, although the Nuremberg trials
| used torture to get confessions, so literally anybody
| could have been convicted.
| vkou wrote:
| Did they? Is that why so many walked? Do you have any
| proof of this?
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala stated that von
| Braun went to the concentration camp to pick slave
| laborers:"_
|
| - _"... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von
| Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the
| corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their
| arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof.
| Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his
| frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not
| touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates
| tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the
| overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun
| passed them so close that he was almost touching the
| corpses.[63] "_
|
| I agree with your comment. Let's never speak in respectful
| language about a Nazi SS officer. It's a loud silence when
| someone circles around the topic without mentioning it, as if
| there were some obligation of diplomacy--as if you owe
| tactfulness or professional courtesy to Nazis.
| codedokode wrote:
| Does this mean that Americans helped a criminal to escape
| justice?
| mkl wrote:
| Not one, many.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip, https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#:~:text=those%20captu...
| soperj wrote:
| They did that with all the Japanese to get info on biological
| weapons. Or check out the Monster of the Showa era
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi), who was
| originally held for war crimes, and then became prime
| minister.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| Wernher von Braun himself also wrote probably the first serious
| treatise on human missions to mars as well as a science fiction
| novel on the topic in 1948. Apparently the original German
| novel remains unpublished, but there is an English translation
| available. It's set in 1980.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
|
| Check out the second link's section about "the Elon".
| ffhhj wrote:
| "Elon Gates to reach the stars"
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| Are the Elon Gates made of sugar, I. E. Zucker? Elon Zucker
| Gates to reach the stars?
| dylan604 wrote:
| > "They are already here among us - they just call themselves
| Hungarians."
|
| Do Germans also have jokes like "how many Hungarians does it
| take to screw in a light bulb"?
| obfuscator wrote:
| Those exist here at the expense of different peoples,
| depending where you are in Germany. Most popular, from what I
| can tell, are East Frisians, but that has to do with a
| comedian who made a lot of those jokes (Otto Waalkes).
| mjhay wrote:
| An oxidizing atmosphere (as Earth and Mars are currently) would
| actually make it much harder for life to emerge in the first
| place. Oxidation makes it very hard for complex molecules to
| remain stable enough for life to emerge in the first place.
| Before photosynthesis, Earth had a reducing environment. The
| advent of oxygen is often termed the "Oxygen Catastrophe."
| jccooper wrote:
| Young terrestrial planets should tend towards a reducing
| atmosphere, due to all the rocks and such oxidizing. It took
| ages for life on Earth to produce sufficient oxygen to switch
| to an oxidizing atmosphere. We have evidence that Mars did
| start reducing and switch at some point. That Mars became
| oxidizing is certainly curious, considering the reason that
| happened on Earth.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| The darker-toned regions in the image on the linked article
| really look like they're still wet; like a frozen image of the
| very last puddles on the Mars surface. Beautiful.
| icepat wrote:
| Link 404's out now..
| labrador wrote:
| Of course it had an Earth-like environment. Hasn't anyone ever
| read Edgar Rice Burroughs?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| That was the first thing I thought of:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carter_of_Mars
| labrador wrote:
| It was fun reading those books when I was a teen
| gcanyon wrote:
| I'm sure that any transition from Earth-like to the present state
| was so slow as to be unnoticeable even over centuries --- but
| it's mind-blowing to me to imagine what it would be like to be,
| say, a nineteenth century civilization realizing you are in a
| race with the dying of your planet to get the heck off it.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| 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 often it has led to technology
| that has made the world worse.
|
| Meanwhile, those stories about martians are all metaphors. But
| people can't distinguish the symbol from the symbolized.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't blame scifi, after all it is just fiction. However, I
| think the blame could go to poor education and being able to
| know the difference.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Yeah fair point. It's not as if Ray Bradbury was the most
| subtle writer. You have to try to miss the point.
|
| Then again, I get it. If somebody offered to build me a
| Gundam I wouldn't think "Oh no, a symbol for the
| dehumanization of soldiers on the modern battlefield" I'd
| think "Is the beam saber included?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| But at the same time, there's so much real science that has
| thoroughly been inspired by scifi. Sometimes, you just need
| to get the imagination juices flowing. "That thingymabob
| from sciFiTvShow would be really cool to have IRL. What
| would it take to do that...hold my beer" type thinking has
| probably given us more than we think. Or maybe I'm just
| romanticizing the concept too much?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The voice feature of ChatGPT on my phone is basically the
| Star Trek ship computer.
|
| The weather radar app replicates a feature of the Star
| Trek tricorder that I saw in an episode of TNG.
|
| Household robots like in The Jetsons are coming soon, a
| couple decades at most from today.
|
| Etc...
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Do you really need sci fi in either direction to come up
| with those ideas? I don't read or consume sci fi, but
| considering the tech available, these just seem like
| natural things you would try to do.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > considering the tech available,
|
| Wow, you're doing some heavy caveating with that comment.
|
| Sure, someone today can say that a handheld device to
| show you the weather in any part of the world seems like
| a "duh" thing now, but in the 60s when Star Trek came to
| TV with a tricoder or really a handheld anything was
| pushing credibility. Computers at the time took up rooms
| in buildings. Of course zillenials never knowing the
| world before handheld mobile devices can't imagine a time
| when it took imagination to think of the things they have
| today.
| kerhackernews wrote:
| To me, based on how quickly life formed on earth. It's highly
| likely that simple life once existed within the ancient oceans of
| Mars. Though, after billions of years there would be no evidence
| left.
| elorant wrote:
| This is scary on two fronts. One, whatever happened to Mars could
| happen to Earth, and two, it puts the Great Filter probably in
| our future. If our solar system had two hospitable planets then
| there should be plenty of Earth like planets around in our
| galaxy. In which case we end up with the Fermi Paradox. If life
| is so abundant in the Universe how come we haven't been in
| contact with aliens?
| xyst wrote:
| That's easy. Earthling tech is just too behind the curve and
| society is stuck in a state where we are considered primitive.
| elorant wrote:
| We could locate technosignatures though. Even if they don't
| wish to contact us we could tell if the galaxy was teeming
| with intelligent life.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I don't understand Fermi Paradox. Why couldn't the chance of
| life be extremely miniscule, e.g. given all billions of stars
| and planets, why couldn't there have been even 10% or 0.0001%
| odds of it happening at all one any given stars or planets?
| E.g. maybe even it happening on one was such a lucky
| occurrence?
|
| Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds
| were just 1 out of 1,000,000.
|
| How can people confidently claim that there must be some other
| civilizations, we wouldn't know the odds in the first place
| unless we know the exact mechanisms involved.
|
| To me it seems like the probability could have been anything.
| It could have required any amount of certain chemical reactions
| to happen in certain order where the probability can vary
| wildly depending on the amount and likelihood of those
| reactions. E.g. it could be 0.01 to the power of 1,000,000 or
| as well as to the power of 10e64 and so on.
| xyst wrote:
| The current state of humanity doesn't deserve another chance on
| another "Earth-like environment".
|
| Let's prove we can take care of this planet first before we think
| of finding a "new Earth"
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Why can't we bring a scanning electron microscope onto one of
| these rovers?
|
| There are companies making desktop ones now.
| api wrote:
| The lack of a microscope on these missions has always been
| puzzling to me. Seems like an absolute no brainer especially
| since they can now be very small.
|
| If there was past life microfossils could be quite visible in
| ancient sediment.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| There have been microscopes but without a human to mount a
| sample they are more like macro lenses
| kobieps wrote:
| Getting a 404 now, wtf?
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| When you read unrealistic sci-fi about Mars as planet with
| vibrant, if aging, life (and Venus as a jungle planet); remember
| that the conditions on Mars surface were still largely unknown
| until the tail end of the Space Race. It was still believable
| that Mars had life up until the 1960s.
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