Author Topic: What if Mars is barren of life?  (Read 71341 times)

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #160 on: 06/19/2012 10:35 pm »
What is coming through to me in your posts is that you are not really a fan of the human exploration of Mars and your main interest lies in restricting who would get to go to the Red Planet, if you would let anyone go at all.

I don't care about the non-existent bugs on that planet and the obvious safety concerns with getting there. That shouldn't stop the people who really want to go from going. People all over terra die doing various recreational stuff every day, even in the nanny states. So what.

Sorry thought you were John for some reason, you are new to this thread aren't you, first to post here anyway.

Yes the difference is with recreational risks then you risk your own life, and sometimes also the lives of the rescue services who come to get you out of trouble.

Here though you are risking the lives of other people, and many of them don't even know what you are doing, some even today don't even know that NASA exists or that humans have gone into space (talking about uncontacted tribes there) - though I suppose if the pathogen was one spread by coughs or sneezes they might end up the only ones left alive on the Earth.

As for my own interests, can just repeat myself. I don't know why it's not coming over in these posts, as I would like to express it.





« Last Edit: 06/19/2012 11:08 pm by robertinventor »

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #161 on: 06/19/2012 11:51 pm »
BTW there is another reason that I am reluctant to terraform Mars right now. It's completely unrelated to the life question, and it depends on whether it's true that a biosphere for Mars would last for only 10 - 100 million years (time scale on which the CO2 is expected to deposit out of the atmosphere as it slowly returns to the current conditions).

So - if you have issues with this as I expect you will, it's nothing to do with the life reason for postponing terraforming Mars for maybe a few decades until we know more about what's there.

That seems a vast time scale to us almost inconceivable. But the beings who live on Mars in 100 million years from now would consider it their "present" and for them Mars as it is then is just as important as Earth is to us now.

So, is it right to generate a biosphere that is maybe dooming future life on Mars to extinction, that's the first thing.

But the other thing is, that Earth itself is eventually going to warm up as the sun gets hotter. It might happen quite soon, in geological terms, or maybe not for a billion years or longer (and may depend on what happens to the feedback loops on the Earth over those long timescales). But it will certainly happen at some time in the future. And again just as befoe, I don't see any reason why the beings who live then in the future are less important than we are now.

So, way in the future then when the Earth is uninhabitable, Mars might be just the place we need as a second home for - can't say human race exactly as probably we've evolved by then - but some beings or other.

At that point then 100 million years of a habitable second home to Earth might be worth a lot more than it is to us now. Later we might then migrate say to Jupiter's moons as the sun gets even hotter and even Mars is uninhabitable.

Just a thought, to mull over. It's not a problem if somehow the Mars terraforming can be made permanent over longer time scales like billions of years.
« Last Edit: 06/19/2012 11:53 pm by robertinventor »

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #162 on: 06/20/2012 01:32 am »
Just realised, maybe part of the reason you think I'm anti manned missions is because of the first paragraph in that "Critique"

" In 2004, the Special committee on the funding of Astrophysics, a committee of the American Physical Society, stated that "shifting NASA priorities toward risky, expensive missions to the Moon and Mars will mean neglecting the most promising space science efforts...."

I didn't write that paragraph and haven't edited it.

It's just the main part of the original "Critique" section as it was, before I started on the article. In fact had more or less forgotten about it - you know when proof reading something there's a tendency for the eye to glide over things you've read before?

I don't agree with it myself, not particularly, and in any case it rather obscures the point, as it's not really an important reason for not going to the surface of Mars. It's a reason for not doing manned spaceflight at all. So though it's true some people do argue that way, this isn't the place to put it.

Also it rather makes nonsense of the para. at the end about Herro.

So, anyway I've just removed it for now.

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #163 on: 06/20/2012 10:00 am »
Hi Mr. Scott,

Thanks glad you find it interesting :)

Can just say as I understand it, modern theories do indeed suggest that the early solar system was one of "interplanetary billiards" as it were. An object the size of Mars is thought to have hit the early Earth and formed the Moon in the process. The tilt and rotation periods of other planets in the solar system also suggest that there were many impacts of the early proto planets with each other. Also study of other solar systems the "hot jupiters" are so close to their stars they could only get there, in simulations, by similar processes. The "hot jupiters" are thought to have formed further out similarly to our Jupiter (not necessarily quite as far out) and gradually migrated in towards their star, hitting and absorbing the other planets or proto-planets in their solar system in the process. That's because they must have formed beyond the "frost line" where it is cool enough for hydrogen compounds to solidify into grains.

In the case of the asteroid belt though - there is no reason at all in principle why it couldn't be debris from these collisions in the early solar system, and part of it might be, e.g. no reason why some of the debris from the collision that formed the Moon could have ended up in the asteroid belt. Also really early on smaller near planet size objects could have formed in many parts of the solar system and not just in the region of the asteroid belt. But the modern understanding of the asteroid belt from simulations and theoretical work is that it's due to the perturbing influence of Jupiter. So something could have orbited there really early on before Jupiter was fully formed. But once Jupiter formed, then the "resonance orbits" with jupiter, orbits that are multiples of Jupiter's orbital period, prevents formation of large bodies there.

It's somewhat similarly to the way Saturn's rings formed, so the asteroid belt you can think of as a bit like a huge and very thin version of Saturn's rings around the sun. Similarly Saturn's rings - they may well get replenished through collisions from other objects that hit the rings or moonlets, or collisions of moons of saturn with each other. But it's not thought that they are the remains of a single large body that originally orbited Saturn, they are just material from minor bodies that never formed into anything large.

In the long term future as we understand it the solar system isn't entirely stable . There is a small but distinct possibility that long term one of the inner planets such as Mercury or Venus will be ejected from the solar system through the slow change of the orbital parameters as the objects gravitationally interact with each other. These planets could also hit each other, or indeed with any of the other planets on their way out of the solar system, so there is a very remote possibility that Earth could eventually collide with Mercury or Venus - but that's so minute not to be worth losing any sleep over it, and not going to happen on the near millions of years time-scale.

Of course our knowledge of these matters is continually evolving, and though that's been the "status quo" for most of my life, some of this understanding is more recent. The gradual appreciation of the long term chaotic nature of the solar system in the future and during it's formation is a relatively recent development, in the last couple of decades.

As for life in the early universe, the thing there is that micro-organisms as we know them on Earth are extra-ordinarily complicated with vast numbers of components, those who don't research into them often don't realise how complex. The structure of a cell has been compared to the complexity of an entire eco-system. So the question is, how did such complex structures arise? We are nowhere near able to create them by evolution from the raw ingredients in a test-tube.

So though the first few billion years of life with only micro-organisms seem uninteresting when you think in terms of animals, plants, and multi-cellular life, there was a huge amount going on at the level of micro-organisms. Also there is evidence that life started off within the first billion or so years on the Earth. So either it got introduced to the Earth already formed via comets or meteorites, or else it is possible for life to evolve quickly within just a few hundred million years from raw materials.

Both those possibilities suggest a pretty high probability of life on early Mars, since conditions were suitable for life on Mars in the early years for at least that long.

So life there does seem likely on modern understanding. If it did get started on Mars, and given that there have been habitats suitable for life probably almost continuously since then (especially if there is internal geothermal heat, and its known that Mars has been geologically active in the last two million years so there is probably at least some geothermal heat in places not far underground), it's a bit hard to see how it got lost. And if it did then it seems almost certain that there must be near pristine frozen remains of early life still on Mars.

It's not too surprising that rovers on Mars haven't discovered it yet, if it is there, as the surface is extremely cold, and dry, especially the top layer exposed directly to the atmosphere which is all that they are able to examine. In areas where it is warm as for spirit rover, the surface tends to be dry and free of ice.  In areas where it is cold enough for permanent ice, it tends to be too cold for the ice to ever melt. Also the low triple point means that water "boils" on Mars at a very low temperature, the highest temperature it can reach without boiling at the deepest parts of Mars where the atmosphere pressure is highest is 10C. The air is also very dry as well, 0.016 percent, compared to the earth’s average level of about 2 percent, so that any water that does form will evaporate quickly.

This means any life on the surface is almost certainly in some dormant resting state at least most of the time, and apart from the Viking experiments nothing we have sent there would have any chance of detecting it. Even the Curiosity rover, though it has a "hand lens" - it's not got quite enough resolution to be able to see any endospores and detect them directly.

There is some chance of habitats just below the surface where we can't see it in extremely thin films of salty brine over the pebbles that melt in warm weather, even on the surface there's a chance of occasional formation of drops of water, but these conditions are hard to achieve on Mars, so that's why there is all this discussion about whether there is any habitat on the surface, easily accessible, for life to survive in. Basically the jury is out on that one at present.

Also - in the case where life on Mars only got a short way, and then became extinct, and never developed modern sophisticated methods of survival such as endospores, then remaining life if it exists, or the organic remains of it, may be deep underground or in rare exposures of organic remains of early Mars.

In between those two possibilities, there is the chance that life on Mars might occur only in some rare habitat and still be thriving there, e.g. in the equivalent of the modern day "black smokers" and "white smokers" in some habitat that occurs in just a few locations on Mars. For instance, it might occur as methanogens only able to survive at least 150 meters underground where the ice is under enough pressure to form permanent liquid water in the presence of heat. In that case there might not be much material evidence of it on the surface of Mars to find.

As for the other things you say, yes some think there may still be a brown dwarf orbiting in the remote reaches of the solar system, it hasn't been completely ruled out yet, and binary systems are very common.

What I'm presenting is the concensus amongst many astronomers and scientists world wide, so not localised in any nation or any country's politics. Whether it is true or not is hard to know, it's just the best understanding we have at present.

I can provide links for all these things I've said if you want to find out more, but if you do a google for the key words, the material is easy to find. Do say if you want to know where to find out more about any particular thing said here.


« Last Edit: 06/20/2012 10:29 am by robertinventor »

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #164 on: 06/20/2012 01:08 pm »
Quote from: JF
Preliminary evidence indicates it is a hostile planet.

Quote from: Robert
But did you not see the quote from the NASA workshop that some forward contamination by humans is inevitable?

Indeed I did.  Robotic or manned, the only, only, only "solution" to forward or backward contamination (FC or BC) is not to go in the first place, and hope, hope, hope that the several hundred thousand bacteria on Spirit and Oppy don't run amok and melt all that ice.

With today's level of precautions in place, it would be more likely that a manned program would result in FC, since in time (many decades hence) somebody's going to rip a suit and spill blood.  with the same precautions, probably amped up a bit, since I'd suggest a large fleet of rovers, unmanned FC is unlikely.

So I agree that FC is inevitable in principle, if we continue to visit, particularly if we send up humans. 

A short refresher on my scheme:  Set up the orbiting manned ring station at Mars, which includes pricey hotel rooms, mints optional.  Heck, maybe it could be a cycling orbit between Mars and Phobos, just to get the "rock stars" to support my idea.  Study the planet thoroughly with a carefully implemented rover plan.  This will take many decades to implement.

Should life be obvious down there, then a plan for dealing with the ecosystem and how that would inform a human landing mission could be made sooner.  Should the planet prove barren to the best of our knowledge, we should land, in as sterile a fashion as possible.  Ya simply don't have to worry about hundreds of people landing.  It may well be that extinct life forms may be found, but they will be dead, and thus classified as barren.  There should be some kind of quarantine for the first landers, probably at least a decade.  This would obligate the continued support of the ring station and surface supplies, to both government and industry.  Should it be considered that the ring station be 100% privately owned, then somebody otta get crackin' on getting funding from the world's billionaires.  But the quarantine would give time for studying the facts on the ground, and determining how to deal with them. 

If that effort should fail, then it would fail.  The failure would inform policymakers here that maybe raping our planet is not the best policy.  But even that can't be guaranteed.

While all of this is going on, as the data are collected, the risk factors of FC and BC can be refined.  In the case of barrenness, we run the risk of an Earthly virus running amok in the closed hab, but this medical emergency will have to be solved as much in advance as possible for the ring station and the lunar colony as well.  If it is conceived that an Earthly bacteria will mutate into a super-flu, because what, the combination of UV and Beryllium is perfect for this possibility?  Then what?  It seems quite a bit less likely than us getting our own rightly feared super-flu back on Earth.

If there is extinct life, and it is thought that somehow this dead alien DNA will infect and mutate our bacteria to some new form, then it must also be totally accepted that Jurassic Park is right around the corner.  The only way dead alien DNA could successfully meld with Earthly DNA is thru deliberate manipulation by living humans, 'cause it certainly can't be done by dead aliens.  I can't see this as the problem forbidding human colonization.

If there are living ecosystems there already, there is a very compelling argument to keep orbiting and observing for a long time.  I don't have a "plan" for this.  In my defense, I've been criticized roundly for thinking far in advance.  But hey: I've got limits as to how far I'd project my speculations.

As always, if the rovers should find a stone axe or a calculator, all bets are off.

As to the Wiki page which you have made yourself the major contributor.  Perhaps you can now see that a "crowd" of one, has limited knowledge to share.  What everybody seems to be overlooking in this crowd sourced, hive minded document, is that the whole is only as good as the pieces.  There are a lot of faulty pieces making up this whole.

This gets into another subject, which I'll touch on briefly.  Our children are being specifically taught that the intertubes and the googols make finding knowledge easy.  This is a fundamental error, first because finding knowledge is hard, and second, because each bit of knowledge is not created equal.  The proof of this is readily summarized, but lengthily discussed:

Eat poop: 100B flies can't be wrong.  The internets is easy, everybody sez so.  But I digress.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #165 on: 06/20/2012 01:27 pm »
...there are no significant resources that can sustain/support life of an unreasonably large population.

Fixed that for ya. 

It took thousands of years for us to overcrowd our planet, so I wouldn't worry about Mars.  At all.  It will certainly support a fairly large human population, given the will to solve the problems needed to be solved.  It simply won't be solving our population problems at home.

Quote
You need to transform the environment somehow to enable the manned colonization.

Naaahhhh.  That's what Venus is for.  On Mars, just build one dome at a time, call it a colony.

Quote
I've also determined in other posts that the search for microbes/other dormant life will not be conclusive.  The agenda for finding life is dependent on conditions that existed in Mars more than 4.5 billion years ago before Mars lost its magnetosphere.  There is no indication of complex life on Earth during that time.  So this effort on Mars is really running on fumes. 

Pretty much agree, noting that should life be found, then those fumes will have been proven potent.  That they're now trying to move the goal posts to Europa tells me that they're bored with the grunt like details of actually looking for life, preferring instead the profitable billions in building hardware.

Quote
Nobody really believes that life on Earth was started by microbes on meteors.  There is simply NO evidence of this.  NASA has been duped into performing missions of only philosophical/anti-religious value, that will never be clearly achieved by their stated objectives.  There will always be some argument with their results. This is not inspiring kids into science, technology and math....  and I don't blame them.

I know, and that story about terrestrial arsenic based life being falsely attributed to alien origin is a case in point.  I quibble that NASA has been duped; rather it is that NASA has been taken over by a scientificist faction which actively forbids even the asking of fundamental questions regarding purpose.  Their stated intents ring hollow.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #166 on: 06/20/2012 11:17 pm »
Your scheme sounds good to me, in general lines :). Will just respond to the things where perhaps I have something of interest to say.

In the case of barrenness, we run the risk of an Earthly virus running amok in the closed hab, but this medical emergency will have to be solved as much in advance as possible for the ring station and the lunar colony as well.  If it is conceived that an Earthly bacteria will mutate into a super-flu, because what, the combination of UV and Beryllium is perfect for this possibility?  Then what?  It seems quite a bit less likely than us getting our own rightly feared super-flu back on Earth.

Okay good point. The point about evolution of new micro-organisms on Mars is the same as the reason you could get native micro-organisms that are pathogens.

I don't know what the organisms they used in that study of human pathogens that evolve independently of animal hosts and it's relevance for Mars. But, leprosy is quite a good example actually, if I understand it right, the one Carl Sagan uses in his quote as an example of a pathogen with a long incubation period so it's hard to know for sure if it is a pathogen or not at the early stages of infection.

I mean, not a good example of an organism that would live on Mars particularly, but to show the way a human pathogen can arise in an unexpected way in evolution from a single mutation.

It's closest relative is Mycobacterium vaccae which occurs in the soil and is non pathogenic, no animal hosts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_vaccae

It's hard to study as it is one of the currently "uncultivable" organisms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy#Mycobacterium_leprae

It was recently discovered (2005) that all leprosy came from a single clone originating in East Africa.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/308/5724/1040

How it got to humans is a bit of a mystery,

Don't seem to know how far back in time that was but could be relatively recent, infected humans at earliest nine million years ago but seems likely that in fact it infected some other host, perhaps an insect, and then from there went on to infect humans at a later date.

http://nyu.academia.edu/CatalinaIVillamil/Papers/431418/The_Origins_and_History_of_Leprosy
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/genomics/disease/leprosy-monot-2009-phylogeography.html

So the organisms we take to Mars would spread out through the surface, and would evolve very rapidly as micro-organisms do, because of the horizontal genetic transfer between them, and the relatively short generations. Studies have been done using just small colonies in flasks and they evolve into distinct versions with different traits in a fairly short time on the years time scale, not the longer time scales of animals etc.

So with the whole of Mars in place of the flask of the laboratory experiments, and with many diverse habitats there to try to colonise, then you could get many new species evolving rapidly, some just small differences from the originals and some larger differences.

So - then they have evolved without any of the usual restraints of the rest of the eco-system you get on Earth (as they are on their own and in a very different climate). It's a bit like the way in Madagascar lemurs have evolved their own versions of the hedgehog (the "tenrec") and rat etc, they would radiate to fill the various ecological spaces and so create brand new versions of the organisms we have in those niches here on the Earth. Of course primary producers would evolve first if none there yet, and then micro-organisms that can eat those would start to grow once they have something to eat (already there in endospores which revive).

So - that's why you might get new pathogens evolving as a result of introducing some new organisms to Mars, then just go away and come back again a year or two later.

It seems hard to say which is most likely to be a problem, organisms that have evolved completely independently for millions of years on Mars, or organisms that have rapidly evolved over a decade or so from micro-organisms that already have adaptations for human spacecraft and humans.

They wouldn't need those capability on Mars, but there is a chance they would still retain them, and so return to the returning astronauts with the same liking of human habitats, combined with new capabilities and features.

So, that was the main idea there. They don't have the millions of years of independent evolution of native Mars microbes. But they have enough time for significant changes, and because of the novel environment and large size of the planet, that's why it seems a concern.

But it's not a very important part of the article. Didn't want to present a "thesis" there, just put it in as a "hook" for future expansion if someone expert in the area edits the article or new research comes along.

Obviously the article should say something about what happens to life introduced to Mars and mention the chance it could evolve to new pathogens, seemed to me you can't just leave that out and not mention it at all. The only thing is what to put there as it's not the sort of thing likely to have much research done into it yet, as we just don't have data to base the research on.

Certainly not appropriate to go into this sort of detail as that's too much like "original research" and also too speculative. But leaving it out altogether also seemed wrong to me too. Anyway if the reader decides like you that it is an unlikely possibility that doesn't really matter, after all it's the sort of thing we would find out in future research on the topic.

As for authoring this section of the article, well, someone had to do it. Recently I was reading another article, about the Carbon cycle. I know didley squat about the geological carbon cycle. But there was no mention of it at all in the article, except in a kind of table at the top of the page, you would get the idea from the article easily that it's not important at all, when it's the most important element and the only reason that our planet isn't hot and roasting with a dense atmosphere like Venus. I went to the talk page and saw a list of posts there by people saying "why is there nothing in this article about the geological carbon cycle?". But nobody had done anything about it.

It is textbook stuff, so I just did a google and found a couple of textbook like links to back it up and put in a short paragraph describing the cycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#Geological_carbon_cycle

So - so far no-one has edited my contribution but someone will sooner or later, who is more expert on it. Meanwhile what I put is a lot better than having nothing there at all.

Generally people tend to be too timid with wikipedia, and don't take up the invitation to dive in and be bold, especially in these science areas (while in other areas like politics they might be too bold I suppose). That is apart from trolls and vandals of course. But it is meant to be an encyclopedia that anyone can and should edit, and if you happen to know about something, you don't need to have degrees after your name in that area of research or to have spent years of your life studying it. It's just how it works, the idea is that by encouraging many people to work in this way then it gradually gets more and more accurate and authoritative, and it does seem to work, the articles continually improve with time.

Hopefully mine will be improved in the same way. It's been helped a lot already by posting here and getting your various comments and criticisms. Chances are I won't do much more on it now that it's there and others will do the rest of the work needed.

If there is extinct life, and it is thought that somehow this dead alien DNA will infect and mutate our bacteria to some new form, then it must also be totally accepted that Jurassic Park is right around the corner.  The only way dead alien DNA could successfully meld with Earthly DNA is thru deliberate manipulation by living humans, 'cause it certainly can't be done by dead aliens.  I can't see this as the problem forbidding human colonization.

Agree that doesn't seem very likely to me. There might be micro-organisms there that periodically wake up every few tens of thousands of years for the occasional equatorial snowfalls when they happen - but they would be in dormant states in between, not dead.

If there are living ecosystems there already, there is a very compelling argument to keep orbiting and observing for a long time.  I don't have a "plan" for this.  In my defense, I've been criticized roundly for thinking far in advance.  But hey: I've got limits as to how far I'd project my speculations.

As always, if the rovers should find a stone axe or a calculator, all bets are off.

Yes agree. Yes I suppose very remote chance of early intelligent life. It would have to get off to an impressively fast and early start on Mars. Since we really know nothing much about how easy it is for intelligence to develop,... wouldn't say absolutely no myself, but extremely unlikely on basis of what we know so far :).

As to the Wiki page which you have made yourself the major contributor.  Perhaps you can now see that a "crowd" of one, has limited knowledge to share.  What everybody seems to be overlooking in this crowd sourced, hive minded document, is that the whole is only as good as the pieces.  There are a lot of faulty pieces making up this whole.

Yes of course. Already the "wikignomes" have been fixing the typos and spelling as I go along, and changing 35C to 35 ⁰C and creating links to other parts of Wikipedia etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome

There is a lot of well researched material about Mars on Wikipedia so I think a fair number of reasonably expert people editing it. So if there are any mistakes in my contribution then they should find them sooner or later.

It was just an omission that for some reason no-one else had noticed this "request for expansion" on this Critique section of the article with the necessary background to do anything at all about it. I had enough knowledge and background to make a start on it and do the necessary research to create a first draft of it. The rest will need to depend on others.

You don't see the "crowd sourcing" benefits of Wikipedia straight away. But for example another article I wrote on the Hexany has been there for a long time and gets a fair number of edits from experts in the field, and it's great to go back to it some years after I wrote it, and see how much it has improved from my first version.

Offline TomH

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #167 on: 06/21/2012 02:52 am »
I saw an episode recently, I believe on Discovery Science channel, and a biologist who studies microbial life forms living in harsh environments stated that data from the MSO shows methane levels emanating from ancient volcanic vents on the surface to be consistent with large underground colonies of bacteria.

Even if the planet were totally lifeless, there is great value in the geology as well as the potential for terraforming.

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #168 on: 06/21/2012 07:39 am »
I saw an episode recently, I believe on Discovery Science channel, and a biologist who studies microbial life forms living in harsh environments stated that data from the MSO shows methane levels emanating from ancient volcanic vents on the surface to be consistent with large underground colonies of bacteria.

Even if the planet were totally lifeless, there is great value in the geology as well as the potential for terraforming.

Yes, that's right. The MSL's Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) is designed amongst other things to analyse the methane and try to find out if it is of biological or geological origin, by measuring carbon and oxygen isotope ratios.

A bit more background about the methane on Mars here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Methane

It could be life or geological, as there are geological processes that can create methane too. For Mars it seems, the most likely geological source might be from meteorites. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11203.html

With the meteorites idea it even might account for seasonal changes too, by heating the materials from meteorites on the surface first to release the methane
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/methane-made-from-meteors-may-explain-mars-mystery/

Another "nobody knows the answer" type thing at present.
« Last Edit: 06/21/2012 08:19 am by robertinventor »

Offline gospacex

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #169 on: 06/21/2012 08:42 am »
So the organisms we take to Mars would spread out through the surface,

Correction: MAYBE they will be able to.

Quote
and would evolve very rapidly

Correction: MAYBE they will be able to evolve rapidly.

Quote
as micro-organisms do, because of the horizontal genetic transfer between them, and the relatively short generations. Studies have been done using just small colonies in flasks and they evolve into distinct versions with different traits in a fairly short time on the years time scale, not the longer time scales of animals etc.

So it happens even now, on Earth. Shock! Horror! Run for your lives!!!

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So with the whole of Mars in place of the flask of the laboratory experiments, and with many diverse habitats there to try to colonise

That's ridiculous. You state as a fact that there are "many diverse habitats" on Mars, but it's far from being a fact!

We don't even know whether there is even ONE place on Mars where ANY Earth bacteria can survive and multiply.

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So - then they have evolved without any of the usual restraints of the rest of the eco-system you get on Earth

What "restraints"? Abundant food? Water in liquid form? Shielded from radiation? That's "restraints"???

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So - that's why you might get new pathogens evolving as a result of introducing some new organisms to Mars

As we told you a dozen times already: the risk of this happening on Earth is VASTLY bigger than on Mars.

For any Mars-adapted bacteria typical Earth environment where humans live is a hellishly hot, chemically deadly place. How it's going to survive and able to infect humans?

Your hysteria becomes tiresome.
« Last Edit: 06/21/2012 08:43 am by gospacex »

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #170 on: 06/21/2012 08:59 am »
Okay the whole thing isn't a big issue as I see it, minor part of the whole picture.

But just for clarification, by diverse habitats, I just meant in the same sense that in the experimental evolution experiments different locations in the flask count as diverse habitats. So you get many more of those on Mars, e.g. if the subsurface brines exist, then for micro-organisms it's not a single habitat, it will be different depending on where you are on Mars, what type of rock formation the ground was formed from and so on, so you'd expect adaptive radiation for them, also development of all the species you get in a micro-ecology of just a single habitat.

Also, because micro-organisms can adapt to live in more than one habitat, even more than one extreme habitat in the case of polyextremophiles, you can't say that because it adapts to live on Mars that it won't be able to survive on humans or in a spaceship.

If you could say that then the whole back contamination thing would indeed be a non issue.

As for how extensive habitats are for life on Mars we simply don't know at present, could be that there are habitats world wide either just sub surface or the 150 m down type habitats. Or could be that there are just a few spots on the planet where life can survive, at least easily accessible, in caves near geological hot spots. In that latter case of course adaptive radiation would be less likely surely, in near term anyway, though you'd still get an ecosystem forming in that location from introduced Earth life.

As I understand it anyway. Hope this helps, it's not hysteria, and you are right to say that it is all qualified with "maybe". Was just describing the scenario as a whole, and it gets boring if you qualify every single statement with maybe, that should be understood from the context, which is describing a possible scenario, that's all, and we don't know enough to be able to judge it's probability eyt.


Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #171 on: 06/21/2012 09:01 am »
It is similar to a situation where a researcher on Earth is creating new micro-organisms by experimental evolution in a laboratory. You wouldn't want him to release them "into the wild" in that situation either, and doing that is similar to returning the evolved organisms from Mars back to Earth.

It would be hysteria if I said the probability is high. Just saying the probability is unknown, and that when you risk so much, even a tiny probability can't be contemplated.
« Last Edit: 06/21/2012 11:58 am by robertinventor »

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #172 on: 06/21/2012 02:09 pm »
Generally people tend to be too timid with wikipedia, and don't take up the invitation to dive in and be bold, especially in these science areas (while in other areas like politics they might be too bold I suppose).

It is interesting that such a timidity exists, especially with the promise of anonymity that Wiki offers.  As an interesting, to me at least, digression, I believe that the crowd sourced online model would work if the sources were actually people.  As it is, the sources are anonymous avatars, who supply misinformation at voluminous rates.  Some of us only have 24.7 hours in the day, and there's simply not enough time to fix Wiki.

Quote from: Robert
...very remote chance of early intelligent life. It would have to get off to an impressively fast and early start on Mars. Since we really know nothing much about how easy it is for intelligence to develop,... wouldn't say absolutely no myself, but extremely unlikely on basis of what we know so far

Mankind has no idea how long that process takes, and a sketchy idea of how long it took in our case.  Our particular circumstantial past, complete with extinction events, is not by any stretch the only theoretical path that the genesis of self conscious intelligent life could take.  As far as that idea goes, we could not tell if there is an intelligent species of our advancement on Andromeda, just to pick a galaxy at random.

So it is with the genesis of life itself.  We have one data point to go from, and the scientificists have no mechanism at all to hypothesize about its origin.

Nut the general sense is that Mars is barren.  I have no idea what the truth of the matter is.

Quote from: Robert
So if there are any mistakes in my contribution then they should find them sooner or later.

Good to see that you said "should", not "will".

It would be hysteria if I said the probability is high. Just saying the probability is unknown, and that when you risk so much, even a tiny probability can't be contemplated.

Unfortunately, you use the hysterical term, "can't".  The risk needs to be determined so that we "can" contemplate a manned landing on Mars. 

Unfortunately, NASA is pre-occupied with insisting that terrestrial life, in some new and unusual cases is actually alien life, that is, when they're not building rockets to nowhere, or retiring rockets that work.  Thus, they are content to look merely for "signs" of life elsewhere, and are happy to move the goalposts to more distant locations, like Europa, bleeding funding from a quicker, more productive development of cis-lunar capabilities.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #173 on: 06/21/2012 03:33 pm »
Generally people tend to be too timid with wikipedia, and don't take up the invitation to dive in and be bold, especially in these science areas (while in other areas like politics they might be too bold I suppose).

It is interesting that such a timidity exists, especially with the promise of anonymity that Wiki offers.  As an interesting, to me at least, digression, I believe that the crowd sourced online model would work if the sources were actually people.  As it is, the sources are anonymous avatars, who supply misinformation at voluminous rates.  Some of us only have 24.7 hours in the day, and there's simply not enough time to fix Wiki.

Yes, unfortunately also amongst the more knowledgeable also. One reason might be that there are many on wikipedia who are really keen at deleting stuff often without looking at it too closely.

So if you post something that everyone in your field knows as "textbook" stuff, but don't add a link to a source for it, then there is a chance someone will delete it without looking any further. What they should do is add a request for citations.

That's what happened to my article on the Hexany in fact, that there was a proposal to delete it soon after I put it in, but after myself and others more knowledgeable than me about the subject added loads of references and citations and a list of composers who use the Hexany in their works, then the discussion was very short and came to the conclusion "keep" quickly.

So there is a kind of "learning period" as you get used to the wikipedia way of doing things, how you need to be sure to add those citations.

You also need to make it clear that your contributions aren't "original research" which is the other thing, especially e.g. in Maths you can say things that are easily seen to be true by any mathematician but if they aren't backed up by links to published stuff, again you might fall foul of someone crying out "original research". Or rather, they aren't particularly vocal about it if it is just a contribution to an article, they just delete it with a note such as "speculation" or "original research" or whatever.

That's definitely a drawback of letting anyone edit the material. Though it's much better now than it was a few years ago, I find (unless it's just that I've got used to how it works...)

There's another thing you get with wikipedia too which puts some people off I think, are the "proposals for deletion". It's a big scary looking notice you may get on a new article. If you read it, all it says is basically, please add some citations to make clear why your article is "noteable" and remove this notice.

But if you are a newbie can easily get put off that, I have occasionally "patrolled" the "proposals for deletion" and often you can just find almost right away with a google search enough citations to make clear it is notable, and can just add in those citations, and remove the notice. If anyone removes the notice even the originator of the article, it can't be put back again, and if someone still thinks it needs to be deleted it has to go to a proper debate.

If no-one removes that notice then the software just automatically deletes the article after 14 days with no further human intervention. You can see why it's done like that with lots of people wanting to add vanity articles about themselves or a friend who has just staged written and staged a play they liked at their local school (to take an actual example of a proposal for deletion which I left as I could turn up nothing to show notability) or whatever.

Quote from: Robert
...very remote chance of early intelligent life. It would have to get off to an impressively fast and early start on Mars. Since we really know nothing much about how easy it is for intelligence to develop,... wouldn't say absolutely no myself, but extremely unlikely on basis of what we know so far

Mankind has no idea how long that process takes, and a sketchy idea of how long it took in our case.  Our particular circumstantial past, complete with extinction events, is not by any stretch the only theoretical path that the genesis of self conscious intelligent life could take.  As far as that idea goes, we could not tell if there is an intelligent species of our advancement on Andromeda, just to pick a galaxy at random.

So it is with the genesis of life itself.  We have one data point to go from, and the scientificists have no mechanism at all to hypothesize about its origin.

Nut the general sense is that Mars is barren.  I have no idea what the truth of the matter is.

I agree competely. Also that life could take forms that we are unable even to imagine at present.

There are all these hypothetical types of biochemistry for instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

Why might there not be life on Titan for instance, or Triton even for that matter, we can't imagine any way it would work at present, but physics and biology are full of surprises.

If you think about it, life based on DNA isn't something you could derive just from knowledge of the properties of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and so forth, even given the capability of Carbon to form long chains easily.

Quote from: Robert
So if there are any mistakes in my contribution then they should find them sooner or later.

Good to see that you said "should", not "will".
It would be hysteria if I said the probability is high. Just saying the probability is unknown, and that when you risk so much, even a tiny probability can't be contemplated.

Unfortunately, you use the hysterical term, "can't".  The risk needs to be determined so that we "can" contemplate a manned landing on Mars. 

Oh right, see what you are saying there. I mean "can't" at our present level of knowledge. If as in your scenario we really did understand the planet extremely well in the future, then your idea of first landing colonists on the planet in a one way journey so they can't return until we are pretty confident that any incubation period is over would be a way ahead.

That depends also on whether we want to terraform it first as human colonists could get in the way of terraformation if that's the eventual aim, you might want to introduce selected micro-organisms first before adding the full human micro-biome to Mars.

Or whatever, but if based on a really thorough understanding of Mars it's felt okay to do it, then the next thing I would imagine is to do a controlled version of back contamination in some way, introduce Mars life to a selected small colony of Earth life.

First to a habitat without humans, and then later on with human volunteers, that could be a reasonable way to do it on current technology, and with future technology there might be other ways of doing it we can't figure out yet.

You could also do the same the other way, before sending colonists down to Mars, first bring up some soil from Mars and simulate it and the atmosphere and see what happens, with the infra-structure of an orbiting colony of Mars and rocket fuel generated on the surface of Mars and rockets shuttling back and forth that should be an easy and inexpensive thing to do. Obviously originally to a facility isolated from the main colony but with vacuum of space should be able to do that fairly easily.

That could test forward and backward contamination in one go without the need to potentially contaminate the planet first to find out what happens.

Depending how it all goes, letting myself get a bit carried away by my imagination and it might go much quicker than that who knows, depending what we find out about the planet.

Unfortunately, NASA is pre-occupied with insisting that terrestrial life, in some new and unusual cases is actually alien life, that is, when they're not building rockets to nowhere, or retiring rockets that work.  Thus, they are content to look merely for "signs" of life elsewhere, and are happy to move the goalposts to more distant locations, like Europa, bleeding funding from a quicker, more productive development of cis-lunar capabilities.

Could be. With Mars whatever you think about the Viking culture experiments, I've no idea myself if they were purely chemical reactions or if life could have been involved in some way, but it is surprising that no attempt has been made yet to build on them and find out on Mars what actually happened.

It seems to make sense to try to simulate the conditions of the more clement periods on Mars with selected samples on Mars to try to "wake up" any dormant organisms there might be and see if anything happens. Just add "snow" and let it melt in one of the experiments to simulate the occasional equatorial snow you get every so often in geological time.

That has the advantage that it doesn't presuppose anything about how their life chemistry works. Even if it is something that evolved completely independently of Earth, still you'd expect changes in the composition of the nutrient, or you might see visual evidence of colonies growing or whatever.

The main assumption it makes is that the life requires water. That is an assumption as there are those theoretical bases for alien biochemistry that don't require water.

In the near vicinity of Earth I do wonder about ice on comets and asteroids that used to be comets. If comets delivered life or its ingredients to early Earth, then comets may still contain those ingredients, or the life itself, so seem worth investigating. That's not assuming any hypothesis about what you would find, just seems an interesting target for research.
« Last Edit: 06/21/2012 04:05 pm by robertinventor »

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #174 on: 06/21/2012 03:56 pm »
BTW just found a paper, it's by Carl Sagan again, where he talks about that idea of future Mars becoming a second home for Earth life as the sun gets hotter.

As usual it's an old 1970s paper so the actual details have changed but the basic idea seems still valid:

http://courses.washington.edu/bangblue/Sagan-Faint_Young_Sun_Paradox-Sci72.pdf

"For AL = 30 percent, this event occurs about 4.5 aeons in our future; for
4L = 50 percent, 3 aeons in our future. Earth will then resemble contemporary
Venus, but with an atmospheric pressure of 300 bars of steam. It is difficult to imagine what could be done to prevent this runaway, even with a very advanced technology (perhaps a progressive Increase in atmospheric aerosol content), but at the same epoch the global temperature of Mnrs will become very similar to that of present day Earth. If there are any organisms left on our planet in that remote epoch, they may wish to take advantage of this coincidence."
« Last Edit: 06/21/2012 03:57 pm by robertinventor »

Offline gospacex

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #175 on: 06/21/2012 04:05 pm »
I am curious how would you stop private colonists from going to Mars.

I sure hope US government will not become some sort of dictatorship which prohibits its citizens from exploring and settling outer space.

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #176 on: 06/21/2012 04:12 pm »
I am curious how would you stop private colonists from going to Mars.

I sure hope US government will not become some sort of dictatorship which prohibits its citizens from exploring and settling outer space.

I don't know, and I wouldn't like that either. It wouldn't work anyway. There are many nations planning missions to Mars, and private companies would most likely have multi-national support and could launch from anywhere.

Actually I worry more about private missions than the public government ones, you could easily imagine if the budget is tight then just like the Apollo 11 return but for different reasons they could be tempted to skimp on the budget for planetary protection and research into the issues.

Maybe not the project scientists for private projects, but the managers of the project, as happened in case of Apollo 11 where an executive decision is made on the spot that ignores the scientific advice.

The nearest I can think of is if it gets some kind of international protected status, similar to Antarctica, probably some kind of international treaty that no-one is to land on it for the time being.

Indeed the Antarctic treaty might be a good model to follow, probably the closest we have to something like that at present.

http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/about_antarctica/geopolitical/treaty/

It works, even tourist ships to Antarctica are bound by the measures to protect the Antarctica environment. So private investors would be and if the reasons for the treaty are well understood for Mars, as they are for Antarctica, I think in practice you would get no-one breaking the treaty.




Offline gospacex

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #177 on: 06/21/2012 04:19 pm »
The nearest I can think of is if it gets some kind of international protected status, similar to Antarctica, probably some kind of international treaty that no-one is to land on it for the time being.

With potential cost of Mars real estate and resources of immeasurable trillions of dollars, good luck keeping people out. Especially that you apparently want to protect some Martian bacteria. Bacteria now have more rights than humans? Gosh...

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #178 on: 06/21/2012 04:43 pm »
Quote from: Robert
That depends also on whether we want to terraform it first as human colonists could get in the way of terraformation...

Well, after you've inherited a swamp in Florida, you don't first design the entire house down to the gold plated toilets, then verify whether or not it will fit the site.  First, you visit and study the site carefully, and then design the house.

So it should be, and most probably will be with any martian terraforming.  A couple of bases here and there, which slowly grow, hopefully.  Should it turn out to be a worthwhile endeavor in a century or two, ya terraform it.

Quote from: JF
NASA is pre-occupied with insisting that terrestrial life, in some new and unusual cases is actually alien life...

Quote from: Robert
Could be.

Couldn't be.  That's an extraordinary claim demanding extraordinary proof.  Until I am proved wrong in this contention, all life on Earth is presumed to be terrestrial life.  Thus saith John.

I am curious how would you stop private colonists from going to Mars.

EZ.  First, place Mars a couple of millions of miles away from Earth...

With potential cost of Mars real estate and resources of immeasurable trillions of dollars...

For sale:  Cheap, fixer-upper planet in desireable location within habitable zone of nearby star...

« Last Edit: 06/21/2012 04:48 pm by JohnFornaro »
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline robertinventor

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Re: What if Mars is barren of life?
« Reply #179 on: 06/21/2012 04:50 pm »
The nearest I can think of is if it gets some kind of international protected status, similar to Antarctica, probably some kind of international treaty that no-one is to land on it for the time being.

With potential cost of Mars real estate and resources of immeasurable trillions of dollars, good luck keeping people out. Especially that you apparently want to protect some Martian bacteria. Bacteria now have more rights than humans? Gosh...

It works with Antarctica, there are valuable natural resources there such as coal, but all exploitation is banned until 2048.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica#Geology_of_present-day_Antarctica

Yes it might take a while for the public to understand why it is necessary to protect Earth from backward contamination and protect Mars from forward contamination.

It took a while for nations to agree on the treaty for Antarctica and for humans to realise the continent needed to be protected.

Anyway I'm no politician far from it, just thoughts and ideas, may be far off the mark maybe some other approach is better, maybe there is a better way of doing it than an international treaty. It's just the best idea I can think of right now :)

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