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New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars
- bsima 3y agoyay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points
- WillAdams 3y agoWell, 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 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18105
- 48864w6ui 3y agoAnyone remember the title of the short where they explore an ancient martian city and find a periodic table that serves as a Rosetta stone?
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoOr, 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 3y agoLife 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 3y agoWhile 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 3y agoYou'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 3y agoAll this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
- baja_blast 3y agoYeah 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 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
- IncreasePosts 3y agoGoing 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 3y agoAsteroids as originators of life, that impacting both, would be the more likely “root cause” of having life on both planets
- c22 3y agoEven 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoSomeone 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 3y agoIt 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 3y agoCurious 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoPerhaps, but given how sterile the moon appears to be, it's not obvious why the Pleidas would be any different, even assuming they were created by the same potentially life-seeding impact. I can see the purely historical interest in knowing how the earth and moon were formed, where our water came from, where terrestial life originated, etc, but it seems (maybe I'm wrong?) that a large part of the interest in extra-terrestial origin of life consideration is from people who don't want to believe that life is all-but-inevitable in the right conditions and therefore presumably did originate here (and very quickly after earth formed - within a few 100M years). However, if creation of life is an extremely rare event, then the likelihood of it having spread from such a rare source to any other compatible planet seems vanishingly small!
- neverokay 3y agoWhy don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
- HPsquared 3y agoMars is big, fossils are small.
- ceejayoz 3y agoThere 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-finds-evidence-of-possible-long-term-water-on-mars https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-fin... are probably good candiates.
- XorNot 3y agoThe 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.
- tokai 3y agoI 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.
- forgingahead 3y ago*Barsoom
- pjmlp 3y agoMaybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.
- adastra22 3y agoYou 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 3y agoBut then how did life get on mars?
- alex_young 3y agoBlew in from Europa
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bena 3y agoExactly, 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 3y agoAll science is the process of kicking the can further down the road.
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- ethbr1 3y agoIt really was Earth all along...
- caseyy 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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?
- ethbr1 3y agoI read somewhere that for geologic-scale signatures you need something that is: - Chemically inert - Recognizably artificial w/o context - Physically hardy - Planet-scale mass-produced On Earth, apparently "panes of glass" are one of the few things that qualifies.
- gmd63 3y agoWhat if humanity oscillates between the two planets, and Elon and Elorp rise by design on each one.
- moose44 3y agoLink not working for anyone else?
- gku 3y agoAlternative source: https://phys.org/news/2024-05-earth-environment-ancient-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2024-05-earth-environment-ancient-mars...
- baja_blast 3y agoOne 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_experiments#Labeled_release 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 3y ago> 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 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]
- logrot 3y agoSo we messed up Mars, almost done with Earth, where do we go next?
- tehlike 3y agoTo infinity and beyond.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoSaturn. Best place for heat and raw materials.
- trentnix 3y agoWe?
- spurgu 3y agoYou know, us lifeforms.
- dotnet00 3y ago"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 3y agoTo the Sun. Just have to make sure we go at night, when it's off.
- walterbell 3y agoKurd Lasswitz wrote "Two Planets" in 1897, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39598983 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) 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, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians." The group included Erdos and von Neumann.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoPossibly 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
- alwa 3y agoAnd 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/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/wernher-von-braun/
- hinkley 3y agoThat song shows up in For All Mankind.
- mjhay 3y agoAn 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 3y agoYoung 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Vox_Leone 3y agoThe 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 3y agoLink 404's out now..
- labrador 3y agoOf course it had an Earth-like environment. Hasn't anyone ever read Edgar Rice Burroughs?
- DoreenMichele 3y agoThat was the first thing I thought of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carter_of_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carter_of_Mars
- labrador 3y agoIt was fun reading those books when I was a teen
- gcanyon 3y agoI’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 3y agoSometimes 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoYeah 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 3y agoBut 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 3y agoThe 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…
- kerhackernews 3y agoTo 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 3y agoThis 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 3y agoThat’s easy. Earthling tech is just too behind the curve and society is stuck in a state where we are considered primitive.
- elorant 3y agoWe 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 3y agoI 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.
- killthebuddha 3y ago> To me it seems like the probability could have been anything. The point is that we do know some things about the universe and, given what we do know, we think the probability is high. So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what. The thing that makes the Fermi Paradox so interesting is that every resolution is either interesting or implies something interesting.
- xyst 3y agoThe 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 3y agoWhy can't we bring a scanning electron microscope onto one of these rovers? There are companies making desktop ones now.
- api 3y agoThe 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 3y agoThere have been microscopes but without a human to mount a sample they are more like macro lenses
- kobieps 3y agoGetting a 404 now, wtf?
- joshmarinacci 3y agoWhen 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.
- gmd63 3y agoImagine the frustration of our martian ancestors upon learning the richest man on earth is trying to go back to they place they originally launched the seeds from.
- laeri 3y ago*One of the richest men. Bernard Arnault seems to claim top spot currently and the definition of richest man is also very vague in general.
- hooch 3y agoImagine their endless frustration as we sailed from place to place felling all the forests to build more ships to sail further afield and fell more forests.
- bmitc 3y agoI dislike complaining about titles, but I really wish articles, especially a national laboratory, would be more honest about titles. This makes it sound like this is the new "smoking gun" that Mars was so-called Earth-like early on. However, it was my understanding that this was already known. The largest known waterfall was already previously known to be on Mars at one point, and it was already known that Mars had oceans and rivers. Again to my knowledge, I thought it was already basically understood that Mars was a little mini-Earth the first 400 million or so years of its life until its core cooled off.
- gloryjulio 3y agoJust a curious question, is Earth's core cooling off like Mars?
- bmitc 3y agoI sure hope not. I would assume it's a rather dynamic situation of various periods of different relative behavior. We're certainly at its mercy though. My understanding about Mars is that it is just a much smaller planet than Earth, and it's core composition was slightly different (?), and so the core couldn't keep up and just slowly stopped "slushing around" and cooled off. That's my very loose understanding of the situation without digging into references. A quick search also seems to imply that it was the collision of Earth and another planetoid (not sure of the right name), the collision that created our rather relatively large and close Moon, injected a huge amount of heat and energy in Earth, basically re-smelting it. Plus the Moon constantly tugs and pulls on the Earth, which also probably adds to the core dynamics.
- nonethewiser 3y agoSo many fortunate series of events that lead to the opportunity for life. Some survivorship bias I guess.
- nonameiguess 3y agoYes, it is. There was a pop-sci book that came out twenty years ago, The Life and Death of Planet Earth, which contains some speculation about the consequences of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Planet_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Planet_E.... They give a low-end estimate of 500-800 million years before plate tectonics stop. Net effect would be the planet becomes uninhabitable by modern day plants and animals well before the sun goes red giant and kills off everything else.
- keepamovin 3y agoI think we can't be certain of the ages of the planets in our solar system. It's based on different things but there's recent uncertainty about the age of the universe, possibly by a factor of two. It's possible the planets in our system are older than we think. Is it also possible they're younger? I'm not an expert on it.
- divbzero 3y ago> there’s recent uncertainty about the age of the universe, possibly by a factor of two Do you have a reference for this? Interesting if potentially true.
- keepamovin 3y agoSure, it's from last year. Surprised you missed it, but no worries! :) - https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-pre... - https://scitechdaily.com/cosmic-paradigm-shift-new-research-doubles-universes-age-to-26-7-billion-years/ https://scitechdaily.com/cosmic-paradigm-shift-new-research-... - https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/could-age-universe-be-twice-old-current-estimates-suggest https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/could-age-universe-be-twice... - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230711133118.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230711133118.h... - https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/age-of-universe-research-james-webb/163845/ https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/age-of-universe-researc... The science is not settled. But that's the point, science never is. Uncertainty for sure haha! :) I think the main point is the older it is, the less certain we can be especially with our current limitations. ha :)
- andrewflnr 3y agoThe ages of the planets are figured out by entirely unrelated mechanisms to the age of the universe. One guy putting forward an alternative to LCDM doesn't itself put any doubt on the planets' ages, probably even if he was right.
- keepamovin 3y ago