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Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
by neverokay 2y ago
Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.
- HPsquared 2y agoMars is big, fossils are small.
- ceejayoz 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
- gadflyinyoureye 2y agoThat’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 2y agoSounds like a great opportunity to rewatch one of my all time favorite episodes, "Revisions" (s07e05)
- prox 2y agoWhat if we send a humanoid drone next?
- Filligree 2y agoGive it a sufficiently advanced AI, and that might work.
- WilTimSon 2y agoCurrent 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 2y agoIs it possible to fly on such a thin atmosphere? Doubt it.
- jwells89 2y agoHumans 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 2y agoIf 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 2y agoland on a travertine deposit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travertine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travertine
- Symmetry 2y agoFor 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001#:~:text=In%201996%2C%20a%20group%20of,speech%20about%20the%20potential%20discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001#:~:text=In%2....
- baja_blast 2y agoGiven 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
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jancsika 2y agoWhy 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. :)
- cooper_ganglia 2y agoThis sounds like what Charles Hinton did with jungle gyms for children. They were originally made to teach children "monkey instinct" to be able to navigate better through 3-dimensional space, hopefully increasing their capacity to visualize and understand 4-dimensional space. It didn't work, but it's very interesting! https://nowiknow.com/mathletes/ https://nowiknow.com/mathletes/
- neverokay 2y agoIf it’s the only option at the moment, sure let’s do it. Beethoven’s ear trumpet.
- fallat 2y agoWe need a hero.
- mseepgood 2y agoIsn't that what Perseverance does?
- aixpert 2y agoOR could 20m deep drilled core samples recovery remnants of RNA based live??