Mars could have supported life

I find this properly exciting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25191316

Data coming back from the Curiosity rover has convinced the boffins that Mars could have supported certain microbial life found here on Earth. If they are right, its not just a theory any more, but fact.

I find that monumental. That's one little robot with limited resources searching one little area. I look forward to reading what else they figure out over the years.

When I was at school, which wasn't really that long ago, I was told categorically that the chances of there being anywhere else in the universe that could support life were incredibly remote, because you'd need just the right type of rock with just the right elements at just the right distance from just the right sized sun etc. Now they've confirmed that its not so unlikely, and that contrary to having to find somewhere immensely distant, our next door neighbour could have supported life. That's two places in a single solar system, one of, as we know since Kepler and other kits came online, many many solar systems.

Call me a geek, but this stuff really interests me

 

Mars, deep fried has been supporting life up here in Scotland for years

 

I'm a geek too

I knew that meant Chemical Rock Self Feeders without looking it up

 

I meant it wasn't that long ago, in geological terms

 

So if there were Martians, they'd be a very long time dead by now, so what's the problem?

 

No problem. I think its an exciting thing.

But, how do we know they're long dead? It seems more data than ever before is coming out of the Curiosity rover, and its barely even scratched the surface yet.

If someone sent a primitive probe into earth orbit, and from space managed to get a few readings of the sahara desert, they could be forgiven for thinking there's nowt much here. If they then sent a later, better probe, they'd see the oceans and the different land masses, but still wouldn't have even a fraction of the available detail.

We're sort of at that stage. I don't mean I expect that next year they'll find tropical rain forests or anything like that, because we've already gathered enough data to know that's not going to happen, but until now all we had was photos, radar, spectrum analyses etc but not much in the way of actual readings and measurements and chemical analyses from the actual surface.

Besides which, we know rocks that originated from Mars have landed here, and now we know Mars could once have supported life, and we certainly know Earth supports life....

 

....And we know Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of Space, so if something similar was blasted off of Mars only to land here and start life off then we're back to square one.

What i'm saying is, if we do find life on Mars and there's a DNA link to life on Earth then it still won't prove that life is everywhere.

If we find life that has no connection to Earth then its game on

 

I thought the 'probes' sent from Earth were a bit more than capable of just spotting "oceans and land masses"and also would have been capable of easily identifying "tropical rain forests" on distant planets.

 

I sometime wonder why they always think life on another planet would need the same conditions we do. ie water air etc.
I'm sure out in the vastness of space there could very easily be a form of life that we dont understand at all, that probably can even get by without water or oxygen.
I think they are being very small minded when they appear to insist life cannot exist without water.
But then its not a subject I know much about so probably best I shut up.

 

Nowadays (and for a good while now) yes, but the early ones were a bit rubbish. Ok, my example wasn't that great but I couldn't think of a better one

My point is that despite how much we think we know, we still only know a tiny little bit of the bigger picture, but piece by piece, with advances in technology and the pure genius of some people, we're getting more and more info, and the more we get, the more intriguing it gets. The more intriguing it gets, the more the boffins try to develop ways to find out more, and when you consider the sheer magnitude of what they're doing, they're doing extremely well on what is really a tight budget for what it is.

At its closest point, Mars is about 35 million miles away. That's an immense distance across vacuum, extremes of temperature and radiation. They managed to get kit all the way there, and then land it safely from 35 million miles away. Then, a human made object is able to function and actually dig about on the surface, analyse stuff, and send data back. Its immense that they can do that at all. Yet they do, and I just find that immense in itself, let alone what they actually find out from these missions.

 

Some of the boffins are already openly acknowledging that they think that, but the reason they look for life that works in a way that we understand, is because its hard enough to research at that distance as it is when you know what you're looking for. To look for something we don't understand would be futile at this stage, because while we can build instruments to look for certain chemicals, gases and compounds because you can test those instruments cheaply right here on earth, you can't really build and test something to look for something when you don't know what it is you're looking for.