Stunning shots of Mars..!

As I understand it, the very processes that are damaging our atmosphere would the ones that help reinstate one on Mars. Years ago there was talk of sending rockets loaded with nuclear reactors to smash into the surface and then slowing go critical. Not like a bomb, but more slowly like a runaway reactor. The idea being it would pump so much filth into the atmosphere that a greenhouse effect would happen. This was years and years ago when NASA came up with that plan. They obviously know a lot more now, so who know what they're planning.

Personally I'd love to see Mars colonised. I don't even think its that far fetched. In my lifetime we wont be seeing ordinary couples going there to live and breed, but we will be seeing scientists and engineers going there on long shifts to get some good experiments done I think. It'll be more significant than the moon landings I reckon.

 

AFAIK, Mars won't ever be able to retain an atmosphere as the internal heating that drives our planet's Magnetosphere & provides plate tectonics has cooled down on Mars.

There's no dynamo anymore, so any attempts on our part to put an atmosphere back will just be stripped away again.

Any colony there will have to be in a sealed biosphere.

 

I must admit Total Recall was in the back of my mind while I was writing that

Watched a Brian Cox prog last night, Mars shows patches of Methane which vary in size, getting bigger in the summer which, could be produced by geological processes, but, as Mars's core is now cold, not very lightly.

The other process that produces methane is bacterial activity.

So, if we find bacteria on Mars, does that mean its already occupied & that we'll never morally be justified in setting up a colony there?

 

A place already being occupied has never stopped us before. Anyway, what if the aliens had come to earth a few million years ago and left because they found primitive microbes? We wouldn't be having this conversation right now

 

True.

Been thinking about the timescales, Mars lost its atmosphere & therefore most of its liquid water 3 billion years ago. Life, it seems, must have liquid, or near to liquid water to sustain itself.

The earliest life we know of on Earth was from 600 mya.

Signs are that if there is bacterial life on Mars, it will be anerobic bacteria, the same as the first bacteria on Earth.

We know that rocks from Mars have landed on Earth. We also know that bacteria can survive being deep frozen. We don't know if they could survive the heat of entry into our atmosphere, but think about this, if there were bacteria frozen deep within a rock at close to absolute zero, could that have protected them from the heat of entry?

So its not impossible that life evolved on Mars first & then seeded the Earth, in which case we are all Martian in origin.

Second thing I was thinking about is what happens when oceans get stripped off into space.

There has to be a point when conditions dictate that the oceans leave the planet en mass, putting a girt ball of water/ice flying off in the direction of the outer solar system.

Now what if this girt bubble was captured by the gravity of another solar body? Say Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter? Which just happens to have a Global ocean 200km deep wrapped around a rocky core.

The surface is frozen but there is liquid water underneath, hence the cracks & heaving of the ice sheet.

Now the cracks are showing a red colouring, the sort that anerobic bacteria make.

Could the waters of Mars have seeded both planets?