Exciting news if it pans out: there are some hints of possible life on Mars, in the form of sporadic plumes of methane gas, similar to instances on earth of outgassing from deep pockets of bacteria.
This would suddenly make a mission to Mars interesting. Extraterrestrial biology? Sign me up for that one!
This is so cool! I always wanted to be a biologist in space!
cue David Bowie
aliens!!! ieeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:-p
Maan… if I had a chance of being a biologist-in-space, I’d so go back to school… but I’m a shortsighted slob who gets car-sick easily; I don’t think they’d let me on a spaceship :-p
If this turns out to be life on another planet, I can;t WAIT to see how the IDiots spin it into being mentioned in the bible.
Of course they will most likely just say it’s EARTH bacteria that we sent there on the probes.
Well, it’s far from the first time we’ve had hints, but I agree that if it pans out, it’ll be a big frickin’ deal.
If we find life — or even clear evidence of past life — on Mars, it’s going to be hard not to take that as suggesting life is endemic, if not ubiquitous, in the universe. Once we find organisms radically different from Earth life… and increasingly far away from Earth… you have to wonder how much fun it’ll be to watch the Cdesign proponentsists back and fill to explain it away.
The rest of us will just be delighted, of course.
So… Is it time to admit that BadAstronomer was right and astronomy is more interesting? :)
-Breaking news-
New bible passages just confirmed!
“On the 8th day, God made Mars fart in order to trick humans into thinking there might be methane releasing bacteria there. This is the word of the lord.”
Do you think the mars bacteria have a bad day when earth goes retrograde?
…
…
(^This is me, speechless.)
Seriously, that’s some serious news. Okay, I get there’s abiotic possibilities. But damn, that just fits so well with what we think we know about how old biological methanogenesis is around here…
And, for the win, the pull quote:
…
…
(Pours glass for toast…)
It tantalizes, but the one instrument that could do some checks for isotopic signatures, Mars Science Laboratory, was delayed for two years. Now to be launched in 2011.
I always wonder why we’re so slow to search for what might be the most interesting discovery of the last 500 years, the discovery of unrelated, or, at most, only very distantly related, forms of life.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
@4 “I can;t WAIT to see how the IDiots spin it”
Unfortunately, you will get one of two results.
1) the current popular religion manages to correctly work it into their dogma
2) another new religion takes its place, claiming to have had that claim as part of their dogma all along
As long as any event occurs that is not exactly and uniquely predicted by science, religions will survive and thrive.
(It’s a depressing thought)
Biology in space? Do I sense the beginnings of a truce between the doctors Myers and Plait?
We are not alone in all sphere. Why not life in Mars ?
Yes, but they’re still just Martians and other forms of Martian. No one has seen a Martian dog evolve from a Martian cat. And if there are still Martian apes then how did
weMartians evolve from Martian apes? Huh? And then what are youscientistsDarwinists going to do about the 2nd Law of Martian Thermodynamics?</This isn’t easy – how do they do it?>
;)
RE: Alex Besogonov (#6)
Yes. Yes it is. But really, we’ve known that all along.
Come now. Can’t we please keep this discussion in the realm of the plausible? Life on Mars, okay…
@ WRMartin #14
you use the find/replace option in your word processor
WRMartin @14
Don’t forget “If you don’t think this is true, the how do you explain MARTIAN PYGMIES+DWARFS!”
I just love seeing something new and not necessarily expected found. A whole new area to investigate. Sniff. The smell of science is in the air.
So said PZ (Tentacles Be Upon Him):
And this is why we need international collaboration in space. On a US-only mission to Mars, some of the crew would surely be fundamentalist Christians and creationists, and PZ would go insane soon after leaving Earth orbit as realisation dawned that he was stuck with them in a cabin for three years…
I WANT A MARTIAN PONY
I WANT A MARTIAN PONY
You’ll be ready for the cold on Mars, having lived in Minnesota…
The Petey:
Oh my. Can you imagine the decades of almost orgasmic fun for biochemists and molecular biologists figuring out what makes Martian bugs tick? That would almost make me long to get back into academic science.
HumanisticJones@19,
Martian Pygmies and Dwarves? Now that’s downright silly.
;)
Martian Pope – that’s what I’m looking forward to.
Martian farts! Cooool!
The puffs of methane are exhaust gases from the giant cannons the Martians have just fired at Earth. They’ll land in 2012—and this time they are prepared for the bacteria—so see, them ancient Mayans were correct! The Earth as we know it ends in 2012!
Seriously…
Awsome news, whether or not it’s determine to be from life. (And absolutely awsome if it is from life, of course!) Could the gas just be ancient reservoirs leaking now? Even if so, the source could still be biology.
How damn cool it would be if it there indeed is life on Mars, and geological evidence and DNA show that life on earth originated from it.
That would seriously make faitheads worldwide cringe in cosmic size cognitive dissonance.
That’d be fun fun fun, ohhh :D
Yngve- but scientifically it would be WAY cooler if Mars and earth life originated independently of one another.
Very cool..hope there are some samples by the time I graduate and go looking for a doctorate :D
Yngve:
Alas, that would just make Mars the original Garden of Eden :/
Trip to Mars PZ?
Bill Donohue has already paid for your ticket! ;-)
How damn cool it would be if it there indeed is life on Mars, and geological evidence and DNA show that life on earth originated from it.
That would seriously make faitheads worldwide cringe in cosmic size cognitive dissonance.
That’d be fun fun fun, ohhh :D
GREAT
That would make Mars the garden of Eden and a whole new set of Holy Wars will be fought to claim it.
Martian farts! Right in the faces of the IDers.
And all this time I thought we would find a big humanoid face on the surface and it would house a 3D planetary museum showing how the martians fled to earth and then… was that movie the worst or what? The only good part was seeing Don Cheadle freaked out after being alone on the planet for a couple of years.
I would love to be on that mission, if there is one. My guess is that unmanned probes will go first.
@14
> This isn’t easy – how do they do it?
first, one starts with a lobectomy.
The recent flybys of Enceladus (and its cryovolcanic plumes) had me really excited about the thought of extraterrestrial microbiological life for a while. Then I began to think, once we discover life on another planetary body, it’ll only be a matter of centuries before we’ve destroyed its ecosystem and driven it to extinction. :(
AK! AK AK AK!
(Don’t run…we are your friends.)
Even if it’s not biological in origin, it’s still pretty damn* interesting.
————————
*Special version of this comment for South Carolina:
Even if it’s not biological in origin, it’s still pretty fucking interesting.
This was one of the comments posted after the live blogging:
Jessica Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
In the U.S., cattle emit about 5.5 million metric tons of methane per year, the US dairy cow population is 9 million, so 19,000 million metric tons would mean there is 31,000 cows on Mars.
Cold as hell, in fact… and it’s a good thing his young’uns are grown, because, you know, Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
[Sorry; couldn’t resist]
oooooooh
Fillet Martianone
It’s also possible, and I believe the report mentions it, that there are large pockets of wandering kobe beef cattle just under the permafrost layer. I wonder what Martian microbrew tastes like … and who’s giving the cattle their kobe massages?
OK, sorry, I’m done (beef on the brain).
Way cool news, BTW.
Any chance this could be contamination? (are the sites emitting methane reasonably near – topologically or geographically – landing sites? Some bacterial spores can last through ANYTHING (almost)).
After a particularly annoying troll-fest on the fresh meat thread on Tuesday, I headed out to the pub to clear my head. Five hours and at least as many pints later, I was guaranteeing a friend of mine that we would find incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life in our lifetimes.
Damn, I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going to die tomorrow.
My coworker was just telling me how tardigrades can survive near absolute-zero temperatures and the vacuum of space (but can anyone hear them scream?)
Cold as hell, in fact… and it’s a good thing his young’uns are grown, because, you know, Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
Actually it’s the perfect place to raise kids. According to planetmaster, Mars beats Terra hands down in all crime, overpopulation and real estate pricing statistics. Earth does edge Mars out on the fronts of education and internet access, but hey you can homeskool, and what good is a 100 mbit/second if some lowlife breaks into your dome and steals your laptop? Am I right?
dreikin:
Shit, forgot about the ever lasting copout that religion provides.
Garden of Eden…
But hey, a completely other origin of life on Mars would give me a big geeky hardon, and the Garden thingy would be a no-go.
So I agree, completely new life is way cooler :D
The subject of newly-found Martian methane came out last year. At the time, it was reported to be coming out of the lowlands of the planet, and that the amount of methane was *increasing*.
Life or no life, increasing was strange, so it begs the question:
Did a Viking lander contaminate Mars in the 1970s, turning it into a living planet?
John
just think what it does to young earth creationists! :D – please please let their be life on mars, that would be great- and all those people who don’t believe in evolution- what will they say NOW – well I think you wont be able to convince them that there really iS life on mars- they just will not believe it- they’ll think it is a trick by satan or something stupid like that-
I really think my parents wont ever believe there is life on any other planet- but that is what a cult will do to you
We can already bet it’s actually a geological source of methane, like we have on earth also…
@ Aaron #11:
3) Denying that the Darwinist scientists found anything. Have you heard that Piltdown man was a fake?
4) Pointing to a “fossilized footprint” in the background of a Mars rover picture proving that Martians and dinosaurs coexisted.
@46 & 48
I know double posting is tedious, but it bears repeating…
Unfortunately, you will get one of two results.
1) the current popular religion manages to correctly work it into their dogma
2) another new religion takes its place, claiming to have had that claim as part of their dogma all along
As long as any event occurs that is not exactly and uniquely predicted by science, religions will survive and thrive.
(It’s a depressing thought)
Flanagan:
Obviously that’s an explanation (one that the NASA scientists are explicitly stating as a possibility to be explored), but why do you think it’s a good bet? As Mumma said in his paper last January, “Living systems produce more than 90% of Earth’s atmospheric methane; the balance is of geochemical origin.”
Ironically, I double posted right as someone quoted me…
@50
Yes, there are other possibilities, but I’m considering the condition that life were actually found, with significant and substantial repeated evidence. Even then, some religion will explain it with their absolute truth.
“The rest of us will just be delighted, of course.”
It’s nice not to have to fit everything you discover into some old story arc.
Methane. Does this mean Mars has gaseous termites?
BTW, didn’t that Science article on ALH84001 already prove there is life on Mars? ; ) It would be interesting to find that McKay was right all along.
It’s just a matter of time. It could even happen in our lifetime: (1) Life (ancient or extant) found on Mars, Europa, or Enceladus. (2) Spectroscopic detection of atmospheric compositions indicative of life by the next generation of space telescopes. (3) A ET signal picked up by the Allen array.
I’m betting we’ll know one of these by 2025.
Aaron,
No argument. I was thinking of the other possibilities of how theists might try to spin the information. I’m sure there’s a few more ;-).
It should be interesting to see what kind of reaction this gets over the next few days. It’s a shame that we’re obviously going to have to wait a very long time to get the really conclusive data needed.
it would be cool to find advanced life…we would make great pets!
Well, yes Cris, I would say on earth 90% is from living organisms because we have… Life!
My bet is simply a bet… Meaning I don’t have any clue, but a feeling. Or maybe the principle of parcimony.
The Petey (#21)
I believe they are called thoats.
Uh oh. Commentary on the findings have started…
This one over at ABC News:
Some comments, not explicitly referencing posts. Sorry. I’m between time points in an experiment so I can’t be persnickety.
1. Exploring Mars is already interesting.
2. Contamination: The Martian surface is so bombarded with UV and GCR that I would rule out contamination from landers. OK, maybe something from the bottom of the feet, which might be shielded from UV, but not from GCR. So I still vote no.
3. Tardigrades can survive all that vacuum/desiccation/freezing exposure – but by going into suspended animation. They have to be warmed and wetted before they start metabolizing again. And they breathe oxygen.
4. One thing you can bet on, is that a re-examination of potential landing sites for the next mars rover, MSL, will be happening in the fullness of time. Oh, and some of those sensors on the orbiters currently there are going be getting pointed at those plume sources pretty darned frequently!
5. As far as life being endemic: If, assuming it’s life, when we actually examine samples, we see essentially the same genetic code as on Earth, it could be Earth-Mars panspermia, which is boring, because we already know there’s substantial transport amongst solar system bodies. If significantly different, it would be second genesis (or first genesis, with Earth being second), which is interesting. The last two would point to the endemic nature of life in the cosmos.
@56
Brian,
A thought I had…
If we assume, as some assert, that life will be found everywhere in the universe that any sort of conditions allow for it, then we may well find the same to be true of religion.
If we observe religions scientifically (a little mix of evolution and anthropology), we might observe they adapt and evolve to fit changing conditions (ironic, isn’t it). If intelligence is the substrate on which religion subsists, in the same way that a mix of organic molecules+water is the substrate that allows life, then it is likely that everywhere in the universe where we ultimately find intelligence we will find some variation on religion.
Now, if they all turn out to be the same religion…
Cris #52:
Regardless of the origin of this methane, Mars very likely has at least some geological sources of methane somewhere. So it could be that the researchers have found the geological source we already know probably exists, or they may have found the biological source that only might exist. The geological origin is the more parsimonious explanation, and so that’s the way I would bet.
Not only that, but the absence of barbed-wire fences on Mars should yield some very excellent Martian leather and exceptionally tender, if not Kobe-beef like, steaks.
Man… I want to eat Mars now.
Does this mean the Reds get their way and we’re not allowed to terraform?
I think we’ve already got enough data to falsify that part :-)
wazza @#65
Glad to see I’m not the only one that read K.S. Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Hopefully we can resolve the inevitable conflict with the Metanats without having to drop an Areosyncronous Elevator onto the planet.
@66
It could be that god is just a prankster, and everywhere we meet new civilizations we always find temples to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
and all this time on earth he’s just been fucking with us.
If there were non-Earth life forms, then that would annihilate some creationist or ID thought, wouldn’t it?
Then I began to think, once we discover life on another planetary body, it’ll only be a matter of centuries before we’ve destroyed its ecosystem and driven it to extinction. – Cris@35
Yes, the more likely it is that there’s life on Mars, the more important it is that we do not send human beings there, only thoroughly-sterilised robots.
If there is life there, and it turns out to be very similar to life here, chances are it started on Mars and got transported here by meteorite – the greater gravity of Earth makes the opposite much more difficult.
Screw the reds, I want to become an ecopoet in the southern hemisphere. Maybe somewhere between Nirgal and Sax.
RE: Alex Besogonov (#6)
Unfortunately, I don’t think so. It just shows that to make astronomy really interesting, you need to add some biology…
That was the fascinating thing about reading “the swarm”; an intelligent life form with a 200 million year memory on earth. Really throws a screw into the YEC crowd’s machinery.
am i the only one trying to come up with a witty Bartertown reference?
*crickets*
guess so
Not to mention the low gravity, which should yield a much more favorable muscle to bone ratio.
But unless we can find a reliable source of propane there, what are we going to use to fuel the grill?
everywhere we meet new civilizations we always find temples to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Temples? Huge mounds of garlic bread, surely?
If PZ finds Deja Thoris when he’s on Mars, I’m changing my name to John Carter.
Well if you would all stop worshipping Darwin for one moment and use your G-D given brains it is obvious.
G-d put them there, like he put the kangaroos in Austrailia- the bible doesn’t mention them either.
Nerd of Redhead said
Smells like bullshit to me.
That’s your upper lip, Randy.
Intelligent Designer
Well thought out and reasoned response there.
Just what I would expect from someone with your handle.
5) The devil put life on Mars to trick us.
6) God put life on Mars to test us.
Life on Mars? … Just a headline designed to fish for tax dollars.
Ahhh, Randy having trouble with his big paper for Nature? Sniff. I’ll be polite and not say what I smell now.
At #78 The Last Hussar wrote:
Wait! God?
Didn’t Noah take the roos to the Land Downunder after he landed the ark?
Wait, did Noah take all species of bacteria along with him as well?
Re: #2: A Holy War between religions over a Martian Garden of Eden would be great. We can ship the fundies to Mars and they’d thank us for it.
Looks like it’s time for another re-run of “The Stimpsons”.
In this episode Randy Stimpson doesn’t realize that the only person who thinks he has something worth saying is himself… just like every other episode.
It’s not exactly Dejah Thoris, but I’ll take it.
What about Venus? There was a paper that reported finding hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere, which can’t happen unless there’s some complex chemistry (sulphur based replicators?).
Man this is seriously cool news!
I suppose we could send Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and crew to Mars with a BAMFDrill and sans nukes (a’la Armageddon)
But this time leave Bruce and Ben behind on Mars.
-DU-
One problem I can see is that methane is a very common gas in the Solar system and in space in general. Oceans (or glaciers) of it on some planets and moons (Jupiter and Titan.) Only way I can see to resole it is to send something(or someone) there and have a look to see what is the cause.
-DU-
WAY OT
Watching our asshole soon to be ex-president.
I almost puked when he quoted Jefferson.
Brain Hertz,
Methane?
Denial is always the first stage. Note, not even a hint of curiosity. How stale these lives are.
Well, well, well. You all think you are so damn smart! I however will assure my place in the new order. I welcome our new Martian overlords. There, that ought to get me further up the human food chain.
I remember an article a while ago (SciAm?) where the procedure for sterilizing the probes are selecting for things that can survive on mars.
Intelligent Designer doesn’t like it and thinks it can’t be true, like anything else that doesn’t dovetail with his special book. Of course anthing scientists find that does fit with his special book just proves how right he is.
IDiot, since this is the opposite of how science works you must either not understand or have nothing but contempt for the scientific method. Why the fuck are you here then?
You might as well just say “I believe in science, when it confirms what I believe already. Oh and I hate government too. Just wanted to make sure everyone knows I’m a walking cliche.”
naoh (#57) you old lyer….
And you too, firemancarl:
I really dont see how there could not be complex organic molecules or even prokaryotes on Mars.
IMO it will only be a matter of how complex life there actually is,and where it is.
Now what this will mean for theology and religiozombies Im not sure,but couldnt gawd have created life on other planets as well,like he allegedly did on ours?Cant see the theologians having too big a problem spinning this…..
How many times have we been down this “there may be life on Mars” path already? I rather spend $225 million on alternative medicine research than trying to find life on Mars.
Rob@#97
That’s an interesting perspective – but I have a problem with the term “selecting for.” I have a hard time seeing what the difference is between sterilizing and not sterilizing. What I mean is: if you kill off everything on the spacecraft but a few bacteria which could somehow survive on Mars, how is that any different from not killing off anything on the spacecraft? In fact, if you didn’t sterilize, you’d potentially making life easier by leaving food for the guys that “could” survive. To “select for,” you’d formally have to go through a few generations under the selective condition, so that the lucky escapers would die, but the worthy mutants would preferentially proliferate.
It is clear that bacteria have gone into a form of suspended animation on the Moon (one of the Surveyors? Apollo 12?), been retrieved, and then cultured again back on Earth, but there is no evidence that they were actively dividing on the Moon.
The problem with UV and GCR is that unless the critters are actively dividing – repairing their DNA at a sufficiently high rate – requiring liquid water and a copacetic temperature (not to be found on Mars) – the physical breaking of chemical bonds imposed by the radiation will mount to the level that they wouldn’t survive even if we went there and put them in a special incubator designed just for them.
Now, if we carelessly sent some random drill bit to Mars and took it down below a couple of meters – that would get us out of the GCR affected zone and into a more habitable environment. But we haven’t done anything close to that yet.
Shitfuckdamn. I’ve been assuming that everybody knows a lot about Galactic Cosmic Radiation – GCR. Not so bad itself, but the secondaries that come off from whatever it hits are pretty darned harmful. It’s pretty high there at the Martian surface.
What special book are taking about?
Intelligent Designer (Randy) is a Deist of sorts.
Not sure there is “a” book.
I second that. Randy’s certainly a wacky character with some rather strange ideas, but he’s no Judeo-Christian.
Intelligent Designer says:
Of course you would. We would not expect anything different from someone with no knowledge of science and no intellectual curiosity.
As far as I can ascertain, this question: “who is making those new brown clouds?” was first addressed in 1978 by Greggery Peccary in the song “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary” by Frank Zappa wherein it was reported that Mr. Peccary was chased into a cave (no ordinary cave but in fact the mouth of “Billy the Mountain”) by a group of hunchmen (and hunchwomen) whereupon he made a phone call to find “the greatest living philostopher known to mankind” for an explanation of the presence of the brown clouds but the authenticity of the philostopher was questionable as he merely proclaimed that “time is of affliction” – and more specifically, “the eons are closing” – so perhaps we’ll never know.
P.S. I just had a root canal and am still somewhat groggy.
Intelligent Designer:
How about we compromise and spend that $225 million to create a permanent human settlement on Mars? That way, when the next city-sized asteroid hits Earth and causes the extinction of 95% of all living species on this planet, we have a chance of not being one of them. I know it may be a long time before that happens (although it could also be in the next five minutes), but in the meantime we could use the Mars base to research both life on Mars AND alternative therapies for radiation sickness and genetic mutations! Everybody wins!
I heard there were spiders from Mars
@102:
Found the article, it was Discover, not SciAm
This is exciting news for sure, but no more than predictable: The Viking landers detected life on Mars 32 years ago. At least the Labeled Release experiment did; the Labeled Uptake and Pyrolytic Release experiments were only capable of detecting life on Earth about half the time.
Faced with this great news, NASA had to scramble around and come up with some way to explain it away lest somebody suggest a new Mars mission, which was absolutely inconceivable in the 1970s, and would have bled money from the Shuttle program if by some miracle it had been approved. They came up with the infamous “superoxides,” which you will notice everyone has forgotten all about. Did Pathfinder, the MERs, or Phoenix find “superoxides?” They didn’t even look for them, because they knew that was all bullshit.
So I’m gratified but not surprised that biogenic methane has been detected on Mars: a lot of us knew it all along!
But couldn’t methane be from iron? Isn’t there a lot of iron in the soil on Mars, which makes the planet reddish? (It would be a lot more exciting if it was caused by life forms, though. That would be neat.)
I made the mistake of serving Kasei Valles bean chili at my last poker game. Wash that stuff down with Syrtis Major beer and you get yourself a methane plume visible from Uranus.
Errr…is it possible for methane to be spontaneously produced by iron? I’m not saying it isn’t possible (I’m not a geologist), but I have never heard of such a thing. I really don’t know, but that sounds kind of far out there. I’m just asking.
So far, the scientists who have been researching this Mars phenomenon have said the most likely culprits are a) biological life of some kind b) geologic/volcanic activity (although there has been no significant geologic/volcanic activity on Mars in human history as far as we know). We won’t know for sure until a lot more study is done by space probes orbiting Mars and/or Martian landers.
all “fossil” fuel is not necessarily biotic, just ask titan. (and probably earth too.)
My post on RD.net:
I’m inclined to vote for life. Abiogenic sources would probably not have been able to keep up this prodigious rate of methane production for all these billions of years. Two abiogenic sources are the Iron-serpintination route, and evaporation of methane hydrates(of comet origin?). Both of these would have been much more active in the warmer past, and would have used up by now. Primitive bacteria life could have been abundant in the warm wet past, and would still be alive deep in the sediments. What in the past would have killed them? Any change in climate would have been slow enough for life to hang on somewhere, where conditions are still suitable, underground. Plus, there was that possible micro-fossil in the martian meteorite. Bottom line, if life ever existed there, it would still be there in some form today. Early conditions were fine for development of life on Mars, and life is probably ubiquitous, starting anywhere conditions are halfway mild enough for it.
Well, methane isn’t really a “fossil fuel”. Plus, didn’t Titan form out of the same proto-planetary material that Saturn formed from (and in the same general area)? In which case, it would make sense that Titan would contain many of the same gases and materials as Saturn? Comparing Titan to Mars is like comparing the Moon to Venus, isn’t it?
I just hope that gas doesn’t start coming to earth and probing people. Well, probing without consent at least.
How many times have we been down this “there may be life on Mars” path already?
Three times in the last 40 years. Christ, I’m worn out.
I don’t think creationists/Cdesign proponentsists will worry too much about Martian bacteria. They’ll say there’s no reason why God/The Designer couldn’t’ve created bacteria there, too. Besides, who cares about a bunch of stupid bacteria? The discovery of more complex organisms might give them some trouble, especially if they have a very different design from Earth life (as they probably would), but even then, they would probably be able to ignore that. Maybe God/the Designer just used different ideas there.
I don’t think it will be until we discover other intelligent life forms, who have far more advanced technology than us, and maybe even records of Earth dating back hundreds of thousands of years, that the creationists/IDiots will finally have trouble. And even then, the creationists will probably dismiss the aliens as demons or something similar. Either that, or jump to a new religion, perhaps one practiced by the aliens (assuming that they, too, had religion)
John Atkinson @ 47
It could be some cyclic process that we don’t know about, which simply happens to be on the increase right now. Maybe some kind of gradual buildup of methane which periodically builds up to a sufficiently high pressure to force open some kind of vent or something, just to throw out one possible idea.
Well, even if there are aliens who are as smart or smarter than we are, they still don’t have souls AND they were created by the devil.
Historically, Yahweh has only had jurisdiction over a small part of the Middle East, and only very recently has he even expanded his empire to cover the entire Earth. All other solar systems, whether they are inhabited by intelligent life or not, are clearly the sole property of SATAN.
This being said, we should immediately begin a campaign to dominate/destroy and/or convert all other life in all other solar systems as soon as it is technologically possible. This is our duty as Christians.
To discover life on Mars seems to me something that simply follows our ability to look. After all, the house of Earth and the house of Mars are next door to each other.
I’ve heard lots of speculation concerning the seeding of Earth from Mars. It may be so. But what of the seeding of Mars from Earth? Or the seeding of both from elsewhere?
When you think about it, it doesn’t matter where life comes from. In the end, it’s just like politics; local, widespread, with adherents and detractors full of, well, life.
You mean a mission to Mars would become even more interesting… :)
Methane on Mars. SO cool. The terraforming has begun! And I want to visit. Ach, the expedition won’t need a middle-aged Unix guy. Dang.
There are several religions that claim that extraterrestrial life exists, and I’m not aware of any whose dogma insist that it doesn’t.
-jcr
Plumes of gas erupting from Mars?
The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one…
“abiogenesisdidit”
This would suddenly make a mission to Mars interesting. Extraterrestrial biology? Sign me up for that one!
Sorry PZ, thats just not on – anyone who hasn’t found the Mars missions one of the most interesting science events that humanity has ever seen, is dead from the neck up…
I’m sure Ben Stein would like to send PZ to Mars just to get him on aonother planet.
Exciting news if it pans out: there are some hints of possible life on Mars, in the form of sporadic plumes of methane gas, similar to instances on earth of outgassing from deep pockets of bacteria.
The Federal Reserve can create unlimited amount of a money supply with interest. So there is plenty to go around for testing to see if little green men crawled on Mars…lol
No. High school chemistry says you can’t get a chemical compound of multiple elements out of a single stable element. But someone else put in some other terms that suggest a more circuitous route, besides which, we couldn’t possibly actually be discussing iron in isolation. Maybe it’s supposed to catalyze a reaction of the actual component elements?
******
#55
A gaseous multi-cellular life form would be VERY interesting to biologists… and physicists.
Did you mean gassy? I know it was a joke anyway, but the idea of vaporous insects boggled my mind.
So how long do you reckon it’ll be before the first Martian restaurant opens on Earth?
Smells like bullshit to me. – “Intelligent” Designer
How would you be able to tell? You spend your whole life wallowing in the stuff, which you produce yourself in vast quantities.
But is there life in Morris, Minnesota?
The kids have left home. So I suspect things are very lively. ;-)
A few years ago I attended a session at the American Geophysical Union meeting where a scientist from Caltech claimed that abiogenesis was more likely to have occurred on Mars and then spread to Earth by meteors. We certainly know that material from Mars has reached Earth on meteorites and if they happened to carry Martian bacteria they could have been the source of life on Earth. I don’t know of the Caltech scientist still thinks this is likely or not, but I thought it was an interesting talk.
Is that what Creationists get in HS Biology?
Emmet:
No, your thinking of Tardis.
@Bill #39
…a rocket maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!
Sing it Elton!
If you say so. I usually blame it on the dog.
Uh forgive me if im wrong, but it sounds less plausible than other arguments, that the huge amounts of methane are being produced from a few organisms seeded from our Earth probes. It means that-
the small proportion of organisms from earth which are capable of surviving the journey, did.
the little buggers didnt want to stay in stasis, as organisms of that sort tend to do when bombarded with such extreme conditions, and instead found water and sprung to life (all Earth life still requires water, even the ones living at the Chernobyl site, and underground in South Africa).
they thrived and bred worse than rabbits in Australia; we make them sound like those organisms from the movie Evolution.
they also got themselves far underground, and started farting in huge amounts that even make cows proud.
(something like that, but you see my point)
also, just randomly… :)
Nadine: Um, Professor, the little wiggly worm things in there are breaking.
Ira Kane: It’s not breaking, it’s splitting. It’s mitosis. It’s how they reproduce.
Harry Block: No sex?
Ira Kane: No time for sex.
Nadine: Bummer.
Y’know, to be fair, maybe we just haven’t given the Vatican a fair shot at this…
No, no. Bear with me… Maybe it’s just about a failure of communication. Memos they didn’t get, see?
So I figure maybe I could just send ’em a little helping hand. Y’know… a pamphlet. Short guide. Might look a bit like this:
Cracker…
Genocide.
(Please take notes. There’s a quiz later.)
… and, of course, the glaring non-sequitur above was intended for another thread. Apologies. Multitasking, ya know. It’s just asking for trouble.
Hints, are the only thing which we have. But i just can’t help but be excited about this.
It would not be that much as a deal to us biologists, since we already almost sure than it will be life as we know it.
Some bacteria strugglin to survive and maybe even happilly proliferating there.
But to plenty of people it will be a shock. Plus it sure will inyectate those so needed dolars into the nasa spacial program.
A multinational mission to mars sounds really like a hit for mankind. Something to remember forever.
Good news. I would love life to be found on Mars, independent of life on Earth. It would really get up the noses of the religdroids, although, as in the past, they would just move the goal posts. After all, God did make the entire universe in one day, although it took him another five days to complete the Earth?
I am not convinced it is life, as it seems to be very hard to find on Mars, and we have been disappointed in the past, but at least it will inspire missions to go to Mars to search for life. I would like to see a nuclear powered probe that could last for years, and able to move from site to site, perhaps with a balloon. I had hoped to see a manned mission to Mars in the next 20 years, but that is looking less likely, especially with the credit crunch.
I don’t see why it should be down to Nasa to fund a manned mission to Mars, as it is a huge financial enterprise. I would have liked to see a world-wide organisation come together, comprised of all nations with an interest in exploring, colonising, and perhaps terraforming the solar system, in particular Mars, which is so similar to the Earth. What greater enterprise could bring the world together in a common aim. I also don’t know why Nasa doesn’t instigate a world super-lottery to help finance its missions? It’s not rocket-science, oh, it is :)
Yes, but only Gram-positive organisms (Bacillus, Clostridium…) sporulate. Methanogens (carbonate breathers) aren’t Gram-positive; they aren’t even bacteria, they’re archaea.
Never misundreshtmate the vast diversity of non-eukaryotic Life As We Know It.
Yep, you can boil them in helium. They won’t wake up on Mars, though, as mentioned above.
Of course — because you don’t want to know if there’s life on Mars. You’re afraid.
Inject.
The process that is referred to – iron serpentization – is the process of reacting iron-rich rocks (mafic and ultramafic) with water containing carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) under relatively low-temperature metamorphic conditions like those found at tectonic plate spreading ridges. The oxidation of the iron into serpentine minerals produces the reduced methane (from the CO2).
Although I’m rooting for biological origins, a non-biological route would also be rather interesting. Where did the water come from? Where did it go? What were the temperatures? What kind of volumes over how much time would be required? What was the mechanism – tectonic? What kind of possible hydrothermal activity might be associated? Black smokers and hot springs would be a good environment for biology.
@ Crudely Wrott #123
I’ve heard lots of speculation concerning the seeding of Earth from Mars. It may be so. But what of the seeding of Mars from Earth? Or the seeding of both from elsewhere?
It is far less likely for material to have gone from Earth to Mars (with the exception of on our space probes) because of the nature of the orbits.
It is easier to move something from Mars to Earth by ‘natural’ means (meteor impact, etc.) because you are going from an outer orbit to an inner orbit and can benefit from the Sun’s gravity (fall toward the sun). To go from Earth to Mars you need to fight against the solar gravity, so it is much less likely to have occurred from a natural event.
Obviously, God must have been intertasking. The Bible only tells what God was doing on and around Earth over days 2-6. He could also have been doing other things elsewhere in Space, that (for His own reasons) weren’t recorded in the Earth Bible.
Chances are the Martian Bible will explain the events of 6000 years ago from a Mars-centric perspective, with no mention of Earth. And so on for every planet into which He brothe life.
Also very significant: Earth’s gravity well is significantly deeper than is Mars’. Ricocheting something off of Mars’ surface is vastly easier.
As I have mentioned several times here, we should have been on Mars years ago if it were not for all the distracting and stultifying crap going on Earth, not to mention the time and bullshit involved with religious cretins who do not want us to invade their god’s domain with space exploration. The great Hubble Space Telescope is worth a hundred times more in value and result than all the religious strickened morons appealing to their imaginary god that is nowhere but in their demented skulls.
As one of the early commenters to say the discovery of life on Mars would make the creos’ heads asplode, I’ve been reading the ensuing byplay with interest.
I agree that church fathers and theologians will find ways to explain away life on Mars and beyond. Of course, theologians can explain away anything, because theology is magic. No matter what we find, an “omnipotent” god can always be posited to have deliberately made it so for his own unknowable reasons.
That said, in the minds of the broad swath of the believing public, who aren’t theologians and preacher, but rather just people who believe what they grew up believing, I think the discovery (when and if we make it) that life is ubiquitous in the universe will be yet another nail in the coffin of the notion humankind is special.
After all, the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism didn’t really refute the existence of god: An omnipotent creator god could just as easily have magicked a heliocentric universe into existence as a geocentric one, Aristotelian notions of geometric perfection aside. The real damage heliocentrism did to religion was not to demote god, but to demote humanity and the Earth. In order to believe you’re a special project of the Creator, you must first believe you’re special.
IMHO, learning that life is everywhere would continue (maybe complete?) the work of Copernicus and Galileo, and of Darwin, in demonstrating progressively more thoroughly that humanity (and its environs) is nothing special, but just one more bit in the vast sweep of the natural universe.
So the preachers and theologians can wave their arms all they want, and the hardcore faithheads will listen… but it will be increasingly more difficult to get the relatively moderate, albeit churchgoing, person-in-the-street to believe in — or, more importantly, to vote for — the idea that we’re really the Great Sky Fairy’s personal science fair project.
I hope this works out. If it does, how exciting!
I’m listening to “Ziggy Stardust” right now in honor of the news. :)
I thought the overwhelming energy cost of going from Earth to Mars or vice versa was the change in angular momentum required. That is, it is really quite hard to “drop” something into the Sun, because you have to cancel all of its angular momentum from being in orbit. As such, it seems it would take as much energy to get from Earth to Mars as from Mars to Earth. What am I overlooking?
It’s nice to see this post get commented so much. I think many would agree that finding life outside Earth would be the biggest thing humans have ever achieved.
I certainly would.
@157 “finding life outside Earth would be the biggest thing humans have ever achieved”
It would be only until we exterminated that life. That would be kick ass. Is there a term for destroying an entirely original branch of evolution? If not, I’ll propose “evocide”
evocide : eliminating not just a single species (extinction), nor ecosystem (ecocide?), but an entirely independent branch of evolution.
What a spectacular combination of arrogance and pessimism. We might end up causing the extinction of — or altering the evolutionary course of — bacterial life on a local planet like Mars… and we could argue, perhaps, over whether there’s any moral obligation not to. But if there’s life outside the Earth at all, it’s probably everywhere, endemic to the universe. We would be, in that picture, just another little drop in a universal sea of living matter, with little power to affect anything other than the next drop over.
Your glib snark imagines, in a single breath, that we’re both Masters of the Universe and mindless brutes; I doubt either extreme is true, let alone both.
@160
Bill,
Your glib snark indicates that the joke went over your head.
It was a little satire, lighten up.
So? Then I apologize for overreacting.
I’m afraid we’ve run afoul of Poe’s Law here: Your satire was indistinguishably close to arguments I’ve heard (too often) made in all seriousness… and then used as a reason we should leave off ever exploring anything. Sorry; it’s a subject I’m just a skosh touchy about.
No problem, not trying to offend, just explaining.
I’m just trying to spread a little cheeky happiness, perhaps add a wry smile to one or two otherwise bored posters. There seems to be an overwhelming view, at least among many people I have met and many posts on this board, that science, whether demonstrated by the discovery of alien life or cool new technologies, will bring about a perfect, inevitable Utopia.
Unfortunately, there is also the likely possibility that when we have cheap space travel, there will be a group of drunk, Texas cowboys waiting to get in their Ford SpacePickup to go shoot some wild Mars hogs.
SteveM (@156):
The major factor in interplanetary transfer of surface material is the likelihood that an asteroid or comet impact will eject material at the local escape velocity or higher. Since Mars has a much lower escape velocity than Earth (and the Moon’s is much lower yet), there’s a far greater chance of Martian and lunar ejecta reaching escape velocity than of Terran material doing the same.
It’s been some time since my only class in orbital mechanics, but I’ll give it a whirl: You don’t actually need to bring an object to a dead stop in space and let it “drop”; you only need to alter its orbital trajectory such that its new orbit intersects the target. When the starting point is Earth orbit and the target is the surface of the Sun, the difference in energy terms is probably small… but the minimum-energy path will be an ellipse that touches Earth’s orbit at one end and the Sun’s surface (on the opposite side) at the other.
The energy cost of transfering from Mars to an Earth-intersecting orbit are vastly smaller, though, and once the ejecta are in solar orbit and free of Mars, there are lots of different forces (solar wind, light pressure, gravitational interactions with other bodies, etc.) that can change its path… and, don’t forget, potentially billions of years of time for those perturbations to bring it into Earth’s gravity well.
It wouldn’t be impossible, I don’t think, for ejecta to travel from Earth to Mars, either, if it could escape Earth in the first place… but as I said, the depth of our gravity well mitigates against that. Our thick atmosphere doesn’t help, either, stealing energy from impactors on the way in and from the ejecta on the way out.
Well, Hell, son! If them hogs caint manage to stay outa’ my crosshairs, y’all can just think of it as evolution in action!
;^)
Oh I can just see it now. The “Bacteria” are really “seedlings” that you inhale and then you are the host. After several days, peoples chests start bursting open with instant martians! Curses science!
ID “How many times have we been down this “there may be life on Mars” path already? I rather spend $225 million on alternative medicine research than trying to find life on Mars.”
You’re in luck; the US government has been spending about $242 million yearly on alternative medical research in NCCAM. Alas!
“The fact is that after >10 years, NCCAM has not yet found a single piece of positive evidence for any of these methods, which include acupuncture, “qi”, homoepathy, magnet therapy, and other treatments.”
At Respectful Insolence
http://tinyurl.com/93o8q2
Obviously some did, and evolved into thoats.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I can think of several ways alternative medicine helps. I suffered with back pain for years. My doctor offered pain pills. I decided to try a chiropactor instead. I’m 50 years old and can stand on one foot and put a sock on the other. Try doing that with a bad back.
Got a herniated disk? Surgey offers about 75% chance of recovery while chiropractic care offers about a 60% chance of recovery. Any one with a brain would at least consider trying a chiropractor before going under a knife.
Got high cholesterol? Eating an apple per day will lower it by 9%. Eating two will lower it by 16%. I would at least try that before taking some pill for life.
Randy, having a chiropractor doing back manipulations is called medicine. It works to a degree, and is actually cheaper for mild back pain than MD treatment. When chiropractors say they can cure cancer though, it is called woo. Some changes in diet will help cholesterol, but I haven’t heard of apples. Beta cellulose containing products like oatmeal have been proven to help. Again medicine (proven), not alternative medicine. I take good quality glucosamine hydrochloride capsules for my knee. Helps to replace the joint fluid and increase mobility. Again, some evidence in the literature that it helps for mild cases.
Look at the source of your evidence. Some places overstate their case. The apples sound overstated to me. There is an awful lot of woo in the health field.
Randy @ 169,
The success of any lumbar surgery depends highly on the indication,i.e.the condition that is being treated.
A Cochrane review from 1999 found the success rates for lumbar discectomies to be up to 96%.
http://journals.lww.com/spinejournal/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=1999&issue=09010&article=00012&type=abstract
As to your chiropractor,good luck and may you not suffer permanent damage.I just looked for any studies on chiropractic lumbar interventions,but apart from ludicruos single-case descriptions there is nothing there.
So I wonder where you get the 60% success rate from.And again,it depends on the condition.A small protrusion will just go away eventually,whether you stand on your head or lie on the couch or go for some chiropractic woo.
Isn’t the Pope of Mars called the Holy Thern? White guy with blond hair?
Steve M @ 156
I’m with you on this one.
If any debris is hurled from Mars at its escape velocity, it will enter an independent orbit around the sun. It will then be subject to any number of perturbations due to all the planets, not to mention solar wind, that will alter its orbit. If it’s perturbed into an orbit that crosses the orbit of the Earth, it’s only a matter of time before the Earth will be there to meet it on one crossing.
The probability for any particular particle is of course minute, but with a lot of time and a lot of particles, it approaches certainty. The exact same thing applies in the other direction of course. The big difference is the escape velocity of Earth, which is 11,200 meters/sec, 2.24 times the 5,000 m/s escape velocity of Mars. But 2.24 squared is over 5 times the kinetic energy that must be given to each piece of debris. That requires a larger impact, of course, but the main problem in transferring microbes would be the much greater heat they would be subjected to in escaping from Earth through impact. That makes the transfer of living material in one direction much, much more likely than the other.
Health benefits of apples for anyone who is interested.
Of course, proving that something doesn’t help is another good reason for alternative medicine research.
I of course agree with all the arguments and calculations regarding how much more likely it is for debris blasted off Mars to strike the earth, as opposed to the opposite scenario.
However, if we are talking about the likelihood of transferring living organisms, we must consider one other variable, and that is the likelihood that the pieces of debris under consideration actually have living organisms in them to transfer.
We know the earth is chock full of life, and has probably been covered, pole to pole, with at least bacteria for billions of years. So for earth, it’s pretty much 100% guaranteed that every single fragment of surface material that escapes earth’s gravity will have started out with plenty of organisms in it.
But what about Mars? We don’t know the likelihood that life ever arose on Mars to begin with. If it did, we don’t know how long it persisted, or how far it spread. And as Mars was dessicating out, did the lifeforms manage to continue to survive everywhere, or were they increasingly restricted to ever more limited “oasis” habitats? Any impact that occurred during this dying phase would have to strike near one of these oases, or there won’t be any lifeforms in the ejecta. And if the organisms eventually survived only deep underground, then the impact energy needed to dig them out from such depths would be that much higher, and rarer.
Since I don’t think we have a very clear picture on any of these likelihoods, I think it is somewhat premature to declare that it is certainly more likely for Mars-Earth panspermia to occur than Earth-Mars panspermia.
If it pans out, and turns out there is life on mars, It would be the biggest discovery since… well ever, I can’t think of a more important discovery. But when I looked in the paper for the article it was on page 10 and given 2 short paragraphs. And if you read comments on other news sites, that aren’t specific to science, people just shrug it off, or say crap like it is just so the government can waste more of our money for pointless space missions, etc.
It is because Christians, etc, don’t want to think of the implications if life was created indepently on another planet. So, very little effort is put into missions to mars and so will be a very long ways off before it could be proved that there is life on mars. And if proved, the Christians will do what they always do, either ignore the information, or make up stupid reasons why god would have created life on another planet. I mean religion continued fine after Dinosaurs were discovered, neanderthals, etc. My family is all religous, and they say stupid stuff like god created earth from other parts that may have had dinosaurs included, or that dinosaurs were put on earth then killed so we can have oil. And that early man wasn’t too different from people today, etc. And when I’ve asked before if like was discovered on another planet, what then. I’ve gotten responses that god would put it there so we can discover it to continue our learning, or to help throw us off, like how he covered up all evidence of the earth only being only 6000 years old, and covered up all evidence of a great flood, etc. See they believe god wants us to worship him, but hides any evidence of his existence so it is on face.
Sorry for the long rant it just bugs me that there is no way religion would ever end no matter what kind of proof came out, because they are just so afraid of going to hell, that’s why it just keeps getting passed on, if they are wrong, than so what, they die and that’s it, but if we are wrong then we will burn in hell for all eternity lol.
Which would be cooler: Martians with which we share a common ancestor (raising the possibility of extra-terrestrial ancestors) or Martians with sufficiently weird biochemistry that we couldn’t have shared a common ancestor (suggesting abiogenesis is easy and that the universe ought to be teeming with life)?
#169:
Somewhere between 85 to 95% of all painful herniated lumbar discs get better on their own, without any intervention whatsoever, within 3 months. As such conservative management is the recommended treatment for all acute disc herniations, unless there are other compelling reasons to operate, such as neurological deficits, or pain so incapacitating it poses a severe restriction on the patient’s quality of life or ability to function normally.
Of the minority of cases that do not resolve after 3 months, discectomy surgery has a reported effectiveness of about 85% (Your 75% seems a little low to me). However, the best available evidence I know of suggests that after 2 years, there is no measurable difference in pain, quality of life, or functional status, between patients who undergo surgery versus those who do not. However, this evidence is highly tainted by selection bias, as there are few people willing to endure 2 years of back pain without trying to do something about it, and, in the U.S. system where this study was done, it is highly unlikely that after 2 years of doctor shopping one won’t find some surgeon somewhere willing to operate on you. (It is unlikely, I think, that this question will ever be settled, as I don’t think a study properly designed to answer this question would be ethical).
Chiropractic manipulation of the lumbar spine has in fact been proven to provide reliable short-term pain relief for degenerative back pain, but not disc herniation specifically (I think). It is I think the only evidence-supported indication for chiropractic treatment. In all likelihood, however, it is symptomatic control for the acute period, which is followed by spontaneous resolution of pain, which is the naturally history of this condition.
This best established first line treatment for all forms of degenerative low back pain is physical therapy, and chiropractic manipulation from the point of view of actual physiologic effect, is really just a variant of a subset of physical therapy techniques. Neurosurgeons, at least in Canada where I trained, will frequently and without hesitation recommend (or at least not discourage) chiropractic treatment for low back pain. As such I do not think it fair to call it “alternative” medicine anymore. It is quite mainstream, which is the proper fate of any “alternative” treatment that is proven by evidence.
Lumbar chiropractic manipulation is reasonably safe. Cervical manipulation should be avoided like the plague, of course.
Pretty much all the available data on surgery for degenerative back pain in general is badly skewed by selection biases, from both the patient and physician sides of the equation. A significant number of surgeries, possibly even a majority, are likely not necessary. Sadly, a common indication for back surgery, especially in the American private system, is a combination of the patient being unwilling to wait to get better, and the surgeon having bills that he must pay.
I think I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that it should be actually shockingly easy to drop something in orbit in our solar system into the sun, provided one is patient enough.
You just have to slow its velocity down to below the escape velocity of the sun, and it should gradually spiral inwards until it impacts.
I’m sorry, but this is incorrect. Escape velocity is the speed at which an object will not return to the primary… effectively it’s the speed an object would attain if it fell to the surface of the primary from an infinite distance. An object moving at or above escape velocity will travel in an open (hyperbolic) trajectory past the primary rather than a closed (elliptical) path around it (technically both paths are “orbits,” but the closed one is what we usually mean by the word).
Thus, a speed less than escape velocity does not mean the object will fall into the primary. Everything in orbit around the Sun — including the Earth — is by definition traveling at less than the Sun’s escape velocity. Ejecta blasted off a planetary surface at less than escape velocity will go into orbit around that planet. Whether or not the ejecta falls back to the surface depends or whether its orbital trajectory intersects the surface (or the atmosphere, if any), but in any case, it won’t leave the primary and travel to another planet.
Similarly, to “drop something into the Sun” you need only alter its orbit so that the trajectory intersects the Sun’s surface. In practice, that means changing it from a nearly orbit around the Sun to a very highly elliptical path in which the minimum altitude at the sunward focus of the ellipse is less than the diameter of the Sun. Practically speaking, this probably requires almost as much energy as completely canceling the object’s orbital velocity, but not quite as much… and, as you point out, the energy need not be expended all at once; you can do it by doling out the delta-V slowly over time.
At least I think I’ve got that right. I’ve had just one course in orbital mechanics and that was ~9 years ago, so I might have forgotten something.
OMG
I’m a NASACast addict (and Hubblecast, and Chandra, etc etc). I cried when Phoenix stopped transmitting.
This is just so amazing…I don’t know that I can wait until 2011…I may have exploded with excitement before then…
I didn’t realize, until I read the paper, that these methane dynamics were discovered using Earth-based telescopes. I’m really hoping they will be able to put an appropriate instrument on MSL, now that it’s delayed for a Marssol.
In order to annihilate creationist/ID thought, the latter would first have to exist.
(Apologies if someone got there before me)
thanks..