Curiosity finds evidence of wet and dry seasons on ancient Mars The Mars Curiosity rover continues to make discoveries that shed light on the early days of the Red Planet, this time having found evidence that the unforgiving dust world once experienced seasonal weather patterns and flooding. The evidence came from photographs snapped by the NASA bot of the dry, dusty Martian surface …
The results discovered by the Curiosity Rover are fascinating and suggest that our theories about life need to keep updating. This all suggests that we have evidence of the possibility of a little life on Mars but we're going to need a lot more Curiosity work before we actually know what happened ... at the moment we only have theories that might give us some ideas, but a lot of Curiosity evidence is that a very tiny form of life might have existed. I have always found Dr. Neil Shubin's writings about the creation of life to be very accurate about our life (our Inner Fish) and the possibility of life's creation in the Universe. Read his books if you want to learn how we started to exist on our planet.
This Mars evidence (Thank you El Reg) and all these theories about life's creation make me think that human life is wonderful, but very rare in the Universe. But I wonder if alien life exists, and is visiting us, then maybe they are fascinated too ... are those flying saucers Alien Rovers?
Well if Mr Einstein's theories on not being able to exceed the speed of light hold up then it takes a f*** long time to get anywhere in the neighbourhood, even assuming you can accelerate to near that speed in any reasonable time without becoming goo on the rear wall - so not surprising nothing is knocking on the door. There may be theoretical ways to get around that (space folding etc.) but if so then either there is a general rule to not interfere with evolving civilisations, or we are completely boring.
spold: either there is a general rule to not interfere with evolving civilisations, or we are completely boring.
Or maybe our society is considered too erratic and violent to risk overt contact? Just looking at the television and radio programs, and the news programs we've been broadcasting for decades, how could any alien species even consider contacting 'humanity' under the current conditions?
Einstein's view wasn't that we can't exceed the speed of light, it was just that exceeding the speed of light would have had resulted in an environment that our existence couldn't exist in ... He was passionately curious about everything so we believe that we can't exceed the speed of light but if the current discussion of alien flying saucers is real then how did they get here? One minor factor is that when they are "seen" then they are going much faster then we can. Einstein was working in the world's dimensions very accurately but these days I wonder if he would be revealing how to fly around by moving into another dimension.
Even if they could fly at "only" 10% of c in space there are plenty of stars they could have originated from assuming a few thousand years of travel. And that's not an unreasonable travel time, if you assume they would be un"manned" just like any interstellar missions we are likely to ever launch unless a way around the speed of light is found.
As for their visibility in the atmosphere, even if a craft was capable of accelerating to a good fraction of c that wouldn't mean it can accelerate to that speed instantly or that it would be capable of moving at that speed inside an atmosphere.
If it's just two people traveling, then two thousand years of travel would involve 1.46 billion beers if they are only drinking one a day. So how big would the larder be and how are they going to organize their Thunderbox? Would they be spending their days just posting on Facebook Spacebook via AI (Alien Internet)?
That's just our view of our life ... you're not wrong, you're just guessing about the difference between us and aliens ... if we live a hundred years we think we're old, maybe if Aliens live 100,000 years then they think they are old and maybe just visit out planet to fly like a Cullen?
I'm only laughing and guessing about the difference between us and aliens too.
If it's just two people traveling, then two thousand years of travel would involve 1.46 billion beers if they are only drinking one a day.
Or they’d go into stasis for the trip, leaving the ship’s computer to handle the navigation… kept sane only by his collection of singing potatoes.
> And that's not an unreasonable travel time
Totally unreasonable, if it's just to play hide & seek with some chosen*, isolated locals.
* Chosen for being psychologically unstable that is.
My point is, if "they" really started a "few thousand years" long venture, and since they have reached that level of technical know-how we have to assume they are rational, it would certainly be for something more constructive than make the locals fantasize about anal probings.
Alien life existing somewhere else in the universe is pretty much a given. Whether that life is like single cell bacteria or something roughly analogous to humanity is a whole other story. As is whether any potential aliens technologically advanced enough to develop some kind of interstellar travel managing to stumble across our little backwater planet.
Life never makes it off-planet
Either they destroy themselves with their technology or they don't develop the tech in the first place, or they don't give a sh*t long enough that they collapse and don't have the resources to rebuild.
Look at all the time & resources the Romans & Greeks had, and they didn't develop anything.
I think we're heading toward #3, or possibly #1.
We've mined all the easy stuff and extracted most of the oil. When civilization collapses again, we won't have the easy ways to develop technology again. It would be like climbing a ladder with the rungs 4 feet apart.
"Look at all the time & resources the Romans & Greeks had, and they didn't develop anything."
From MP's Life of Brian script:
REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!
XERXES: The aqueduct?
REG: What?
XERXES: The aqueduct.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS: And the roads.
REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--
COMMANDO: Irrigation.
XERXES: Medicine.
COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh...
COMMANDO #2: Education.
COMMANDOS: Ohh...
REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1: And the wine.
COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...
FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
COMMANDO: Public baths.
LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.
COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
"Look at all the time & resources the Romans & Greeks had, and they didn't develop anything."
They did quite a bit with hydraulics, mechanics and even dabbled with steam, but there was no economic incentive to develop most technology when they had lots of cheap slave labour.
> They did quite a bit with hydraulics, mechanics and even dabbled with steam, but
hadn't developed the chemical and specifically metallurgical knowledge to take those technologies much further. Without reaching at least an understanding of the periodic table those sciences were rather stalled.
True, but the OP said "Look at all the time & resources the Romans & Greeks had, and they didn't develop anything.". "Technology" is a wide ranging topic starting with a simple lever, so I'd argue, with evidence, that the Romans did develop technology. Architectures, roads, concrete better than any before them and even capable of setting underwater are probably the least of their technological achievements, Just look at the Pantheon's almost 2000 year old concrete dome. Still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, Nowadays, we build reinforced concrete bridges and buildings and are lucky of we get 50 years out of most structures. We CAN build better concrete structures, but we don't because it costs too much and our children and grandchildren can deal with replacing that bridge after we've used it 20 years past its life expectancy :-)
The Romans (and Greeks) were actually pretty innovative with architecture and construction. Multi-storey buildings with tiled roofs (many of which are still intact underneath many metres of volcanic ash as Herculaneum), sewerage systems, aqueducts sometimes hundreds of miles long, underfloor heating, water storage cisterns lined with hydraulic cement, lots of things with arches (viaducts, etc.).
Many of their innovations are still in use today (terracotta roof tiles, and hollow bricks, for example, and, as you point out, concrete!) - just because we have grown accustomed to materials and technologies that are thousands of years old, doesn't mean they are no longer useful, and it also doesn't mean they weren't innovative. People work with the materials and techniques they have available.
Well, in Rome, if you look hard enough, you can find Romans amongst all the tourists and touts aggressively pushing selfie sticks in your face. You'll probably have to go to the suburbs a bit, or look behind the counter in a bar or restaurant.
As for Greece, well, I'm reliably informed by a relative that lives there, that the foreign tourist numbers, especially from the UK, are really down this year, and that most of the tourists in Peloponnesus this year are Greeks, mostly from around Athens.
Romanization/sexualization used to be selling your kids into slavery as a fashion statement or trading them with a neighboring town. Christian Rome took the testicles of those it sent to African slavery before putting them on the boats. Romans traded boys for women we should presume. If Jesus was an objection to eunuchs? We'll never know if he was one or not. Climate is all Roman, all the way from the emasculation of chieftans by tying them to a pole while the guy with feathers in his cap rapes him with a baton for the whole tribe to watch. Colonialism isn't cool or glamorous. It's some seriously psycho sexual stuff that is crazy, psychotic mind warping. We are that. That's not progress.
《Really? This is implying that Mars' atmosphere was ever a sufficient insulator to prevent that happening anyway, which seems a bit of a stretch to me.》
Scratched my head over this one too. Naughty martian microbes initiated an run-away anti-greenhouse effect which chilled the planetary core presumably by inhibiting the radioactive elements in the core from decaying (which is said to be the source of the heat, I believe.) Conversely by our heating of the earth by increasing the insulation should make our planetary core hotter and alter the planetary magnetic field.
An alternative load of codswallop would be the Martian Ice Warriors over exploited their planet's geothermal (areothermal?) energy to the point of exhaustion.
I vaguely recall recent seismic observations from the rovers suggested the Martian core is not quite as dead as was thought - just resting? :)
Well, if the Martian atmosphere started off in chemical equilibrium, and life developed and modified it, in a similar way that Earth's was posited to have, then it would have started off with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, and this would have been consumed and converted by photosynthesis into oxygen.
This is what is supposedly happened with the Earth. The evidence for organisms beginning to produce oxygen on a global scale is quite strong; there is geological evidence in the form of the production of "old red sandstone" where the oxygen was soaked up by oceans and oxidised iron II compounds (which are typically yellow/green) to iron III ones (which are orange/red), and then there is a mass extinction event of microorganisms for which oxygen was toxic once the oceans had been oxidised and atmospheric oxygen began to build up, followed by geological evidence for a global ice age when the global cooling caused by a reduction in carbon dioxide caused the oceans to begin to freeze at the poles, thus becoming more reflective and causing a runaway cooling effect (look up "snowball Earth" for details of the evidence for this, such as magnetic field preservation in equatorial rocks showing widespread ice at the equator).
So, in short, photosynthetic life causes global cooling, not global warming.
Early life would most likely have been photosynthetic, as it would have to get its energy from somewhere, and the alternatives are "chemosynthetic" life, which relies on a chemical gradient (such as those around volcanoes or hot springs) to produce energy, or "thermosynthetic" life which relies on temperature gradients (again, around volcanoes, or hydrothermal vents). Both of those would be very limited in their scope to expand, so any organism developing photosynthesis from thermosynthesis or chemosynthesis would have an evolutionary advantage in that it can spread more freely.
Oh good, now all the climate change deniers can say how the earth getting warmer is a good thing, because it strengthens the Earth's magnetic field. Then point to this theory about what happened to Mars as supporting evidence. Not like these types have ever let a silly thing like misrepresenting facts stop them.
Either way, interesting article.
It seems that Mars was quite the place to be until its atmosphere got stripped and it lost its surface water. It won't have been like Earth but it probably had a thriving ecosystem, including a lot of life forms that probably denied that they were doing anything damaging tot the planet.
Still, I suppose they'll eventually be Venus. Maybe.
"Recent theories have suggested that early Martian microbes may have changed the atmosphere drastically enough that Mars cooled until no longer able to support life"
However, there's no concrete indication that life ever evolved on Mars as it was really only amenable to the evolution of life during its Noachian era. The key issue is that Mars has only 1/9th of the mass of Earth and that was its downfall. There was insufficient mass to keep an active dynamo effect going, the protective planetary magnetic field failed and so solar winds could actively impinge on Mars' atmosphere so wearing it away.
If Mars had, for example, a mass of 1/3rd of the Earth then we might well have had a second habitable, life-bearing planet within the solar system.
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