Earlier NASA probes have probably already contaminated Mars with microbes so it would have to be something previously unreported. We won't actually get to see anything from there for a long time.
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
n
he
ances that we are not alone.
technology creating form of life in the universe.
Mars is about like finding trash in the suburbs indicating there must be o ther cities in the country. It has been theorized that life might have star ted on Mars and spread here from there. The likelihood of that happening is much, much higher than life spontaneously evolving from a primordial soup on both planets.
We haven't got a clue about which scenario might be more probable, and no r eal way of estimating the probabilities. The fact there is life here, and t hat there seem to be a lot planets that might be hospitable to life as we k now it does make it likely that there will be life somewhere else, but ther e's nothing rigorous about that kind of speculation.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
On a sunny day (Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:16:24 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
In the past, fishermen with small boats on rivers. Then the sea , the oceans. Then 'merrica was discovered by Columbus There you are.
Evolution Maybe aliens taste good and you get addicted to that food. Or maybe you need to design weapons to prevent them eating us or taking over your workshop or putting you in a cage on their planet to show humans to their kids like we have zoos to show alligators and monkeys
Maybe they are already here, many people are told by their parents that kids are delivered by storks but that is not 100% true, some may well have been dropped by flying cup and saucers. Elon Musk says he is an alien :-)
Science is always interesting. we are always just at the beginning.
That's kind of the point of looking for it on Mars. It certainly won't answer the question entirely (two sample points is not great statistics), but if clear evidence of life is found on Mars, it be a big step on the way to getting an answer. (If no evidence is found after years of searching, that would be a small step towards answering the question.)
Well, you might jump off a cliff and land on the one tree below which allows you to survive. How many times are you going to jump off that cliff to support your contention? Statistics exists for a reason; it gives you the possible odds of something happening. Of course you can have something happening 1 in 10 times happening twice in 11 times, but then not again for another 9 times, but that's stats for you. Something happening once in 10^100 times happening twice in 10^100 + 1 times would be really something very unusual, even though the stats say it /could/ happen. And, as I said, it's not just that single event, it what comes after to sustain life which may be as, or even more, important.
Where do you get that idea from? What "forces"? Chemical? Physical? And "mostly"??!! what happens the "non-mostly" times? It look to me as though you are trying to say that something is trying to influence a random event. Maybe that's an unusual way of looking at divine intervention...
That's an interesting concept - that life is inevitable. I'm not sure how that ties in with entropy. Do we assume that life is less chaotic than what goes on around it?
Until you have evidence that a single event is not unique, because you know how that single event came about, it is implausible to think otherwise. But maybe that's a chicken and egg situation.
No disagreement there...
-- Jeff
From two sample planets, you can't judge such probabilities in any meaningful way. If life (or unequivocal evidence of its past existence) is found on Mars, it shows the two planets can /support/ life. You are correct that it does not show that abiogenesis occurred independently on both planets.
How much we will learn depends on what we find and can analyse. If we find organisms similar to bacteria with a biology that closely matches what we have on Earth, it strengthens the theory of life starting on Mars and moving to Earth. If they biology is massively different, it looks like parallel abiogenesis.
I recall that Drake gave the opening astronomy society lecture in my first year at university on his equation a decade or so after he had come up with it. These days we do have a few more numbers than he did.
Seems like planets around stars are pretty much ubiquitous. Goldilocks planets somewhat rarer but that could be a sampling effect on our part. Earth like ones are incredibly hard to detect against a bright star.
Nobody knows how, but we do know when - and it was very soon after all three phases of water could co-exist on the planets surface. Before that the atmospheric pressure was much higher and the surface temperature above the boiling point of water in that denser autoclave atmosphere.
We know that many of the building blocks can arise in a suitable reducing atmosphere so it is pretty much only a matter of time before the right combination happens. You only have to get lucky once with a self replicating molecule (as the BSE prion so clearly demonstrated).
It would massively improve our understanding to find another form of life. Does it use the same handedness and group of amino acids and is it based on the same set of core molecules or was the choice arbitrary.
If we find independent life of any sort in our solar system that isn't just human contamination of a pristine environment then it vastly alters the probability of life being found elsewhere. Mars and Earth can and have in the past exchanged meteorites - easier from Mars to Earth so it is just about possible that we are descendents of former Martians!
Mars being smaller cooled down sooner and have had a head start. Too bad that once it lost its molten core and magnetic field the atmosphere was toast.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
How many children indeed! Perhaps we need to think of the children in rega rds to everything we do. Would we have stormed the nation's Capitol buildi ng if we had thought of the children first? Would we have separated famili es at the border if we thought of the children first? Would we object to p aying taxes if we thought of the children first?
Everything we do impacts everything else since there is always the guns vs. butter tradeoff... the children's butter.
Do we think of the children every day?
-- Rick C. + Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging + Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Entropy is not a problem for the existence of life, even though it is forming order from something with less order. The second law of thermodynamics applies to a closed system - so it does mean that living things cannot be closed systems by themselves. As long as you have energy coming in (such as from sunlight, volcanic activity, etc.) and heat going out, entropy is happy.
(There are many other examples of order occurring spontaneously, such as the growth of crystals, sea ice pushing out the salt, or the separation of element layers in the formation of a planet.)
Indeed! Even more interesting to see if any of the choices made by abiogenesis to life are arbitrary. It would complicate bringing samples back to Earth if they did find any indications of life though.
We might be able to hold a slow conversation with a nearby civilisation if they were common enough. We don't know for certain that interstellar travel is impossible either. It would be incredibly expensive, slow and difficult but not necessarily impossible with today's technology.
The Pioneer probes for example will eventually reach the vicinity of other stars given a few billion years or so.
But a more advanced technology might be able to do things that we can only dream of. OTOH the Fermi paradox of why aren't they here also applies.
I suppose it is something of a concession that you think it interesting.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
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JL puked:
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** JL lacks the human insight to realise that everything he does today, to make a good living, once depended on "pure science".Pure science = research activity with no immediate, commercial purpose.
As self obsessed engineers's blindness.
..... Phil
A trip of some thousands or millions of years would kill electronics, and indeed a lot of materials, from radiation damage.
Even a one-way trip to Mars would kill people. And then the surface of Mars is nasty, about 8 rads/year with occasional solar proton blasts. And there's not much to eat.
Picking up intelligent radio signals from another star system would be interesting. But what would it actually affect?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
Not so. Prior to about WWII, electronics was mostly invented accidentally by amateurs. Lots of cool circuits were developed before then. I have some good electronics books dating to 1922.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
[ ] after cruising around to search for signs of life it will suddenly discover that there already is a McDonald's on Mars
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
The Edison Effect and DeForest's triode were hardly scientific. Science often follows invention. For example, semiconductor diodes came before semiconductor physics.
I think the triode oscillator was an accident.
Just offhand, I can't think of many cases where the science lead invention. The maser/laser is one notable exception, and Townes defied the scientific eatablishment and Einstein himself to do that.
Well, curiosity anyway. As the story goes, a young Edwin Armstrong connected his tube circuit's output back to its input and made the first tube oscillator. (He later invented the superhet, frequency modulation, and many other things, so it wasn't a fluke.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Scientific results can lay out possibilities for invention to work on. Cat's whisker / galena detectors led to solid state physics which led to the invention of the transistor.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
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ting.
y, to make a good living, once depended on "pure science".
John Larkin's grasp of scientific history is not impressive.
invented and patented the thermionic valve in 1904. As a student at Cambrid ge he attended James Clark Maxwell's last lecture series.
Edison discovered thermionic emission as part of scientific research into h is light bulbs around 1880.
He wasn't the first to discover thermionic emission. As the electron wasn't discovered until J. J. Thomson's identified it in1897 in the course of a thoroughly scientific investigation, nobody understood enough about what w as going on to exploit it any useful way - Edison patented one idea, but di dn't make any money out of it.
efore semiconductor physics.
John Larkin doesn't understand design, so thinks that most useful developme nts are "accidental"
n.
If you don't know much, you haven't got all that many cases to think about, and you won't properly understand the cases you do know about.
fic establishment and Einstein himself to do that.
They were sceptical about getting the population inversion that the maser a nd laser need.
The first lasers and maser used a three level pumping scheme, which is rath er inefficient. The four level schemes - which can be better - came later.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
John Larkin does like to think that, despite our persistent efforts to educate him.
who died in 1942, had got some 128 patents by that time. He was part of a team that deliberately invented new stuff.There were others.
Nothing much more recent ... or a least nothing that is undemanding enough for him to read.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Since I fool around with circuits, I must be a scientist.
I'll give myself a raise.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
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sting.
day, to make a good living, once depended on "pure science".
That doesn't follow. The crucial point about scientists is that they publis h their results. We can cite patents in scientific papers, so patenting stu ff might constitute publication, but you do need to place your new observat ions in context, and patents aren't designed to do that (though many of th em do).
You don't publish and you clearly don't know the literature, so you really aren't a scientist.
Not wise. What if your employees start making the same kind of specious cla im?
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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