Re: More signs of life on Mars?

Perhaps they should be looking a little deeper. ;-)

It's remarkable how little we understand about relatively inaccessible areas of our own planet.

Yes, that has been a pattern for some time. Water on the moon was another similar trick.

Jeroen Belleman

On 7/27/24 07:33, Jan Panteltje wrote: [...]

So they discovered that reactive metals in water release hydrogen. We knew that, didn't we? Calling it a "sustainable source of clean energy" is a stretch. The aluminium has to be mined and reduced at some point, both very energy-consuming activities. Recycling waste aluminium metal back into new products is much better.

Jeroen Belleman

It doesn't take as much as reducing Al2O3 to aluminium metal in the first case.

You don't seem to know much about thermodynamics.

Water desalination is a lot less energy intensive.

There always is. It's a big market, and even quite marginal improvements can save quite lot of money if you are desalinating on a large scale.

If they had a practical product, they wouldn't be advertising it in American Institute of Physics journals.

And the promised "salt self-cleaning" properties are not likely to keep on working for long when the membranes are exposed to actual sea-water.

That is a remarkably garbled story. Whatever is making the oxygen down there it sure as hell isn't those nodules corroding away. It is whatever it is that makes the nodules form that is making oxygen down there.

It is true that we know less about the really deep ocean trenches than we do about the moon...

It melts relatively easily. You typically put a line of soap on it to know when it chars that it is time to throw it into water when annealing it. Get it too hot and it melts.

Self assembling zeolite type chemistry is a much more likely solution.

I reckon if they scrape a sample off and it pyrolyses with the same sort of signature of lipids and carbohydrates that you might see from a terrestrial lichen then it most probably *is* a lichen. Might even still be alive. Bringing a sample back would be the ultimate thing to do.

OTOH plenty of diffusion limited inorganic reactions can produce very lifelike patterns. Perhaps the most famous being Liesgang's rings (but other iron / sulphide combos will do it).