Traces of ancient ocean discovered on Mars

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-ancient-ocean-mars.html

by rbanffy • 4 years ago

142 69 4 years ago

The water which supplies the farms of Mars is collected in immense underground reservoirs at either pole from the melting ice caps, and pumped through long conduits to the various populated centers. Along either side of these conduits, and extending their entire length, lie the cultivated districts. These are divided into tracts of about the same size, each tract being under the supervision of one or more government officers.
Instead of flooding the surface of the fields, and thus wasting immense quantities of water by evaporation, the precious liquid is carried underground through a vast network of small pipes directly to the roots of the vegetation. The crops upon Mars are always uniform, for there are no droughts, no rains, no high winds, and no insects, or destroying birds.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/pmars-XXI.html

dotancohen• 4 years ago

  > The crops upon Mars are always uniform, for there are no droughts, no
  > rains, no high winds, and no insects, or destroying birds.

Presumably the are still seasons, cloud or dust storms, and wind. Possibly also variations in supplied nutrition and water pressure, maybe even water impurities and minerals. Radiation fluctuations might lead to crop variance as well.

borissk• 4 years ago

We live in truly amazing times. In a few years NASA may succeed in sending probes from Mars to Earth and we may get evidence for past or current life on Mars.

In 10 or 15 years if Starship works out we may be able to send scientists to Mars.

I'm a fan of the hypothesis that life on Earth came from Mars - will be very interesting to see how it develops as we study Mars.

benjifri• 4 years ago

What makes you think life on Earth came from Mars?

ihatepython• 4 years ago

Kuato

bbojan• 4 years ago

Mars is smaller and cooled down before Earth. That means it had liquid water while the Earth was still too hot. Therefore, it's possible that life first appeared on Mars, and was later transferred to Earth on a meteorite.

diwank• 4 years ago

Did they find microplastics in it?

mach1ne3• 4 years ago

Mars lost all of its (surface) water presumably due to solar wind, and thus never had time to evolve complex life. Earth would have faced the same fate were it not for the fact that the Moon collided with us at some distant point in time, surrendering its iron core to ours. Now, our Rare Earth has an unnaturally large active iron core, resulting in an unnaturally efficient magnetic field which is able to protect our waters from being blown away by Sun.

atoav2• 4 years ago

One might be inclined to attribute the amount of good luck to devine intervention, but to this I would say: If the conditions on our planet would not have allowed for higher life, nobody would have been there to ask themselves why the conditions were slightly off.

biren342• 4 years ago

If you haven't heard of it, you've just stated the weak anthropomorphic principle.

ramraj073• 4 years ago

I have very little reason to believe life evolved in Earth or even in Mars for that matter. The more likely scenario is that there’s rocks floating around everywhere that have spores of life throughout the galaxy ready to seed a suitable planet in geologically instantaneous timelines. That will explain the extremely rapid emergence of life on earth initially while it took a few billion years to evolve any further. In which case if Mars had flowing water at some point it likely also harbored at least single cell life.

Source: biologist but not specializing in evolution.

varjag2• 4 years ago

But you only introduce an unnecessary extra step in the same theory. Life still had to evolve somewhere, just that now it had to embark onto interstellar trip.

nigerianbrince• 4 years ago

If living organisms can survive on a meteorite, they can definitely survive on moon/mars, which contradicts our observations.

another2another• 4 years ago

That raises 2 problems for me.

1. How exactly are these spores of life getting into asteroids and being pinged around the Universe? The mechanism seems absurd to me. Earth is teeming with life, but outside of our explorations I believe none of it escapes our planet at all.

2. The life that would reach us would be already specialised for whatever environment it came from, and I would imagine would result a lower amout of variety, since it's already a successful species. But on our planet we have a massive amount of variety, which I believe points more to a bootstrapped start where competition was less intense, and odd things could develop, which were later outcompeted (see the Cambrian explosion).

Disclaimer: Not even a biologist, but I'm more willing to accept that life started and evolved here. Of course that might all be cast in doubt if we detect masses of life on asteriods or metoerites, but the first attempt at that seems to have come up with nothing so far.

smaddox2• 4 years ago

What makes you think panspermia is more likely than abiogenesis?

The only data point we have suggests the evolution of eukaryotic cells and multicellular life is simply less likely than abiogenesis. There are plenty of hypothesis to explain why that might be the case.

ratg132• 4 years ago

Seems like a bit of a stretch to say with certainty that Mars never evolved complex life 500+ million years ago.

mach1ne3• 4 years ago

Fair point, but even with rovers we have zero indication to the fact, and thus it's a very reasonable estimate.

Aardwolf• 4 years ago

Just wondering, what would have stopped the Earth from having enough iron on its own in the first place? If the Moon could have that much iron, the Earth could as well have had it without needing to mix with the Moon, they're made from the same original matter after all.

TSiege• 4 years ago

The OP mispoke. It wasn't the moon that collided with earth, but another planet around mar's size. As a result of the collision the the core of that planet combined with the earth and the crust and parts of the mantle were ejected and coalesced into the moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis

tablespoon• 4 years ago

According to the article below, the impact may have started the magnetic field by mixing the core. It doesn't mention anything about "adding more iron" being in itself more significant. I wonder if the OP is half-remembering a distorted version of this theory.

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-doesnt-venus-magnetosphere.htm...

eloff• 4 years ago

It's not that the water "blew away" in the solar wind, it's that the atmosphere did, taking the water vapor in the atmosphere with it. This is a very gradual process, which would happen on Earth too, if not for the magnetic field.

I don't know that the collision with the moon is the secret here or not. I think it's complex.

sneak• 4 years ago

Neither Venus nor Mercury have substantial magnetic fields presently (compared to Earth).

I don’t know enough to know if that supports the GP’s conclusion or not, but it may.

holografix• 4 years ago

I dream that in my lifetime we’ll find signs of any form of life having existed on Mars.

What a momentous discovery for humankind that would be!

popcorncowboy• 4 years ago

If the most compelling recent hyopthetical solution to the Fermi Paradox is correct [0], finding anything other than a totally sterile Mars would be very, very bad news for humankind.

0: If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2369

ramraj073• 4 years ago

It’s beyond obvious that water flew as rivers in Mars at some point, and looks like there’s some water there even now!

Even life, is there any reason to think there WASNT some microscopic life there at some point? I doubt anyone thinks there’s viable life there even now (though one can’t 100% exclude the possibility).

It’s like everyone kind of already knows these are the likely facts but we keep using these as scapegoat questions to fund more missions for rovers etc. Instead, wouldn’t it be better if we are honest to oursleves and find things we actually want to do? Like get some people there? Which again, more than the science is just about the accomplishment itself.

I’m genuinely curious about places like Europa. I’m not at all curious about digging more Martian dirt and doing increasingly insignificant geology on a dead planet.

parasti• 4 years ago

Science is the difference between "everyone kind of already knows" and proven facts. Don't confuse a hundred years of Martian sci-fi with actual scientific discoveries about Mars.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

Not being snarky but that is what Science is supposed to be. Unfortunately, it has mutated to the more warm & fuzzy "everyone kind of knows." Case in point, it should be "trust the data" but instead we get "trust the experts." The irony? We all know expertise in humans is fleeting.

pocketarc• 4 years ago

I would argue that the main thing holding us back is the lack of funding. NASA's entire budget can't even compete with Meta's R&D department, so they have to take small steps. Investigate Mars, try to get people back on the moon (Artemis), and go from there.

Eventually we'll get to a point where we can explore Europa properly and we can send people to Mars, and all that, but it's going to take time. Without enough funding, things just take a lot of time.

sidewndr46• 4 years ago

You have it backwards. NASA is actually really good at exploring other stuff in our solar system. They have sent probes to all kinds of places, recently direct imaging Pluto with New Horizons.

Their budget is actually absurdly large. The problem is they are mandated to engage in vanity projects like Artemis, which don't do anything to contribute to science at all.

trophycase• 4 years ago

So agree, but the logistical challenges for even landing a probe on somewhere like Europa or Enceladus are far greater than landing somewhere as inert as Mars. Jupiter has an incredible magnetic field, we'd need to somehow land on the moon (which is a challenge in itself due to the potential for 30m spires of ice), drill through the surface ice and possibly through multiple subsurface oceans til we reached a layer that had geothermal vents.

Also while I agree with you that it's very likely that there was microscopic life on Mars at some point in the past, considering that finding evidence of life on other planets would be one of, if not the largest discovery in human history, I think it's important to keep going until we confirm it.

treeman79• 4 years ago

I always gave this vision of 20 years after sending a probe the moon turns green. Liquid sub surface ocean being an excellent breeding ground.

zokier• 4 years ago

Even life, is there any reason to think there WASNT some microscopic life there at some point?

Well the little thing of not having any evidence indicating the presence of life.

CorrectHorseBat• 4 years ago

Even life, is there any reason to think there WASNT some microscopic life there at some point?

We have no clue about how likely it is for life to emerge or how it happens, so we can't really tell. Maybe we're on the only planet with life in the universe.

Finding proof of life on Mars would completely change that equation.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

Commented this and got flagged:

“We need boots on the ground to back the good science behind these findings.”

Why is wanting to send people to mars to confirm or leverage these findings so offensive?

goodcanadian• 4 years ago

Perhaps, "boots on the ground" was flagged by an overzealous automatic moderation scheme?

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

Interesting. Indeed the wording is not great but a human would get the idea :-) I did notice that quite a few times when i write that i want space exploration and expansion it gets downvoted. So there may also be a crowd that thinks we should solve all problems on earth before going to space, as if thats possible or achievable.

OmicronCeti2• 4 years ago

Many, many single-purpose rovers can be sent in the place of a human mission with no risk to human life. There is no scientific justification for sending humans on a science mission, it's mostly just adventurism.

throwaway57522• 4 years ago

I think I'd feel better about the suggestion for a manned mission if it talked about 1) what value a human would offer in collecting samples and analyzing data over a robot 2) how that value would compare to mass of air, water, and food as well as life-support systems and radiation shielding; the additional fuel and oxidizer to move the mass of the crew and supporting systems 3) the ethics of sending someone capable of doing this important research to their probable deaths rather than an unmanned mission and 4) the cost-benefit to funding this versus other non-space exploration efforts.

What also gets to me is that clearly people have done this cost-benefit analysis before - people that know a lot more about the topic than me. It lacks humility to ignore their reasoning (see https://spacenews.com/independent-report-concludes-2033-huma...).

LeanderK• 4 years ago

Highly doubt this, but I am no expert. A human is just very flexible and the rovers up there look super complicated while only been capable of very simple tasks. A lot of scientific progress happened because somebody took a risk, not in the name of adventurism, but in the name of science.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

guess the phrase is a military phrase, and militarization of space is not a neutral topic at this time

api2• 4 years ago

I was under the impression that abundant evidence of water on Mars had already been found, though I suppose this adds to the pile.

There's this from 2008:

https://www.space.com/5546-proof-water-ice-mars.html

It seems to show evidence for subsurface ice on Mars now, though I'm not sure if this is H2O ice or CO2 ice.

OmicronCeti2• 4 years ago

There has long been debate in the scientific community about whether Mars had an ocean in its low-elevation northern hemisphere, Cardenas explained. Using topography data, the research team was able to show definitive evidence of a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old shoreline with substantial sedimentary accumulation, at least 900 meters thick, that covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

I feel like the announcement that bodies of water have been found on Mars has been made every few years since the late 19th century. You'll have to drill into the details to learn what they actually found.

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

Start the reactor, free Mars!

Traces of ancient ocean discovered on Mars

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