Mars Express Confirms Water Ice on Red Planet
- Thread starter MrBishop
- Start date
chcr
Too cute for words
MrBishop said:...yet.
Lots of carbon dioxide though...very nice start. More than here on earth... wow!
I can't help thinking about the potential of terraforming Mars and Venus...then reality sets in and I can't help thinking about the 70% failure rate for Mars probes and satellites. Then I have another beer and all is well again
Not enough gravity, Bish. It's a pie in the sky, half baked notion by some fringe scientists who have no understanding of the physics involved. We would always be living in domes.
Did Prof explain the moon thing?
Thulsa Doom
New Member
wait.. who says the point of going there is to terraform the place? what happened to the pure pursuit of science? earthlings will eventually become martians (and alpha centurians and all sorts of stuff) but thats way down the road. our focus should be "whats out there". the rest of the stuff will follow from that. personally I want a sterile probe dropped into the oceans of europa.
Thulsa Doom
New Member
chcr said:No planets around Alpha Centauri.
well it sounds a lot sexier then becoming HR 4796'ns.
Camelyn
New Member
Thulsa Doom said:
I agree completely. About Europa too. It has quickly become the most likely place to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Under the frozen surface of Europa may lie vast, carbon rich oceans, kept above freezing by heat from its interior, generated by tidal friction from nearby Jupiter. Unfortunately the whole freaking moon is covered in a thick layer of ice, and we can't know for certain. I would love to see a probe sent to penetrate that ice and see what lies beneath.
If we are looking for life today, Europa is the place to look. If we are looking for evidence of life in the past, we may find it on Mars. Mars *did* have a sufficient atmosphere and magnetic field to support liquid water about 4 billion years ago....a little early for life to evolve perhaps. If we are looking to colonize, Mars and the moon are the closest and most hospitable, relatively speaking.
MrBishop
Well-Known Member
Gonz said:
If there was life on Mars, Archaologists are exactly the kind of people that you would want to send up there...right along with Geologists, Chemists and Phycists. You don't want remains damaged by people who havn't the slightest idea how to excavate a site and you certainly don't want to change the surrounding atmosphere if it means damaging evidence of prior life on Mars.
Imagine...following the evolution of a completely seperate lifeform. Just the differences between our bacterial evolution and the Martian one (even if it's just from single-celled amoeba to multi-celled bacterium) would be a boon of knowledge!!!
If you can't find proof of any previous life on Mars, then you can go ahead and start your strip-mining. If you do find signs of life...you'd better watch out where you're strip-mining. You're likely to piss-off Greenpeace (or in this case Redpeace) if you don't