stilover

They have picture evidence of what they hope is water on Mars.
Could be a major breakthrough for life on another planet. Along way to go yet, but where there's water and sunlight, life can exist

This image released by NASA shows two views of a gully on the wall of an unnamed crater in the Centauri Montes region - Yahoo! News UK

Scutch

Major Update!!

GrahamG

found another one...

stilover

Very good.

*Sonic*

The chances of anything coming from Mars, are a million to one



















he said

Scutch

Yes I'd heard that too.

But still, they come... Ooooooh laaaaaaaa apparently.

davegtt

Brilliant

OllyK

Seems the current suggestion is that is may be liquid CO2 under the surface which when the pressure is released, escapes to form a snow / slurry with the sand and rock.

Sti_Prodrive

we have some proper funy fu*kers in the house

Ben v7

I am sure we are not far off discovering the existance of life on a planet other than our own - the ramifications of such will be truely magnificent. I hope the discovery comes in my life time and it's great to see that we are still pushing out into the next frontier of space. Intelligent life I am not so sure about finding - SETI hasn't found anything concrete after intensive searching. Either they are communicating via a different medium or have already been and gone.

douglasb

Or they're just so far away that any electromagnetic signals that they created have been attenuated by the distance they've travelled and we don't have sensitive enough receivers, or they're so far away that the signals that they're sending now won't reach us for a few more millennia.

unclebuck

mars... needs... wimmin.....

So the song told me...

j4ckos mate

whywould anyone give a **** if theres water on mars

Ben v7

Both are possible of course but last time I checked SETI had analysed the entire northern hemisphere. If the universe was teaming with intelligent life we ought to have picked something up. Either way, it looks like we won't actually make contact with intelligent life and could be alone in that respect. The alternative again is that they are so far advanced that they do not communicate or indeed travel by a mechanism we can detect. We have only been gaining knowledge like we have been for a few thousand years - imagine a civilisation with a million years of intelligent thought behind it. Personally I don't think we will find intelligent life - things are just too perfect on Earth...

The significance of water is that it is considered to be one of the essential ingredients of life. Discovery of water on Mars would add a lot of weight to the argument for Mars ability to (once) support life. There may be life out there in our solar system still - Titan or Enceladus (Saturn moons) are both possibilities as is Europa (Jupiter moon).

Brendan Hughes

fffffffreezing...

Nimbus

Not necessarily. For Europa, the tidal forces between the Europa and Jupiter can create heat inside Europa which keeps the water in a liquid state not to far below the surface ice.

There was once talk of life in Jupiter's atmosphere. That would be cool.


Re intelligence, Imagine a dark room. Inside are a number of light's. Each light, representing intelligence, switches on when that intelligence is active and sending electronic signals into space. If one year represents the age of the universe, how long would one light stay on for, and how often do two lights come on together (one intelligence discovers another)? A second, a minute, an hour? If a light comes one, does it stay on, or does it extinguish after a short time? Who says that once a species develops intelligence, it will remain intelligent?

I suspect the rise of intelligence, and it's creation of a stable technological society, may be more difficult that is thought. So we may find life, but not intelligent life anytime soon, if ever. An would we recognise intelligence if we found it? Who would class dolphins as intelligent? And how do you even define what intelligence is?

This is getting heavy for a Friday...

Ben v7

Geo-thermal heat can also provide the warmth necessary for life on these moons. We have life at the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches here where there is no light and only heat from geo-thermal venting - these are extreme conditions and if life finds a way here...

I like that analogy of a huge dark room with tiny lights occassionally flicking on for a split second, over a long period, as a good illustration of the odds against two intelligent technologically advanced civilizations from distant worlds, happening to be in a position to discover one another.

As far as what sort of creature we may encounter if it should ever happen - there is a good chance this 'alien' will bear a relatively close ressemblence to ourselves. The form that is taken is dictated by energy efficiency of a particular configuration. Any 'alien' could not look that wildly different to ourselves for this reason.

stilover

Because one day, man might have to live there. As the Sun gets larger and hotter, Earth will become to hot for animal and plant life to survive. We will have to leave our planet behind to survive.
The thinking is, is that if Mars has frozen water beneath it's surface, as the sun heats Mars up, water vapour will rise into the atmosphere and create clouds, that will both trap heat and also create rain. A livable atmosphere will be created (plant life needed of course) so man can move to Mars while the Earth becomes a molten ball.

Obviously this is hundred of Millions of years away, but better to start looking now rather than later.

Brendan Hughes

I think you guys are starting to confuse life with intelligent life with life that we can make contact with. Look at the problems humans have had, being born on the perfect planet, living on the crust, looking into space every night. Now imagine being born a few kilometers under ice, not knowing what is on the other side of it, and not really seeing the point of finding out. If you want to, then as you bore deeper into the ice, it gets colder and colder, and presumably harder. Somehow you have to stop the ice re-forming behind you in the tunnel as you bore, otherwise you'll be sealed and die; not easy at zero kelvin or whatever it is. You have no knowledge or evidence of sky, space, other planets, etc. Once you get out you're at minus god knows what, with no geothermal heating and a kilometre or so of ice between you and cosy home. Why the hell would you want to continue?

This is nothing like life forming on a cooling planet which comes to settle at somewhere between 0 and 100C.

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

can we not just start shipping out the asylum seekers now??
I mean, it would be a terrible shame if some didnt survive the journey...
and I am sure there is room on the mars express for a few rapists, kiddie fiddlers etc...

would certainly sort out the prison overcrowding and immigration problem in one fell swoop..plus they can get the place all tidy and nice for us when we need to move planets....

side note...I see an opportunity for the first intergalatic estate agents coming soon....

stilover

That's what the Moons for. I wish

Ben v7

How about we terraform Mars (could be done in 200-300 years with a committed effort) and extract as much as we can from this planet (forget Global warming for a start) and live for today and not tomorrow here.

We could build a new lovely world over at Mars - get everything right. When this planet is completely spent *we* could all move over there and leave this planet to the low lifes, assylum seekers and fanatical muslim hoards. The gulf of space would make it a bit harder for unwanted immigrants to find a way in surely too.

Nimbus

I'm not confusing the two, I was just expanding the topic as others have done by introducting intelligence. Will we find life outside the Earth? Almost defninitly. We will find intelligent life outside the Earth? Most probably not.

And you're comments regarding the ice dewlling alien. He(she/it?) will probably think that they live on a perfect planet with all that nice cool ice about them protecting them from preditors and the ravages of the enviroment. He(she/it) must think that any animal that has to live on the surface of a planet to hard done by, having to suffer the varagies of the weather, tempreture changes, exposer to the UV radiation...

We should not be too blinkered assuming that life, whether intelligent or not, would necessarily exist in anything like the same form as ourselves. Yes, we know our environment is ideal, but only ideal to our life. We need to keep an open mind about these things.