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Author Topic: Nasa is to reveal Mars water secrets...  (Read 14457 times)

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Offline ivier

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Re: Nasa is to reveal Mars water secrets...
« on: April 03, 2004, 10:59:26 PM »
Things needed for life on Mars...

Surface :
Warmth - Gets upto 86 degrees F at the eguator around noon (mars time ofcourse). Plenty warm enough, life would just have to hibernate when it gets to cold.

Liquid Water - Areas where the martian atmosphere are higher then normal go above the 'tripoint', where liquid water can exist, though in a smaller tempreture range then earth, in these areas, water can remain liquid between 0 - 10 Centigrade. Areas where the atmostphere would be thicker include deep craters, and massive canyons.

Light - Mars has plenty of light on the surface

Underground:
Liquid Water - Mars is covered in a permafrost that goes very deep into the planet. this permafrost is mostly ice. Mars seems geothermally dormant, but looks can be decieving, unlike earth which 4.8 billion years ago got smacked by a small planetoid, which knocked by a rather sizeable chunk into orbit, and provides enough stress on our crust to keep it thin. Mars has a normal thick crust like most other terrestrial planets. But that does not mean it's asleep, it just means that events happen less often, but on a much larger scale, thus Olympus Mons. So in the deeper parts of the martian crust it is likely warmer, possible with huge ungerground rivers, lakes, and maybe even oceans.

Warmth - see above

Light - we already know that life does not need light

Under the icecaps:
liquid water - liquid water needs 2 things, pressure and heat. the more pressure you have, the less heat it takes.
The martian icecaps are huge, and express a great deal of pressure on the lower parts of the icecap. It is not inconcievable that the pressure under the ice could be great enough, to compress the ice into liquid water, and if theres even one tiny geothermal dome or vent under the ice, it's pretty much assured.

Warmth - having warth is well and good, but life does not actually need it. Seeing as how life lives on or in every continent on earth. Some forms of algae actually live IN artic ice, melting it as they need it, by excreting antifreezes.

Light - life does not need light, only energy, which can come so many ways.


Summary:
Despite Mars' harsh conditions, and the obvious fact that the surface is not infested with martian life, the conditions are there for life to exist across large expanses of the planet. Some are more likely then other to harbor life. Most will be microbial, but maybe some will be large enough to see, and maybe even crawl across the surface. The trick to finding this life, is finding where the conditions exist for the life, and waiting to see them wake up.

AfterThought: It is often stated, that mars is too small to sustain a sizable atmosphere neccessary to sustain a living planet. I believe this to be wholey untrue, but rather, that mars had it's atmosphere destroyed by a very massive impact, after most of the free material in the solar system that could replinish it's atmosphere had dissipated. the evidence is in the southern hemisphere, a crater 6 miles deep. The majority of all life on mars would have parished shortly after this impact, but the oceans would take a long time to evaporate and snow down onto the poles. Life during this time would have been adapting to a collapsing ecosystem, finding nitches where ever they lie. These lifeforms could possibly still be there today. They would likely be so fragile, they the very act of discovering them could kill them. We must tred cautious in our exploration of Mars, and hope we find life, but also that it remains living after we find it.
 

Offline ivier

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Re: Nasa is to reveal Mars water secrets...
« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2004, 09:48:17 PM »
Myth: Chlorophyll is green
Fact: Most Chlorophyll on Earth is green, BUT alot of it is purple, and has 70% efficiency when compared to green chlorophylls. Green however is NOT neccessarily as efficent as chlorophyll can get, just the most efficient, that earth life has found. 95% of all plant species on earth use green chlorophyll, but theres still the other 4.9999999% using purple. but there are other chlorophylls as well, they are quite rare, usually found in unusual algae and moss.

To say mars has no photosythisizing life because there is no green, is the same as saying, a city has no taxis, because there are no yellow cars.
 

Offline ivier

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Re: Nasa is to reveal Mars water secrets...
« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2004, 11:47:02 PM »
Quote
However, they seriously don't like exposure to free oxygen  :-)


TRUE, but, long chain carbon molecules don't like oxygen either, infact most early life was killed by oxygen.

The whole reason oxygen breathing organisisms dominate the planet earth (right behind carbondioxide breathers) is this.
Most methane breathers exhale oxygen, most carbon dioxide breathers exhale oxygen, most(all?) oxygen breathers exhale carbon dioxide.

So while early earth was saturated in methane and carbon dioxide, most things produced alot of oxygen. When methane breathers breathed oxygen, they litterally burned up, too much energy at once. carbon dioxide breathers choked on the oxygen.

 The oxygen continued to rise uncontrolled, eventually escaping into the atmosphere. mixing in the atmosphere with vast amount of methane ofcourse resulted in a very explosive atmosphere. Lightening would spark vast firestorms that would race across the sky, devouring the methane, and the oxygen, producing alot of carbon dioxide. The methane breathers gasped for breathe as the methane was rapidly depleted. Most ofthe methane breathers died, leaving only the ones clutching to life in the bottoms of the deep oceans. Meanwhile a new form of life had come around, an oxygen breather, it stayed close to the carbon dioxide breathers who were busy producing oxygen from the almost completely carbon dioxide atmosphere.

now we all know that carbon dioxide is a green house gas, but what you might not know, is methane is a much better greenhouse gas, the world has been kept at a good warm tempreture in the early solar system, when the sun was a little bit cooler, the loss of the methane resulted in the first of many ice ages to come, the big ice age, snowball earth. Glaciers covered the continent(s) [this is pre-pangea], the oceans froze over, the ice at the equator was hungreds maybe even thousands of feet deep. The world was seemingly dead. Beneath the ice, life continued, co2 breathers clung to the ice, straining to feel the light that only barely trickleded through (ice being less dense then water allows light deeper down, though more scattered) the o2 breathers hung close to thier vital air supply. some of the o2 beathers eventually started munching on the co2 breathers, which threatened the vital o2. other o2 breathers responded by munching on the 'herbivores'

Above the ice, as the sun grows still hotter, the co2 starts playing it's role as a greenhouse gas and the world over tho course of 100,000 years begins to defrost. When the first openings in the ice occurs, the 02 escapes into the atmosphere, slowing the warming process. it will take a million years before the ice fully recedes into nothing more than caps.

The co2 breathers at the gaps explode in numbers, and produce massive amounts of o2, the o2 breathers explode in numbers as well, consuming the o2 almost as fast as it's produced, but massive amounts of the cooling o2 gas still makes it's way into the atmosphere, to play havoc at a later date. in the ice gaps near land, some of the plants, make thier way onto living on shore, just a slime at the edge of the oceans. some of the minute animals, also pull thier hard exoskeletal bodies to shore, and feed on this slimey plant life.

The bugs find the reproductive parts of the plant to be the most nurishing, so the plants that keep those parts highest out of reach of the bugs survive more often, they quickly grow to an inch in height, far from the mearly microscopic bugs reach. some of the bugs respond, by learning to jump, others devolop pointy protrusions which gives them a better grip for climbing or pulling, while others devlop both. The plants grow still taller, and taller stretching upwards, to a foot, then a meter, and tens of meters. some of the bugs eventually grow wings, and learn to fly, and thus began the age of insects, and the end of snowball earth.

Snowball earth was the 2nd cataclysm (that i know of). the first created the moon, which would shape life for thousands of millenia to come.

-- Back to Mars --

Mars is in a very extended snowball stage, one that is difficult to recover from, but all it would have taken is a single microbe to survive the initial cataclysm, and mars will be teeming with life, across its surface, probably single cellular, or maybe even sub scopic multicellular. the conditions of mars are not friendly enough for anything much larger then a large flea. such creatures will likely stay very close to thier food source, maybe even farming it like some ants do. most likely in underground colonies, where they can control the enviromental conditions somewhat.

Martian colonial creatures might do various things to improve thier living conditions. One that seems quite possible, but that i have not even heard of earth life doing. Is pressuring thier underground colonies, with a series of airlocks. The airlocks (and all walls of the colony) would be made of some excreted material which is consumed and re-excreted to open and close them. inside the colony, the creatures would have a larger tempreture range in which water could exist in liquid form.

The tempreture would be kept in this range by collections of well fed organisms,  which constantly vibrate thier bodies to generate heat.

Pressure would be maintained by some of the creatures going outside, taking a deep breathe, and going back inside to exhale it.

To gather liquid water for thier gardens, they would likely excrete an antifreeze onto some frost in the early morning to melt it, then sip it up.

If thier gardens required atleast some light, i could see them packing the 'martian plants' into thier bodies and taking them to the surface at dawn, keeping thier insides pressurized for the benifit of the gardens, and laying in the sun until dusk. during this time they would be tended by others of thier colony providing water and nutrients the gardens would need during the day.

There would ofcourse also be solitary creatures which raid the colonial creatures nests, for food, wither it be the colonial creatures themselves, or the gardens they tend.

The raider would either have a burrow of it's own, that it hordes it's food in, or it would freeze solid at night and hibernate, or maybe even live in the colonial creatures nest, pretending to be one of them.

The colonial creatures would have to defend thier nest from these raiders, so they would likely develop methods of fighting simular to the colonial insects of earth. apon being detected the raider would be clobered by hordes of the colonial creatures, dismembered, and used as a mulch in thier garden.

The point of this post is ofcourse, that if something survives a global catacysm it will likely adapt, the life of earth adapted to being frozen over (on multple occasions). If any life on mars survived, it will have adapted and still be there, but we probably won't see it, unless it crawls across the camera lens, because it'll be quite small. Only in abundance do things grow very big, and we can plainly see mars does not have anything other then reddish soil and ice in abundance.
 

Offline ivier

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Re: Nasa is to reveal Mars water secrets...
« Reply #3 on: April 07, 2004, 02:24:36 AM »
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There is more biomass inside the earth than on the surface


quite true, but finding subterrainian life on mars is difficult, especially deep subterrainian, it's much lass likely to find them with any near future prove, than anything living just below or even on the surface.

i personally hope for the pressurized nest, insect like creatures.
 

Offline ivier

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Re: Nasa is to reveal Mars water secrets...
« Reply #4 on: April 07, 2004, 04:03:21 AM »
Quote
I think you might be waiting a long time for that one. I can't imagine the pressurised environment being feasible. Aside from the sheer maintainance problem, the idea of insect like creatures going outside and inhaling atmosphere in an average 6mb environment is a bit hard to take seriously.


i think you do not fully appreciate how thick the martian atmosphere really is, NASA is designing planes to fly high above it's surface. global sand storms which as you know are caused by winds, rework the planets looser surface on a yearly basis, and erode away at all geologic structures. The atmosphere is just too thin in MOST places for liquid water.

the creatures would not have to have much of a pressure increase to keep thier homes always above the water tripoint, there are places on mars where this already occurs, the deepest/warmest regions, like canyons, near the equator! Life on mars would have to adapt to the conditions there in order to survive, the pressurized colony is the only thing no earth life form does, and thats because no earth life form needs to.

obviously underground mars is likely to be pulsating with microscopic life. i was trying for something a little more complex and just as likely in my description. mars has been around about as long as earth, thats a LONG time for life to advance, and it WILL have advanced, and just possibly into the very small scopic range. it can be easily seen that an insect like design would be well suited to harsh conditions, but if they are farming any sort of garden, they will tune thier enviroment to best suit thier crop. just as colonial insects of earth do. earth insects carefully maintain the temperture and humidity of thier nests, and many of them DO excrete a rather hard material to reinforce thier nest walls, it is not a far stretch to seal off the tunnels to create an airlock. the martian bugs, and thier garden food, would probably (but not neccessarily) need to have already evolved (but not neccessarily thier relation) before the oceans and atmosphere were stripped, the bugs would be more adaptive then thier food supply.

if it was a slow leaking of the atmosphere into space as some believe then they would most definately had plenty of time to adapt. if it was a sudden event, as i suggested, with a massive impact destroying the atmosphere, then there will be a much smaller chance of such an adaptation is far less likely, but still possible. the earliest forms of life adapt the quickest.

As for maintainance, kick an antpile sometime. yes a rather bad maintainance problem, but colonial insects are anything but lazy. they will work themselves to death for the good of the hive. the nest design would likely have many chambers, with airlocks between each chamber, incase of breech. but being mars, there is little to disturb thier nest, what would cause a breech? heh, i'm not a short sighted hypothisizer, the raider bugs, for one. or the yearly sand storms. the latter of which would likely result in the nests being rather deep in the ground