Fingers crossed in the near future we'll send a probe to that location to take a look at what's in this water. Double fingers crossed for evidence of a past martian biosphere.
(09-30-2015, 12:06 AM)Rynn Wrote: [ -> ]Fingers crossed in the near future we'll send a probe to that location to take a look at what's in this water. Double fingers crossed for evidence of a past martian biosphere.
According to Nick Bostrom we should hope that there is no life and has never been any life on Mars:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
I may be naturally pessimistic, but when I did the fermi equation, including rather a bunch of things he didn't include and my own best guesses for some of the probabilities he assumed....
I got approximately 1 in 100 billion. Coincidentally 100 billion is our approximate estimate for the number of stars in this galaxy.
So I figure it's probably about even odds that we're the only ones.
I remember reading a short story by Kim Stanley Robinson unrelated to the Mars trilogy (I think the title of the story was
Discovering Life or something like that) where, in a near-future Earth of the 20th/21st Century, NASA discovers signs of bacterial life on Mars. The main character despairs over the fact that terraforming Mars will surely not happen in the near future.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lak...ement.html
Reader-friendly article that details what hydrated minerals might be present in these surface features.
Quote: - The best mineral matches to the spectral data are magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate.
- The presence of perchlorate salts could lower the melting temperature of water at Martian conditions by 40 kelvins, making it much easier for water to melt.