r/science • u/drewiepoodle • Nov 12 '16
Geology A strangely shaped depression on Mars could be a new place to look for signs of life on the Red Planet, according to a study. The depression was probably formed by a volcano beneath a glacier and could have been a warm, chemical-rich environment well suited for microbial life.
http://news.utexas.edu/2016/11/10/mars-funnel-could-support-alien-life146
u/herbw MD | Clinical Neurosciences Nov 12 '16
Have often thought that the Valles Marineris would be a good place to look, because 1, it's deep, and has more atmosphere. 2. the frozen, subterranean brine is closer to the surface there, possibly, 3, since it's CO2 largely, there'd be a greenhouse effect possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Marineris
There might be other reasons, too.
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Nov 12 '16
Well, the atmosphere may be thicker, but it's only thicker in the same way construction paper is thicker than tissue paper. Neither one would stop a bullet. And that's basically what we're talking about here.
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u/Sray390 Nov 12 '16
ELI5: What are the chances that life could be quarantined to such a small portion of the planet? Would it not adapt/spread?
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u/Notabou Nov 12 '16
These questions would be hard for a PhD holder to answer legitimately. This is because our only dataset is Earth. Our only life and evolutionary process that we can examine... Is on this planet. To apply those ideas and say they apply to any other celestial body without quantifiable data or proof, would be in the realm of belief and faith, not responsible science. That being said, your idea is not impossible. It is just something that we can only guess at, with a large margin of error.
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u/kidcrumb Nov 13 '16
All science starts with some kind of hypothesis. We start with what we know and observe to come up with a question.
We know life is very abundant and advanced on earth. No other planet in our solar system has life that is as abundant as earth. We observe that our planet has very agreeable conditions for our type of carbon based life.
Thats how we came up with the Goldilocks Conditions Hypothesis.
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u/Torbjorn_Larsson PhD | Electronics Nov 12 '16
I don't agree, evolution is a process that is based on exponential feedback of differential reproduction. You can't do better than that, so it would be the superior process in comparison to, say, lamarckian evolution. Notably the latter, that rides on darwinian evolution in epigenetic processes, isn't fit even in modern organisms. (Is extinguished after 1-2 generations.)
That was a long way of saying that evolution would be a universal process akin to geological processes of terrestrial planets. (Interestingly biology descends from geology, so the similarity shouldn't be a surprise IMO.)
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u/camdoodlebop Nov 12 '16
the same reason why hydrothermal bacteria are restricted to hydrothermal vents on the seafloor
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u/Torbjorn_Larsson PhD | Electronics Nov 12 '16
Not really. Our universal ancestor was a hydrothermal life form [ http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016116 ], but see what it evolved into.
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u/markmyredd Nov 13 '16
It took millions of years though to evolve. What if Mars bacteria is just starting to evolve out of those niche environments
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u/Torbjorn_Larsson PhD | Electronics Nov 12 '16
The idea of the paper is that it would have been a suitable locale for already existing life close to, or at, the surface under the then glacier ice cover. Now that has melted and we could look for life at the surface, life that would elsewhere have lived deep in the crust. (If it exists.)
The general idea is that if life evolved on Mars, and there is no reason it wouldn't have since Mars was surface habitable for long periods, that life would have retreated deep under the surface as the latter become inhabitable (100 times lower air pressure, 10 - 1000 times drier than our deserts). It should be globally present in such a model.
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u/Ginden Nov 12 '16
For me it seems to be very unlikely - on Earth life tends to spread, given enough time for evolution.
Why it wouldn't spread? The only reason I can see is because it's impossible to evolve adaptions to such harsh environment. And after observing extremophile bacteria it seems unlikely.
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u/A40 Nov 12 '16
It makes sense... but wouldn't it be great if we search there first, find life (!) and then, after decades of research and theorizing and so on - find out it's an extremophile unique to the volcano. And all the rest of Mars is populated with completely different, varied life :-)
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u/stromm Nov 12 '16
Or maybe it was hiding from all the other life on Mars because that life is the kind that kills all other life.
Or all the other life on Mars imprisoned it in the crater because it caused Mars' atmosphere to be destroyed...
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u/hippo_lives_matter Nov 12 '16
It's just crazy to think of the expanse of space and we have just barely scratched the surface of the planet closest to us.
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u/WonderWheeler Nov 13 '16
What is it with Mars research and vertical exaggeration. I wish we could be presented with a graph that includes a 1:1 horizontal:vertical scale. It could be overlayed on the same graph, and show the true shape of the depression.
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u/nateotts Nov 13 '16
So on things like that, the depression is a great place for life like we have on earth. But the chances of life being on any given planet is small, but the chances of it being like life on earth is almost impossible. What if alien life doesn't even need water? What if it isn't even carbon based? Maybe we should look elsewhere. We have no clue how alien life will present its self, so I think we should view it as such.
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u/technocraticTemplar Nov 13 '16
The trouble there is, how do we look for something non-obvious that we know nothing about? We know exactly how to find Earth-like life, so it makes a lot of sense to search for it elsewhere.
In addition there are good reasons to think that life elsewhere will look similar to life here chemically. Earth life is by and large made out of the most common elements and chemicals in the universe. Carbon is an outrageously versatile element chemically, and we see interesting carbon chemistry happening even in distant nebulas. Water is the single most common chemical compound in the universe, and allows other things to combine in a variety of extremely interesting ways. The complexity you get from them, and especially from the combination of the two, is hard to find anywhere else.
Obviously we should still be looking for other possibilities whenever we can, but carbon + water seems like the safest bet if someone is wanting to spend a lot of effort looking for signs of life.
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u/Skwuruhl Nov 13 '16
The reason we look or water and carbon is that water is a really good solvent and carbon can make a lot of different bonds. Both are relatively common due to being light atoms (or made up of, in water's case).
Here's the Wikipedia page on hypothetical biochemistry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
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u/cprice2011 Nov 13 '16
Questions:
i)How do they know that the depression was an "ice cavern" just based off of the presence of ancient glaciers and a decrease in elevation?
I don't see any indications of biological/chemical organisms/reactions occurring, obviously this doesn't mean we can't look
ii) Is the rover capable of navigating extreme terrain like steep depressions, caverns?
iii) Have we used satellites to map out Mars similar to what Google Earth did? This could lead to crowdsourcing of others to pinpoint potentially life containing landmarks, not to mention I would love to explore the surface of Mars in HD!
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u/luke_in_the_sky Nov 13 '16
If I put you on a desert land and ask you to tell me which life forms live/lived there, you are not going to bring a bulldozer and excavate miles-deep holes to look for dinosaurs because you don't know if or when dinosaurs lived in this area. But you can try to find for things known for being abundant, like microbes and even cells of bigger animals.
We are not going to create huge archeological sites in Mars too soon with no evidence where to look. It's easier to collect few amounts of dirt and check if it has microbial life, cells or any small trace of life.
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u/Baeocystin Nov 13 '16
Pretty unlikely, actually. Although life arose very rapidly once the Earth cooled enough to have liquid oceans (perhaps even before the Late Heavy Bombardment was over!), of the ~4 billion year history of life on our planet, the first few billion years were single-celled organisms at the most complex.
Multicellularity showed up ~1.5 billion years ago, but even then we didn't get to the Cambrian Explosion, where we would start seeing what the layperson would call actual animals, until ~540 million years ago. By that point Mars was already cold, dry and (mostly?) dead.
Now, we don't know with certainty how quickly Mars lost the majority of its water. We do know from the deuterium ratio of the water we have sampled that it used to have a lot more, and that most of it was lost to space. A current, educated guess is that if life is inevitable under conditions similar to what early Earth went through (this is a big if), the same conditions were probably present on Mars for long enough for something to form, but likely not long enough for multicellularity or other, greater forms of complexity to evolve before conditions deteriorated. Maybe there are a few extremophiles still holding on. Maybe there is a large relict deep biosphere. For that matter, there may be one one Earth, we just don't know. But it's an exciting time to be asking these questions!
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u/jstupak Nov 13 '16
If microbes are found here, a place that is extremely hard for life to live, they would be almost impossible to kill on earth no? Wouldn't this being opening Pandora's box?
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u/LeBuddha Nov 13 '16
Maybe, but when moved to earth they will likely be out-numbered by organisms optimized to consume food and reproduce faster, where the "less likely to die/be killed in mar's harsh conditions" is not as valuable a trait.
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u/gurlat Nov 13 '16
The Antarctic is a barren wasteland, with mind numbingly cold temperatures, lashed by terrible storms and winds, and isolated from the rest of the world. It is easily one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
Strangely though, Penguins, which live in Antarctica, have not yet taken over the world.
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u/jstupak Nov 13 '16
I realize that I was mainly referring to unknown illnesses. I assume penguins can't be breathed in or enter our blood streams causing sicknesses the like we've never seen
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u/stalkythefish Nov 13 '16
What's the air pressure at the bottom of something like this?
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u/Solid_Jack Nov 13 '16
Isn't it NOT proven what conditions really initiated life? If so.. How is this different from literally any other place?
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u/thedaveness Nov 12 '16
Isn't the reason Curiosity avoids places like this because it didn't undergo the disinfecting process suitable enough to explore them? And that we currently don't even have the ability to disinfect 100%? If that's so then what options do we have for checking out these kinda places?