Nicker on 11/6/2018 at 01:19
Maybe.
[video=youtube;cXLk879Glbk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXLk879Glbk[/video]
While organic compounds are not proof of life they are highly suggestive, especially since methane has been found in the atmosphere. Methane is not very persistent so there seems to be a source for its production or release.
Interesting times...
icemann on 11/6/2018 at 10:48
Next up they'll send a sample back to Earth, it will spring to life and we'll all be dead soon after. God damn you science.
Tommyph1208 on 11/6/2018 at 11:57
What are actually the next planned studies of mars does anyone know? I guess the reason why they only "dug a few cm. into the surface" is because thats all they can do with the current rover equipment etc.
So when will Bruce Willis and the rest of his crew actually go there and do some proper drilling? Or as a start, just some other rover with some different capabilities?
demagogue on 11/6/2018 at 12:28
Mars is such a tease. I swear. It's been pulling this "maaaaybe I have life" thing since the mid-17th Century.
PigLick on 11/6/2018 at 14:14
mid 17th?
demagogue on 11/6/2018 at 14:22
First stories about trips to Mars & visiting its inhabitants were in the mid-1600s. Much before then I suppose they really didn't do fiction and I think it would have been heretical to talk about life on other planets anyway.
Well, Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter & landscape of the moon was the first time someone gave evidence and a sustained defense that the planets weren't perfect heavenly spheres that rotated around the earth, but rocky masses that might be imperfect and earth-like, the evidence being the thing that allowed anyone to make a viable claim against church dogma. And that was only in 1610. So you couldn't really have a viable concept of living things on them before that without branding yourself a heretic. But once you did have it, the floodgates to speculation are suddenly open. (Edit: Not saying it couldn't have occurred to someone before then. It probably did. But that's the important date that mainstreamed the idea in history.)
Of course the life speculation really picked up in the mid-19th century when telescopes were good enough they discovered the "canals".
Edit2: Marcia Bartusiak wrote a really cool book about the history of astronomy called "The Day we Found the Universe", where it talks about how the popular speculation over Martian life actually played a role in funding serious astronomy early last century, as long as they devoted a little telescope time to answering the "Life on Mars" question.
PigLick on 11/6/2018 at 14:29
any links cos that sound damn interesting
re: pre 19th century Mars stories
Trance on 12/6/2018 at 12:11
[video=youtube;pv_oMqVe-9Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv_oMqVe-9Q[/video]
demagogue on 12/6/2018 at 13:29
Quote Posted by PigLick
any links cos that sound damn interesting
re: pre 19th century Mars stories
Bartusiak's book did a little blurb on it, oh, and she also wrote an almanac of historic astronomy, that's where I got that stuff about Galileo from. But as for what I just said on Mars, I was just looking at the wiki. As good a place to start as any. (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_in_fiction)
(I'm also a fan of Space: 1889, which was originally P&P Steampunk RPG that includes a Victorian Martian colony.)
