Life on Mars?

[rov1200]

Now that water has been found on Mars with no chance of life being found there is it time to call a halt on these costly space journeys to the red planet?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7536123.st m

[New Judge]

Why?

I did not think the purpose of the missions was solely to find life and abandon the project if none was found.

[jake-the-peg]

Unmanned missions to places like mars are actually very cheap The Phoenix project cost about $420 million.

About the same as two or three fighter aircraft.

Compare that to the manned International space station $100 BILLION!

Phoenix has shown that life could have existed on Mars at one time - the discovery of fossilised proof of this would be a monumental discovery on a par with the Earth orbiting the sun.

It is time though to put all the Star Trek fantisists back in their boxes, stop doing expensive manned space flight and do *more* unmanned work like Phoenix

[dundurn]

I personally don't believe we'll find life on Mars but fail to see how you can say from the article you quote that there is 'no chance of life being found there'. If the combination of atoms into self-replicating 'life' forms is a truly random event, then there is every chance of finding life on Mars and in numerous other places in the Universe.

[jake-the-peg]

I think there's very little chance of finding life on mars because there's no liquid water.

However there are many signs that there was once liquid water.

Mars is much smaller than the Earth and was once geologically active but is not any more. At that time it's likely to have had a much thicker atmosphere of CO2 and would have been warm enough for liquid water.

When we're talking about life on Mars we're really thinking about micro fossils and evidence of things perhaps no more complex than bacteria.

However even this would be monumentally important.

We know there are triillions of stars out there and many have planets. We are also proving that there are many rocky planets that could support life.

Yet we still don't know how probable it is that life arises - Are we a fluke accident? One in a trillion? Seems unlikely given how quickly life started but finding that life started independently on Mars would point to a Universe swarming with life.

We could try and answer these questions or we could buy more fighter aircraft

[Teddio]

Why should the sole purpose of space exploration be to find life? It's a myth to think that money "saved" from cancelled space missions could be spent on worthy causes such as fighting poverty.

[MatydaLover]

Costly? Last year the Yanks spent 100 billion dollars keeping their army in Iraq.

[rov1200]

That $100 billion would have gone a long way to keeping a roof over the heads of impoverished Americans. Geo. Bush's plan to get the banks to underwrite losses on property turned out to be a damp squib. If only he'd put the same effort into tackling homelessness as the Iraq war he'd have gone down in the history books of doing something worthwhile. The expenditure on unmanned space travel falls into the Iraq category!

[wildwood]

If we consider a collection of molecules that can replicate themselves as life then yes, there is probably life out there.
I am still pretty sure that Earth is the only planet to have life as we know it. The initial proteins that made up the primeval soup existed for many millions of years before the miracle of mutation happened. This could only have happened in coordination with this planet's changing atmosphere and climate.

[wildwood]

Oh, and yes, the prime objective of the International Society should be to solve the food/polution problems associated with the burgeoning population.
Developing a pen that writes upside down or a lightweight heat resistant metal is insignificant in comparison to the future of Earth.

[jake-the-peg]

Really wildwood?

I seen to think that the development of solar panels is a pretty significant spin off from space technology.

Don't believe all those urban myths about American Space pens and Russian pencils.

And as for the development of life it appeared fantastically early in Earth's development possibly as early as 4.2 billion years ago - that's about as close as you can get to the Hadean heavy bombardment!

Your expression miracle of mutation implies knowlege you don't have. For all you know that could have happened many thousands of times before one strand got going.

These are the questions that make exploration of mars for signs of life so important - finding a planet where life got started and stopped would be a giant leap in our understanding