Mars Rover Perseverance Discussion Thread

[kerbiloid]

51 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The weak part of panspermia is that it remains purely speculative.  Should we find microbes on Mars, Europa and elsewhere it might be argued to be factual. Then we need to find extra solar DNA bearing life and maybe it becomes the standard model 

I just try to imagine what can be a better place for the life genesis than the Earth, that somebody at all came to the panspermia hypothesis.

It would be understandable if they were discussing a mollusc shell on Mars.

Edited December 18, 2021 by kerbiloid

[sevenperforce]

23 hours ago, NFUN said:

of course, you may have been paraphrasing, but the wording you have was what I was referring to

I was paraphrasing from memory. I looked it up and the actual exchange is even funnier. 

[magnemoe]

On 12/18/2021 at 5:09 PM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The weak part of panspermia is that it remains purely speculative.  Should we find microbes on Mars, Europa and elsewhere it might be argued to be factual. Then we need to find extra solar DNA bearing life and maybe it becomes the standard model 

If life on Europa or Mars has the same biochemistry than on Earth, panspermia is likely, if different its not. This require living bacteria as micro fossils don't hold enough details. 
It can also be foiled if its found that only one set of biochemistry works, we know mirror proteins should work for mirror biochemistry, now that is 50%. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

38 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

mirror proteins should work for mirror biochemistry

I really hope that this turns out to be merely a theoretical possibility, but that the universe 'chooses' to not allow it. 

Otherwise our decendant's food choices could be severely constrained. 

Edited December 19, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[kerbiloid]

As a human chauvinist pig, I believe that the protein mirror direction is defined by the starlight polarization, and we'll probably face same statistic asymmetry like matter/antimatter or righties/lefties, and we can be happily eaten by Martian raptor without poisoning it.

Edited December 19, 2021 by kerbiloid

[Minmus Taster]

That part where they throw the ascent vehicle in the air tho-

[kerbiloid]

You see?
Once Squad had released the breaking ground patch, and immediately NASA tries the robotic hand to take the ground samples!

Not a week before, not a week later.

Isn't it the best evidence of how the modern spacenautics works, and what software all of them use for the space engineering?

[StrandedonEarth]

 

[wumpus]

On 12/18/2021 at 12:01 PM, kerbiloid said:

I just try to imagine what can be a better place for the life genesis than the Earth, that somebody at all came to the panspermia hypothesis.

It would be understandable if they were discussing a mollusc shell on Mars.

As far as I know, for all eras that could possibly confirm life, there are known fossils.  So not only must Earth be a good place for life to originate, it has to be great enough to almost immediately generate.

Which would *still* make it odd that life didn't happen on Mars (or possibly Venus, but I'd assume that all fossils have long since melted).

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, wumpus said:

As far as I know, for all eras that could possibly confirm life, there are known fossils.  So not only must Earth be a good place for life to originate, it has to be great enough to almost immediately generate.

Which would *still* make it odd that life didn't happen on Mars (or possibly Venus, but I'd assume that all fossils have long since melted).

Mars is too small, doesn't have continental platforms, it hydrosphere consisted of shallow lakes and lasted to short to let somebody significant evolve.

Venus rotates slowly (so wasn't accelerated and partially melted by impact), doesn't have continental platforms, its gravitational differentiation was lasting calmly until the lifting matter had reached the surface and cause a planet-wide set of eruption, it's covered with tesseras (so, its crust was slowly cooling rather than catastrofically mixed), it has lost oxygen and hydrogen, but keeps a lot of sulfur oxides
So it never had a real ocean, just another net of shallow lakes, its water- and carbomate-rich minerals have been completely destroyed, the water has been splitted by UV. and the lightweight gases have completely escaped due to high temperature due to the greenhouse effect.

So, none of them had enough time to develop something meaningful, rather than the Earth had.

Presuming Mars or Venus be a life donors for the Earth is like accusing two non-infected persons that they have infected the third, infected one.

[darthgently]

30 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Mars is too small, doesn't have continental platforms, it hydrosphere consisted of shallow lakes and lasted to short to let somebody significant evolve.

Venus rotates slowly (so wasn't accelerated and partially melted by impact), doesn't have continental platforms, its gravitational differentiation was lasting calmly until the lifting matter had reached the surface and cause a planet-wide set of eruption, it's covered with tesseras (so, its crust was slowly cooling rather than catastrofically mixed), it has lost oxygen and hydrogen, but keeps a lot of sulfur oxides
So it never had a real ocean, just another net of shallow lakes, its water- and carbomate-rich minerals have been completely destroyed, the water has been splitted by UV. and the lightweight gases have completely escaped due to high temperature due to the greenhouse effect.

So, none of them had enough time to develop something meaningful, rather than the Earth had.

Presuming Mars or Venus be a life donors for the Earth is like accusing two non-infected persons that they have infected the third, infected one.

Samples from Mars' and Titan's poles, Enceladus' oceans and thermal vents, Europa's thermal vents would be the things to go for first if the range of parameters that terrestrial examples of life have been found within are a guide.  I wouldn't be surprised if we found the equivalent of bacterial life elsewhere in the solar system.  But I also wouldn't be surprised if we found that Earth was the only place where life exists in the solar system (well, now we need to include LEO also as there are people on the ISS and on the PRC station).  Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if we never find life anywhere beyond what comes from Earth.  Not because it doesn't exist, but because the possibility that life in the solar system could easily just be on Earth and life beyond our solar system is so far away we may never see it.  Just because there are stars "near" us doesn't mean they have life around them.  We really don't know how common or rare life is

Edited April 2, 2022 by darthgently

[kerbiloid]

37 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Samples from Mars' and Titan's poles, Enceladus' oceans and thermal vents, Europa's thermal vents would be the things to go for first if the range of parameters that terrestrial examples of life have been found within are a guide. 

Have been never delivered, and unlikely will be in a couple of centuries, so 

37 minutes ago, darthgently said:

I wouldn't be surprised if we found the equivalent of bacterial life elsewhere in the solar system.

is just an optimism without any facts, scientific basis, to support it, just a kind of sympathetic magic.

Also, all four are icy, so unlikely T, E, and E samples would show anything older than several million years, while the Martian polar cap will probably hide the samples for centuries.

The Earth is a rather unusual planet in almost every sense.

[darthgently]

4 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Have been never delivered, and unlikely will be in a couple of centuries, so 

is just an optimism without any facts, scientific basis, to support it, just a kind of sympathetic magic.

Also, all four are icy, so unlikely T, E, and E samples would show anything older than several million years, while the Martian polar cap will probably hide the samples for centuries.

The Earth is a rather unusual planet in almost every sense.

Lol.  Those are places that experts consider worth looking.  Take it up with them.

I also wrote, but you neglected to quote, that I also would not be surprised if life was unique to Earth.  Why should I be surprised either way?   I'm not sure what your point is.  Maybe you know life is unique to Earth, but I do not.  I would not be surprised if it turned out to be so.  I'm not exactly sure what you are taking issue with honestly as all I did was make a case for the fact that we don't really know and the range of possibilities is very wide.  Kind of hard to disagree with

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Lol.  Those are places that experts consider worth looking.  Take it up with them.

North America was worth looking in sense of gold, because South America was rich of it.

Other experts, same evidences.

7 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Maybe you know life is unique to Earth, but I do not. 

An expert gave an advice to not presume life when it can be explained with no life, especially when there arre no samples anyway.

[darthgently]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

An expert gave an advice to not presume life when it can be explained with no life, especially when there arre no samples anyway.

Where do I presume anything?  These are logical places to look because of temperature ranges, water presence etc, not places to assume we will find life.  My post was basically a big "who knows?" and you keep telling me I'm assuming/presuming things.  I truly wrote the exact opposite of assuming anything

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, darthgently said:

These are logical places to look because of temperature ranges, water presence etc, not places to assume we will find life.

Water is one of the most common compounds in the Universe, and it's almost everywhere.

Temperature is in range across all habitation zone.

Life (in sense of self-reproducing organic structures) needs enormous amounts of chemical reactions united into multistage cycles (tens of stages for every).

The universal fuel of all terrestrial organisms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate

It's more complex that just warm water.

[kerbiloid]

[snip]

I just remind that the life is a supercomplex set of reactions which require other parts of puzzle to exist for their running.
The early Earth had very specific conditions (mostly thanks to its Moon), and nothing even remotely similar can be observed anywhere in the known Universe yet.

[darthgently]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

I don't compete. I just remind that the life is a supercomplex set of reactions which require other parts of puzzle to exist for their running.
The early Earth had very specific conditions (mostly thanks to its Moon), and nothing even remotely similar can be observed anywhere in the known Universe yet.

I never wrote that life isn't supercomplex.  You apparently assumed  that I didn't realize that.  I am actually very aware of many other factors other than water and temperature.  Radiation, an available energy gradient above some critical threshold, available elements to produce organic molecules, and a lot of things we still don't know about.  At this point my view on all this is that you did not parse what I wrote properly and are debating some straw man that does not exist and I'm not going to answer for his alleged crimes

[Vanamonde]

This thread has had little to do with the Perseverance rover (Which is supposed to be the topic! Really! Go check!) for quite some time. How about we get back on-topic and try not to get so angry with others who disagree with us? 

[tater]

 

[tater]

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

That was cool! 

[Hannu2]

Was that real time or accelerated? How long does such eclipse take?

[tater]

6 minutes ago, Hannu2 said:

Was that real time or accelerated? How long does such eclipse take?

The Sun is ~0.35 degrees arc from Mars. Looks like it took ~22 seconds for one limb of Phobos to cross the Sun (less than the whole disk). Phobos moves 0.013 degrees/s across the martian sky.

Real time I think.

[Kerwood Floyd]

55 minutes ago, Hannu2 said:

Was that real time or accelerated? How long does such eclipse take?

 

38 minutes ago, tater said:

The Sun is ~0.35 degrees arc from Mars. Looks like it took ~22 seconds for one limb of Phobos to cross the Sun (less than the whole disk). Phobos moves 0.013 degrees/s across the martian sky.

Real time I think.

Phil Plait says it was real time.

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/bad-astronomy-perseverance-rover-sees-phobos-transiting-the-sun