There’s Something Funny in the Air on Mars | Hacker News Reader

There’s Something Funny in the Air on Mars

cosmos.nautil.us

Was anyone else able to detect any semblance of a date that this article was posted?

Personally, I think there is something intellectually dishonest about not including a publish date in a piece for anything remotely scientific. Context deeply matters.

edit: looks like it's Nov 2016, but you need to go to the parent page to see that.

What would _possibly_ make you think it was an act of dishonesty, instead of a simple oversight?

There's waaaaaaay to much paranoia going around these days.

I didn't interpret king_magic's comment in the way that it was deceitfully dishonest, but that it was dishonest in that it lacked date. As in, that it is inherently dishonest not to publish with a date, and there doesn't necessarily have to be a dishonest intent behind it.

Honesty is a function of intent (being honest means acting in good faith), so "unintentionally dishonest" is an oxymoron.

Perhaps GP meant "misleading", but he said "dishonest" which implies intent to deceive.

I'm with you, but there's phrases like "intellectually dishonest", where "dishonest" doesn't imply deception as much as just a character flaw in the author where they're being unintentionally dishonest by favoring their own ideas for example. As the OP mentions, context matters and the word dishonesty has a few bends to it depending upon the situation or phrase.

I assume showing the date published is the responsibility of the publisher, not the author. In which case, it's possible Nautilus has an anti pattern of not showing dates.

Yeah, that seems a bit dishonest.

Because, as I said, context deeply matters in science. Intentionally excluding publish date - which, by the way, is also not present on any of this piece's siblings - is intellectually dishonest.

If I'm reading this piece by way of a direct link, I have no idea of when it was published, diminishing its current credibility and relevance. Having to go hunt for that information is supremely annoying, and makes me wonder if they made some intentional decision along the lines of "well, if people know this article was from 5 years ago, they probably aren't going to read it because they will go searching for something more up to date", which would in fact be dishonest. To be clear - I'm not accusing them of that, but in an era of rampant fake news, why do anything to cause your readers to question your honesty?

I'm sorry, but this publisher exists in 2016, a time in which they know articles (fake or not) are frequently passed around in ways meant to misrepresent science behind them. There is no excuse for not including a publish date. None.

I would take it a step further. I want a date on any kind of article, scientific or not. Bonus points for having separate published and last modified dates.

Well that settles it. We have the Encrypt the Web folks. I'd like to see a Version The Web

Someone, I think it was Copyblogger and others, convinced people that to create "evergreen content" you should take dates off articles and blog posts. The web has been worse off for this advice.

That's what repos and wikis are for IMO.

Even while you're hunting for that date you're improving their metrics :(

Having a date on the article is not an advantage here.

Unfortunately I don't see this going away anytime soon. Something like a browser plugin that notified you of article date could be helpful, but would face challenges in mass adoption.

Have you noticed the general reduction in usefulness/efficiency of web pages? I sure have. Pages turn a 100 word answer into a 10,000 word essay with 5 videos.

I see that so much on technical articles. It really does make a difference if the content was published in 2007 or 2016.

Also, footnotes citing sources.

Isn't that because they appear to have "Issues" and "Chapters" that are all published at different times - so in this case the parent page has the date.

Mods, can we work "methane" into the headline?

> In 2003 Earth-based astronomers caught glimpses of methane in the Martian atmosphere.

Intrigued to hear about those astronomer bases not on Earth, in 2016.

Space-based platforms like the Hubble, Cassini, or Chandra.

Orbital platforms that are still operated by Earth-based astronomers, no? I don't intend to argue semantics, just think it's a poor (and somewhat funny) choice of words.

Perhaps, but that's how the platform deployment is described.

I was expecting a bunch of puns about nitrous oxide but all I got was a shitty article about methane. I must spend too much time on Reddit.

That was my first thought too - nitrous oxide on Mars. Peculiar/strange might have been better adjectives? "Funny" probably is better for SEO (like no dates on articles).

There is no air on Mars.

Methane is a very simple molecule. From what I understand it's quite likely to form if there's C, H and some heat/pressure. Since H and energy have been abundant during formation of planet's, the interesting part is that there's C on mars.

But calling it an "intriguing" discovery and talking about water and "the base for life" based on that seems like a stretch to me...

Carbon is very common as well, is it not? It's not like there's anything producing new carbon on earth, either. All we have is what was here when the planet formed.

> It's not like there's anything producing new carbon on earth, either.

Actually, there is: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology...

But by now the rate of creation should equal the rate of decay so even though "new" carbon is being made the amount of carbon doesn't really change.

The article explains right in the second paragraph why detecting methane is so intriguing.

If you dropped a molecule of methane into the atmosphere of Mars, it would survive about 300 years—that’s how long, on average, it would take for solar ultraviolet radiation and other Martian gases to destroy the molecule. By rights, the Martian atmosphere should have been scrubbed of its methane eons ago.

Yeah, I had read that.

It could just leak out of subterrane entrapments, as they mention later in the article:

> They must have been of Martian origin—perhaps a burp from a relatively small and localized subsurface source to the north of the landing site. The Martian winds would blow that methane away over several months, explaining why the signal went away when it did.

But then keep that line of thought going. Mars has the pieces it needs to form dna like molecules, at least in some protected environments, like in the salty almost frozen water slightly under the surface, so there's a very likely possibility of life being related to or similar in process to our life on earth.

I see what you mean; we know the ingredients (necessary elements and energy) for earth-like life are there.

However, we don't know the probability of all the steps leading to life actually taking place in the given time frame. The only reference value we have is earth, so it's just one data point and hardly possible to generalize. And mathematical estimations are difficult due to way too many factors to be considered (I've never seen one actually).

At the least we can say that formation of complex structures like DNA is far more complicated and thus less likely to form than methane, by orders of magnitude. So one could argue that it is generally far more likely for methane to be encountered than any (earth-like) life form.

They address that in the article. If the methane was being formed by spontaneous physical processes in the atmosphere, its concentration should remain constant.

Yeah, but it might just be emitted from subterrane entrapments (see my reply to Sharlin).

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