Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth

nytimes.com

104 pointssigna1164 comments

One of the many things that really reemphasizes how limited remote technology such as probes and rovers really are. As the article mentions this has been known about for about 6 years. Having rovers do what they were designed to do is very difficult, having them try to explore previously unknown phenomena is generally just not really possible.

Consider for instance water on the moon. When was this discovery finally confirmed once and for all? It didn't happen until 2009! [1] And the discovery of water-ice only happened in 2018. These are 'obvious' surface level characteristics, yet we're only confirming them some 60 years after our brief dalliance with manned exploration.

It's incredible to think about all the things that we've yet to discover but eventually will once we start getting indefinite bases setup across various destinations.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water

If life - present or past - is one day found on Mars, I shall be hugely surprised if it doesn't share our basic DNA. Interplanetary pollution - pollination, if you will - or common influx from somewhere entirely else.

History repeats itself. So many times a group of people on earth thought they were alone (a tribe, a region, an island, a continent), they were wrong. Earth is our current island, scale it up. Chances are when we find other life, it will share a common source with us. There's likely other life that doesn't but the closer ones probably do.

Maybe we are the "uncontacted tribe". I wonder at what point when you're observing an isolated tribe do they demonstrate enough advances that it's OK to contact them? Or do you just wait until they discover the observer?

I doubt we are observed. Space is really really big - even bigger than that... Are first radio signals have barely reached 100 light years by now (you a great antenna to received them). All other intelligent beings know about earth is what they can infer from how our gravity changes the sun, and other such indirect measures.

If we're not currently odds are we will be--given N tribes, we're only 1.

On the other hand we haven't been able to establish a firm minimum amount of time from when Earth got oceans to when it got life. It took a long, long time to add photosynthesis to cemosynthesis, a long long time to create eukaryotes, and a long, long time to create multicellular life. I made a timeline:

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...

Interplanetary pollution seems to happen pretty quickly compared to the history of life but I'm not sure we can say that it happens quickly compared to the start of life. Of course for all we know the reason Earth developed life so quickly was that it was seeded by the quicker-cooling Mars which had had Oceans before Earth did. More research is needed!

I would not presume to have any opinion on the direction such traffic might have taken. All I know is the one certain, observed fact in this case is that pieces of Mars have indeed fallen to the surface of Earth. There is of course no known reason why the reverse would not have happened.

From your writings (added to feed, thank you) I notice we share a belief: That life may well be quite common out there, but human level intelligence exceedingly rare. I somehow believed this from a very young age, long before I ever heard of Drake or his equation or any such calculation.

I was just reading about how far out into space the ejecta from the Chicxulub impact went and it really brought home how possible it is that life from Earth migrated elsewhere, Mars being an obvious possible destination. But as one gets further out, it seems less and less likely that any life found has terrestrial origins. I am very much interested in knowing if there is any independently evolved life in the oceans of Europa or any of the other ice moons.

Space is pretty inhospitable though. Is it possible for living organisms to survive ejection, a space journey and re-entry?

It's an open question, but there is some reason to believe that bacteria can survive a journey through space. Multicellular life would be much less likely to survive, although I'm constantly amazed at how hard it is to kill a tardigrade!

It's called panspermia, for the curious.

Long journey to Mars in hard vacuum and under UV radiation makes it very unlikely, but bacteria spores are very resilient to harsh conditions. I think it is still theoretically possible. There are a few papers on this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11539977/

A tardigrade must first complete cryptobiosis, otherwise they are fragile[1]. Given that it takes time to enter cryptobiosis (maybe 1 hour), it is unlikely that any active tardigrade would survive a meteor impact.

Suppose a tardigrade was in complete cryptobiosis and survived a journey to the surface of Mars. Conditions would need to be favorable if it were to ever regain an active metabolic state.

[1]https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-take-to-kill-a-waterbear-...

> Space is pretty inhospitable

Is it? Predation, old age (wear and tear), disease (pollution) are the primary reasons that what we consider "living things" die. Space has very limited vectors of death for something like the tardigrade. To some bug dessicated hibernating in a rock, it's not too bad.

Eventually, cosmic ray damage will even get the tardigrade.

> Predation, old age (wear and tear), disease (pollution) are the primary reasons that what we consider "living things" die.

...on Earth, where the multitude of things that make space inhospitable - both objectively, like no atmosphere to protect from cosmic radiation; and subjectively, like vastly different conditions that terrestrial life hasn't evolved for - aren't an issue.

We're aware of meteorites from Mars coming to Earth (a quick search brings up [0]) - who says they can't go the other way!

[0] https://www.space.com/14268-rare-mars-meteorite-rocks-tissin...

If life is discovered on Mars, I'm going to be waiting to see if it is obviously Earth-based DNA. If so, then as excited as people will be, it won't actually be any particular sort of evidence for wide-spread life. It'd still probably be a reasonable candidate for discovery of the century, but not the millenium.

(We will be able to determine if it is has the same source as Earth-based life, because Earth-based life has a lot of things that seem like they ought to be free parameters, but are highly conserved across our entire ecosystem. This includes certain basic genes and processes and their exact "spelling" in genes, the mapping of DNA letters to proteins, and probably quite a few other things. Can't disprove a common third source that way, of course.)

Or ... do we have Mars-based DNA?

I've seen the theory tossed out there, but it's hard to do anything about it. We'd need paleontologists on Mars to really be sure (to prove life that predates Earth, as a step 1), and we're a long way away from that no matter how you slice it. But as I understand it, the time scales work; for the same reason that Mars is basically a dried-up, used up planet now while Earth is flourishing with life, Mars was theoretically possibly habitable much earlier than Earth.

Imagine there are ozeans, and they slowly dry away, evaporatintg to space. The water gets more saltier with every season, uvw rays grill what ever is left of your living space.

All you can do is sleep through longer and longer winters in this brine, waiting for the sun to thaw the salty mud. Or you retreat, using some weak smoker in the depths as a provider of energy, following it ever deeper down, the world freeze drying behind you.

I know its frowned upon by some, but imagine we could create a sort of floating spirondella, and set them free in venus atmosphere. Venus beeing a dead planet, cooled by a floating forrest sounds actually more realistic to me terraformingwise then changing mars.

The problem with Venus cloud cities is the cost of getting any solid material and lack of exploration. The technological threshold to reach sustainability seems much higher, even though initial conditions are better, especially gravity.

I think life would pretty much solve that problem rather quick (on a cosmic scale) - life has been regulating pretty well here on earth.

What's the chances that bacteria from Earth made it over on the rovers?

I understand that NASA takes great pains to prevent this but they can't get every single one, surely? Especially extremophiles?

Space cows

The tastiest burger

They are called buggalos :)

Maybe something went via the numerous landers that have visited Mars over past 4 decades?

I cannot read this article because of: "You're in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode".

How NYTimes knows I am in private mode?

No cookies? Access to local storage disabled?

Worked for me in Firefox private browsing

Also worked for me in Chrome's incognito

They are A/B testing it, or rolling it out slowly. I saw reports a few weeks ago, but didn't get hit with it myself until today.

Firefox may be leveraging container functionality for private mode. Firefox containers are fully functional isolated containers of data where regular browser features function like expected.

Even if it doesn't, the Firefox temporary containers add-on would help.

A quick look suggests it might be trying to do something with geolocation.

I didn't get the message in Chrome.

Googling "detect incognito stackoverflow" finds a question answered "The FileSystem API is disabled in incognito mode."

Maybe they shouldn't disable it, but simply fake it.

Now that people are using it to detect incognito mode they probably should...

They plan to deprecate it

A minimalist browser that ignores everything but the most basic of html works just fine.

I visited using mothra on 9front and was able to view the full article including images with no nag screen or articles remaining nonsense. It doesn't render perfectly but is completely readable. Just text and images with no other fluff to get in the way. I miss the old web.

NoScript = no problems

Well, not the one you're mentioning.

Whatever they're doing generates a weird reaction in Edge on my computer, where I get the private mode warning in normal Edge and no warning in inPrivate Edge.

Works fine without JS.

Mostly old news really..

Yes, it's been known for decades. Perhaps the new news is the latest sighting and that now it's accepted as fact.

It peaks in the warmer months.

Many Martian meteorites have been found on Earth, and it's likely that earth meteorites have made their way to Mars. We know that algae can survive in space and extreme conditions.

It would be unexpected if simple life from earth had not made its way to mars from time to time. It would be interesting if it continued to survive there. The methane and its seasonality is possible evidence of this.

Reasonable targets for future Mars missions are craters where methane is known to accumulate.

for life to have moved from one planet to another is unlikely: it's the product of life being on the rock on the source planet in the first place, multiplied by the probability the rock gets ejected into space, that the life survives a journal, and that it lands on a planet where it can survive. All of those are extremely tiny probabilities (but nobody denies the mass exchange between planets).

Slow down. There is life pretty much everywhere on earth. The probability the life is on a rock ejected into space is nearly 100%. Only when we get to life surviving the journey that we have and doubt, but even then there are a lot of different single cell lifeforms on that rock and we only need one to survive. If that one survives the space journey odds are it can survive on mars as well.

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