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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the part of being sick of it, but I also wonder why it even matters.

So what if there are microbes in the maritian soil? What difference does it make to us? Except possibly the worst invasive species incident in human history.

At least this isn't into the total wing-nut fanatasyland of living on mars, which is one of the stupedest ideas proposed in modern time.

Just bury a trucking container in Nevada and live in it, That's exactly what living on mars will be like, except the line of logistics will be much more practical.

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If there are microbes on Mars, then studying them could tell us a lot about life on Earth. So far, we're trying to extrapolate from a single example.

The most interesting result would be to discover that Mars life is unrelated to Earth life. In that case, the universe is probably overflowing with variety of life in every suitable niche.

Or perhaps we'll keep searching for a thousand years and never find a trace beyond Earth. In that case life may be exceptionally rare.

> Or perhaps we'll keep searching for a thousand years and never find a trace beyond Earth.

If we find evidence of current/past life on Mars, what is the math that this means there's "overflowing" life throughout the universe?

And of course, the inverse: If there is no evidence on Mars, what does this show whether there is no current/former life outside the inner solar system (besides Earth)?

Maybe we spend less on Mars (at least for now)? So much more out there than ancient lakes?

> If we find evidence of current/past life on Mars, what is the math that this means there's "overflowing" life throughout the universe?

If life on Mars is related to life on Earth, that doesn't tell us very much.

If it's not related to life on Earth, then that means life can arise easily, so we should expect to find a lot more examples. Currently any instance of life is guaranteed to find at least 1 example (itself), so moving from 1 to 2 is significant.

> If there is no evidence on Mars, what does this show whether there is no current/former life outside the inner solar system

Evidence for the "Earth is special" hypothesis gets stronger the harder we look and find nothing, but we can never know for sure. At this point, we've hardly looked anywhere.

Because evidence of life somewhere other than Earth is the sort of scientific event that shakes up, well, a whole lot of related fields.

And besides, exopaleontologist sounds like an awesome career.

And being unable to find any evidence of the place we consider life most likely to have existed, will also change a lot of how we think.

> What difference does it make to us?

Anything proven or disproven adds to our collective understanding. You could apply that new information to old or existing problems and possibly come up with new or useful results.

Think “what would the proven existence of microbes tell us about a theory like the Fermi paradox”?

If it's demonstrated that life is able to develop independently on other planets, it seems reasonable to me to infer that any planet/moon with water and geothermal vents would have complex lifeforms. Possibly even intelligent.

If life on Mars had a separate origin (say, with a different genetic code) it would be strong evidence that life is common in the universe.

However, they'd need to rule out transfer of life between Mars and the early Earth. If they can't do that, this is still somewhat interesting, since it could mean life was transferred back and forth between Mars and Earth during that period. It might also mean there's still life deep in Mars' crust where liquid water can still exist, and that life could give more information on what early life was like (being another branch of our evolutionary tree).

Nevada is not far away enough to keep you safe from all of the Earthlings who are angry that you destroyed their planet.

Whatever humans do to earth (based on current technological capabilities) it will still remain more habitable than Mars by a magnitude or two

Oh certainly, for most of us at least.

But there's still potential for a pretty significant quality of life decrease. And... we're petty, so it's not too crazy to imagine that if you anger several billion of us by making it worse, then it might not be safe for you here.

I don't think we're quite so coordinated as that at present, but who knows what the future holds.

Because it can answer, and complicate, questions and theories from everything like theology to biology.

I only see this opinion on HN really. HN as a community is obviously large and split, but the virtriol here against people that are interested in Mars science, habitability, etc is so intense. People here have told me to go live in my mom's basement and shut up about my interest in Mars. Or to go bury myself in Nevada. Or go live in Antarctica. And it's always said with such disdain, effectively insulting and hate-filled comments towards those who are interested or curious about something.

I'll never let the HN Mars-hate-fest ruin my curiousity - but boy is it annoying to read sarcastic comments about how dumb people are for being interested in something.

Go ahead though I guess. We all know you are well aware that living on a different planet is quite different from living under Nevada. Your hyberbole is ridiculous and it's like, do you want us to really think that humanity as a whole would agree that living on Mars is "exactly" the same as like, living in a basement in Nevada?? Uh-huh.

There are too many Americans on HN.

I think it's a sign of how far HN has strayed from its mid 2000's roots.

If we discovered for-sure even one single tiny microbe anywhere off Earth, that would only change a fundamental fact of the entire rest of the universe forever like when we discovered that the rest of the universe exists at all and that the Earth is not the center of Gods sno-globe. It would only mean there absolutely is other life out there even if we never meet them because of the sheer scale of everything. No big.

It's just the basic nature of reality changing. You can't eat it or fuck it, and your Netflix subscription will still be annoying, so what does it matter amirite?

Why does knowledge we don't have matter?

It’s still important to know you don’t know as opposed to not knowing you don’t know. In the former you have a chance of finding out.

I'm assuming this is sarcasm for the above comment

Yeah, I guess I had an intended tone without realizing it. I'm not sure I meant it to be sarcastic, but rephrasing his comment in questioning tone.

Oops

Well it matters because it's how we discover things and grow

If we say knowledge we don't know yet doesn't matter, then we will stop progressing anything.

Why go learn to bake bread, if the knowledge you don't know yet doesn't matter

Oh yeah, 100% agree and I'm going to use that bread baking analogy if its ever relevant again.

I swear I'm decent at conversation in real life, but I don't think I'm good at it online.

I don’t think you have a problem at all mate

There are so many areas of science that you could argue don’t make any difference to us. Should we stop research into black holes? How about astronomy all together? Why even spend money on NASA and any of its space exploration programs? Are all the people involved in these areas wasting their lives away? I mean all they’re doing is adding to the corpus of human knowledge. /s

There are a variety of terraforming proposals with not totally insane price tags. To some, creating a livable biosphere in 1/3rd earth gravity brings exciting space travel prospects.

With what atmosphere/water?

We can't even keep our current planet habitable.

That's what terraforming is - it creates/modifies/brings what is needed for an atmosphere and water and everything else.

We can't keep our current planet habitable because of current forcings that are not present on Mars, like varying governments, greed, incentives, etc. Plus, trying to live sustainably on Mars is likely to teach us more about how to live sustainably here.

It's quite a logical fallacy to suggest we shouldn't/can't try to make Mars human habitably simply because we're struggling with Earth right now. Doing both things at the same time would be related to each other and help each other.

  brings what is needed for an atmosphere and water and everything else.

Bring from where?

  governments, greed, incentives, etc.

You really think those forces will disappear on Mars?

You only need to look back a few 100 years for an example of this exact scenario playing out (the wild west in America).

The most likely candidate for the atmosphere is melted co2. Mara would have liquid oceans if the co2 ice caps were melted away. From there, a biosphere would need to be introduced for oxygen production. The main limiter on earth based animal life would be a lack of buffer gas such as nitrogen, and the excessive co2 concentrations.

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