New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

Yes, agreed. I'm not arguing that the standards of Nuremberg were actually the right ones.

As for Allied war crimes, many of those were only criminalized after-the-fact. For example, the justification for nuking Nagasaki was "well, there's a factory nearby, so that's a valid military target".

[0] For example, "fiduciary duty to shareholders" was a valid excuse that saved several businessmen at Nuremburg, despite them running forced labor camps that were deadlier than Auschwicz.

That's a very good point, although the Nuremberg trials used torture to get confessions, so literally anybody could have been convicted.

Are you saying that supporting Hitler before the war should have been a war crime?

The initial ones did, but there were subsequent ones targeting entire organizations--one of which was the SS, to which Von Braun belonged.

Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods. These terms we use (rightwing, fascist) are new terms for ancient political dispositions. If I describe someone as imperialist, patriarchal, sexist, antisemitic, and racist, am I more likely to be talking about the Nazis, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Abbasids or the Puritans?

> Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers

My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

It's also funny to brand Caesar as an evil dictator. He was a revolutionary with very benevolent tendencies, both toward the masses and to his enemies. Dictatorships like Sulla's, which came before, were the brutal ones. What the people back then saw Caesar as was as a populist hero fixing a crumbling, broken, and corrupt system. Later, the people of the Empire would think back of the Republican era as one of horror and chaos -- because that's what you get with mob rule.

It's all very relativist.

I think, in the far future, people will regard the Nazis as a point on a continuum and all current governments today as not that far away on that continuum -- not like we do, thinking Hitler was the devil.

Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances. Maybe it's more productive to regard that environment as "evil" than raising people up to Anti-Christ status when the environment churns them out. In Caesar's case, that was a broken senatorial system and a provincial military system not designed to deal with how large and ambitious Rome started getting; in Hitler's, it was how brutally the European powers treated Germany after WW1 and the nearby rise of communism.

I would say an unemotional actor will recognize that those examples are objectively analogical. But that's not really here or there because I'm not saying one cannot have a well-founded moral reaction to the past. I'm saying it's an accident of our location in history that only Nazis receive this treatment -- well-deserved as it may be -- and admittedly one should expect any group to harbor resentment towards a vanquished enemy for some time. But this forum and particularly the context of this thread requires some stationary, objective analysis, which is impossible with the ankle-biting "by the ways."

However, haven't we roughly recreated the process in a lab in the last couple of decades?

And we may never have the answer because we simply can't know because no one was there because nothing was there. But there's a plausible enough explanation that we don't need to invoke the extraterrestrial and all of its problems.

And I think that's part of the appeal of panspermia, it makes life extraterrestrial. And if it is extraterrestrial in origin, then it could have happened elsewhere. Whereas if the genesis of life is contained to Earth, then the chances go down that it happened somewhere else.

But they don't have nearly as many opportunities to react as in a hot planet with an atmosphere. So pushing that life started there instead of only recognizing it's a very unlikely (but still possible) possibility isn't sustained by evidence.

For the appearance of life, a planet with a hot interior and volcanism is necessary, so that minerals that are stable only at high temperatures in the interior are ejected to the surface, where after cooling down they are no longer in chemical equilibrium, providing the energy necessary to drive the synthesis of organic macromolecules (by producing through chemical reactions with water reduced compounds like dihydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can reduce the abundant carbon dioxide and dinitrogen to eventually generate amino-acids).

The solar energy cannot play any role in the appearance of life, because harvesting it requires systems that are much more complex than those that appear naturally in the inorganic minerals and fluids.

While the Earth had certainly all the preconditions for the appearance of life right here, it is likely that Mars also had them in the beginning.

What another poster has said is plausible, i.e. the only reason for supposing that life could have been brought on Earth from another place is that life has appeared rather quickly on Earth, even if this is an event with a much lower probability than all the other events that have occurred after that during the evolution towards more complex forms of life, which have required billions of years to happen.

If life has been transferred to Earth from elsewhere, Mars is the only plausible source, because it had the conditions necessary to generate life long enough before Earth and because fragments from Mars have been frequently transported to Earth, where they fall as meteorites, after being ejected from Mars by impacts that happened there, which is easier than from other planets due to the lower gravity.

Despite the fact that it is not impossible, I doubt that life has been brought from Mars, but it is indeed puzzling that life seems to have appeared very quickly on Earth.

There are also facts that are hard to explain by the hypothesis of transfer from Mars. If that happened, than the forms of life that have been transferred must have consisted of at least one kind of autotrophic "bacteria" and at least several distinct kinds of viruses, to explain all the existing living beings as their descendants.

There is considerable evidence for the fact that the current genetic code of the nucleic acids is the product of a long evolution process. In the beginning there must have been a simpler code where many more combinations were equivalent and which encoded no more than 10 amino-acids, perhaps only 6 or even only 4 in its original variant. So very ancient "bacteria" may have superficially looked like modern bacteria but they must have had a quite different metabolism. In the hypothesis where life has moved between planets, there would be an open problem of when had the transfer happened during this early evolution of the genetic system.

On Earth there has remained no survivor with a much simpler genetic code (though there are a few examples of only slightly simpler genetic codes than the canonic variant). Perhaps the earlier living beings were completely uncompetitive with the modern ones, so they have been eaten or they have starved to death. In the case of a transfer from Mars, it would also exist the possibility that only living beings with a complex genetic code had survived through a transfer and the others had remained on Mars.

And it wouldn't be technologically hard to do it such that no trace remains over those timescales.

So, yes, that's "crazy". On the other hand, it's unfalsifiable in the absence of other theories.

800 million is greater than 3/4 billion?

I mean maybe its a lot compared to 20 years ago but in absolute terms? It’s practically nothing, isnt it?

[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...

Even if it was, it wouldn't have survived the impact that created the Moon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#...