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Comment by neverokay | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.

I don't remember where I read it, but somebody wrote that a geologist with a hammer could do more science in an afternoon than all our mars probes have done combined. Its hard to do science with a rc car, even if said car is cutting edge.

That’s true. Look at how many time SG-1 got into an issue even with the MALP. That’s with a much quicker wireless connection too.

Sounds like a great opportunity to rewatch one of my all time favorite episodes, "Revisions" (s07e05)

What if we send a humanoid drone next?

Give it a sufficiently advanced AI, and that might work.

Current AI isn’t ready for that yet, though. What’s available to us couldn’t even be effectively used for research on Earth’s out-of-reach places, much less on Mars. In some years, however… That would be curious.

Is it possible to fly on such a thin atmosphere? Doubt it.

Humans can also take on new research objectives on the fly while rovers/probes can only ever do what they were designed to. The difference in flexibility, capability, and speed are vast.

For half the history of life on Earth there were no multicellular animals at all[1]. Given how quickly life on Earth arrived I wouldn't be surprised if there were bacteria on Mars. But given how long it took Earth life to develop Eukaryotic cells I'd be surprised if Mars ever developed something as sophisticated as an amoeba. Still, Bacteria do leave fossils like stromatolites and some scientists even think some Mars rock parts look sort of like bacteria fossils[2]. But those are more ambiguous than little skeletons or shells.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001#:~:text=In%2....

That’s the part that still boggles my mind. How could there not be some kinda micro bacteria on all these planets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobacterium

Why don't we just teach kids music by having them buy a cheap $3 plastic recorder and simply glue a mic to it that connects to a 13-minute-and-48-second delay line which feeds into to an expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones that they wear during all practice sessions?

Easy peasy. :)

If it’s the only option at the moment, sure let’s do it.

Beethoven’s ear trumpet.

This sounds like what Charles Hinton did with jungle gyms for children. They were originally made to teach children "monkey instinct" to be able to navigate better through 3-dimensional space, hopefully increasing their capacity to visualize and understand 4-dimensional space. It didn't work, but it's very interesting!

https://nowiknow.com/mathletes/

If you took at fairly smart person, give them a set of Earth maps, and had them pick one spot where they could fake landing a rover, and let them travel within a few hundred meters of that spot and drill, like, 100 spots, I wonder what the odds of them finding a fossil?

land on a travertine deposit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travertine

Mars is big, fossils are small.

There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops with them.

Layered sedimentary rocks like the ones pictured in https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-fin... are probably good candiates.

The trouble is that while common, we still had to explore our whole planet pretty thoroughly to find them.

We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right now.

That's fair. I'd expect knowing where we're likely to find them on Earth does at least help inform our few Mars landers' choice of landing sites, though.

Would orbiting satellites with lidar sensors be able to find suitable candidate sites for digging?

Given how long it took for Earth to develop multicellular life, Mars was probably pretty dead before it could take off(although it's very likely microbes still exist on Mars). But who knows, maybe Earth was late to the multicellular party, but I doubt it. If Mars did somehow evolve to multicellular life before Earth it's very likely that the multicellular would have been seeded to Earth via asteroids with something akin to a martian tardigrade

OR could 20m deep drilled core samples recovery remnants of RNA based live??

We need a hero.

Isn't that what Perseverance does?

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