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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

I'm not opposed to digging around in that sand for a bit. But how much time and money to you spend searching if you haven't found anything yet?

If you plot the hopes for life on Mars through the modern era, it really starts to look like a "god of the gaps" situation. Apparent artificial canals dug and maintained by an advanced civilization give way to mere vegetation covering the surface, which gives way to microbial life, which gives way to fossils of extinct life buried somewhere under the soil... Each time life on Mars isn't found, believers posit that it might still be in some yet smaller crack we haven't looked in yet.

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> But how much time and money to you spend searching if you haven't found anything yet?

Good question. I would like to spend $10B searching, which amounts to a one time cost of about $30/American.

Historically, investments in NASA have a very good return, since building cutting edge aerospace tends to directly percolate into the economy. Not to mention the technological advancement it will likely spur.

I’ll take those odds and double them!

The real question is, can rovers similar to the ones we have on Mars detect life in places where we know for sure have at least some life? We have to calibrate our expectations right? Given the sensors available on mars rovers, many of the samples of life found in Atacama would be inconclusive if found on Mars. There are a lot of interesting findings about analyzing sparsely distributed life in this paper. Here's a quote you might find amusing

> While life “follows the water” in the desert, it is scattered and its distribution follows the subtle reaches of the fog or that of invisible aquifers, which are dictated by complex geographical and topographical parameters. It can be abundant in a localized patch (millimeters to a few hundreds of meters in size) and then disappear for many kilometers. It can be present on one wall of a small gully and absent from the opposite wall only ten centimeters away. Keys to finding microscopic life are critical at all scales. They are found at the megascale (regional geology, morphology, topography, and climatology); at the mesoscale (a slope, a rock, a type of soil, a specific size of sediment); and at the microscale (a crack in a rock, pore and joint spaces, grain translucence). The success of finding life while exploring the desert on foot depends on integrating all of this information, a task which robotic exploration needs to achieve as well.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

On the other hand, we haven't dug extremely deep on the surface of Mars, and Mars lost its habitable status a really long time ago, which as a layman I understand means Mars has been battered by a dusty windy climate, that pushes dirt around alot, and solar radiation can get through in a myriad of ways and other not great things for life.

So I imagine, if there was evidence for life on Mars, before the habitability went sideways, then it would likely be many feet deeper than we ever dug.

I'm not holding my breathe, because the likelihood is pretty small, as all this happened 3.6 billion years ago, but if we did find undisputable evidence of civilization, it would be game changing.

I simply hope it isn't Prothean ruins and a map to the nearest Mass Relay, cause what comes next is a bad time.

From my understanding, it's doubtful Mars ever had a civilization. It's plausible it had life but only just so since it only had its habitable status for just about the amount of time it took life to first appear on Earth.

That would be assuming that it would have followed the same trend as Earth.

It’s highly likely you’re right and I acknowledge that, but it’s not an absolutely certainty that it would have taken as much time for life and possibly civilization on other planets as it did here on Earth

They could have had a more rapid development cycle for whatever reason. We simply don’t know definitively

Yea, it could have been more rapid or slower. Perhaps if it cooled down faster at the very start? I'm not sure, but I'd wager that the conditions couldn't have been that different. And it took multicellular organisms a few billion years to show up on Earth. We don't know definitively, but it seems highly probable we won't ever find remnants of complex life there.

Highly probable isn’t the same as not possible. IMO it’s worth the cost to find out

Why would we have found anything yet? Mars' surface has barely been explored.

Not too mention we're not really looking for fossils and we're staying away from the places with the highest chance of harboring life today because of contamination risks

the search has been far from exhaustive. Total mars rovers have traveled ~50 linear miles on the surface.

That is equivalent to driving from SF to San Jose and recording what you see out the window if your car.

The linked article is literally about a thing they just discovered. Apparently you were hoping they would discover something different?

Archaeologists dig down in $COUNTRY and discover copper wires: "we were the first to have a communications network!"

In $FAVORITE_COUNTRY, they dig and find even older: "we're the best!"

In $OTHER_COUNTRY the dig and find nothing: "we must have been the first to invent Wi-Fi!"

:-P

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