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Comment by Crito | Hacker News Reader

We basically have one shot, per body in the solar system, to find an example of life with an independent abiogenesis point. Right now biology only gets to work with a single example; the impact that finding another would have on the field really cannot be understated^W overstated.

Now, you may not be particularly interested in biology, preferring space travel, but you should be. Any realistic attempt to terraform Mars will require a lot of skill with genetic engineering. Furthermore, the discovery of life that can only be properly studied on Mars would provide a major boost to any colonization effort. The more 'kinds of science we use to justify the initial expenditure, the better.

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You're both right. Yes, we should check very carefully, but as you point out we have more than one body to play with. We should have a clearly defined cutoff point at which we stop looking for something that may not be there in the first place and do other things instead. Otherwise we're never going to get off the planet.

As these things go, Mars is far less interesting to me than Europa. That moon of Jupiter seems to have massive amounts of liquid water, geysers, ice quakes and plate tectonics, (presumably due to) tidal forces from Jupiter, and a thin oxygen atmosphere. Along with Saturn's moon Enceladus, it's the most promising place to look for other forms of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_(moon)

There is more than one body to play with, but Mars is among the better chances that we have (and I'd say certainly the easiest chance. Europa is the best chance, but it is not exactly easy to get out there).

Of course we need some sort of cutoff for how cautious we need to be, even if we do embrace caution. Slapping a McMurdo style base down on Mars so that biologists could work more efficiently would risk contaminating the planet, but I think that is a risk we should take (once we have confirmed that there is life there, it would probably be reasonable to loosen controls).

Seems we're ont he same page. In discussions like this my comments are partly tinged with frustration about how much more we could be doing at relatively modest cost, though activities int he private sector and from countries like China and India are greatly encouraging. I want the space colonies I was promised, dammit.

I wish humanity could fix its memory leaks before it goes out to buy more sticks of RAM.

Regardless of whether we fix the memory leak or buy more RAM we are still running our production service on a single server, and could do with a high-availability setup.

Either way, our deployment process to new servers leaves something to be desired.

We keep trying to automate it but the PHBs keep on shutting down project after project.

The one shot for Mars may have been missed, millennia ago, when rocks blasted from Earth landed on Mars.

On the geologic scale things get knocked around a lot.

Even if we suppose that panspermia is likely, it is still important that we avoid cross-contamination ourselves. Discovering that panspermia took place through natural processes would tell us a lot about how prevalent and resilient life may be in the universe. Furthermore, two instances of life with the same abiogenesis point, isolated and diverged sometime in the past, would be very valuable for biologists.

Furthermore, two instances of life with the same abiogenesis point, isolated and diverged sometime in the past, would be very valuable for biologists.

Isn't this something you can basically get on Earth? Perspermia doesn't really seem to be required.

To a limited degree, yes. Biologists study divergence of isolated species all the time; panspermia would give us a difference in degree, not kind.

There's no reason to assume that we are currently working with a single independent abiogenesis point on this planet, that is one plausible hypothesis among many and not one I particularly favor.

I am particularly interested in biology, enough to know that the chances of an Earth-adapted microbe or lichen running roughshod over any Mars-adapted life are roughly on the order of the LHC spawning a black hole when it was switched on. Analogies to organisms crossing between the continents and human populations of Earth (which you have not made but several posters have) are incredibly far off the mark. Whatever life has tenuously held to Mars, if it exists, will not be disturbed by our minuscule presence, and it will be sufficiently novel at the biochemical and sequence (will it even have sequences?) level to be readily recognizable, even if it is cultured from the 22nd equivalent of a Starbucks parking lot on Olympus Mons.

The life that we have available to study on earth right now has a common ancestor. There may have been multiple abiogenesis events, but life on earth stemming from other abiogenesis events has either died out, merged so as to be functionally indistinguishable, or has not been discovered. I am unaware of anyone working in biology under other models.

I suspect, as you do, that any Martian life will likely be recognizable as "life". The long term fear is of course that either things from earth will eat all of it, or it will eat everything from earth (that's less of a concern since quarantine in that direction is pretty easy). The short term is what we really need to be concerned about though. In the short term, the concern is that Martian life will be mistaken or written off as life from Earth.

This problem is exacerbated when we consider that the life on Mars that we are looking for could be former Earth life that hitched a ride on some rocks millions or billions of years ago. If we scoop up some Martian soil and find a few rather prokaryote-ish looking things bopping around in it, then exactly what we have just found becomes very hard to determine if our spacecraft was not sterile. Did it just find an example of convergent abiogenesis and evolution? Evidence of panspermia? Or did somebody in the assembly building sneeze on the scoop?

"Quarantine in that direction is pretty easy"

Until unrecognized Martian life jumps onto your happy home-bound spacecraft and starts colonising Earth. We can't even make sure recognised life from Earth is wiped from spacecraft...

That's just begging the question. The whole point here is that we shouldn't need "science" to somehow "justify" the colonization of Mars. Saying that it's a good thing because it "justifies" expenditure, is like saying that it was good for Hitler to continue WW2 because that's what incentivised the US to invade Europe: pragmatically it's correct, but pragmatism is really not what's debated here.

Personally I would like to see the priorities of "colonization vs science" reversed.

The expenditure does not need to be justified to people like you or me; it is obvious to us that we should colonize Mars even if it is currently a dead sterile rock. Sadly however I have not yet become emperor (work in progress), and funding for space exploration often requires short-term tangible justifications. This becomes more true the more expensive it gets.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it is important that any life that may be on Mars is discovered so that we can use those results to push for more funding. Anything that could accelerate the process should be investigated.

If that is unsatisfactory for you, I'll point out again that it isn't just a matter of politics and funding. The discovery and study of non-Earth life would provide countless opportunities for the advance of biology. An advanced understanding of biology is essential to the core mission of colonizing and terraforming Mars, even if I am made emperor.

I agree, but what you are saying is "assuming the status-quo, let's see if we can find something good about it". Whereas I'm saying: you might be right, but the status quo is still wrong, and we shouldn't be happy about it being wrong.

Concerning your last paragraph - while it may be true, I'm pretty sure that gaining terraforming-related knowledge plays a very minor role in NASA's research decisions, which is also something we shouldn't be happy about.

Anything that we learn of biology will help with the eventual terraforming. That is not the sort of thing that necessarily needs to be researched directly right now, researching things in general expands our knowledge base, giving something for terraforming research to stand and build on.

Blimey Charlie, I definitely wasn't expecting this discussion thread to be Godwinned.

I'd prefer the safe approach be taken as well, but I imagine even if there were contamination we would still be able to identify original Martian life by DNA or whatever.

Unless it just gets killed off too quickly.

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