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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
Requires free registration:
http://nytimes.com/2004/03/07/weekinreview/07mars.html Now that there's conclusive evidence that at least part of Mars was once a water-soaked place where living things could have wriggled, swam or slithered, it takes only a few more leaps of speculation to wonder how they might have died. .... In a Martian rock that originally carried a few million microbes, a 10 percent survival rate would still leave a few hundred thousand Martian microbes to populate Earth. Or maybe there never were native Martians or Earthlings at all, and life originated from a third planet. "We can always blame it on Venus,'' Dr. Jakosky said. |
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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
"Kenneth Chiu" wrote in message ... Requires free registration: http://nytimes.com/2004/03/07/weekinreview/07mars.html Now that there's conclusive evidence that at least part of Mars was once a water-soaked place where living things could have wriggled, swam or slithered, it takes only a few more leaps of speculation to wonder how they might have died. .... In a Martian rock that originally carried a few million microbes, a 10 percent survival rate would still leave a few hundred thousand Martian microbes to populate Earth. Or maybe there never were native Martians or Earthlings at all, and life originated from a third planet. "We can always blame it on Venus,'' Dr. Jakosky said. Well first there was panspermia, where spores travelled through the cosmos in comets or on the solar wind etc, and tocuhed down in suitable environments and began to generate a heat signature, then the colonizers go out and and look for planets with that heat signature, and then probes are dispatched and more seeding takes place, then further crews go out and examine the environment and design life forms suitable for those environments, guys like this... http://www.crystalinks.com/ancientastronauts.jpg go out and genetic engineer some species based on future needs and an ecosystem is designed. Then eventually a moonship is dispatched with natives in the terraformed interior and they are deposited on the planet. As far as they are concerned, when they are finally deposited, it looks like a new earth and sky, and now there are rainbows, when before there weren't any. Then, the slave masters arrive when enough building has taken pace, and live like kings and queens and get as fat as hippos, and never work a day in their lives. Sound familiar? |
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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
"Rick Sobie" wrote in message news:arC2c.729794$X%5.144532@pd7tw2no... "Kenneth Chiu" wrote in message ... Requires free registration: http://nytimes.com/2004/03/07/weekinreview/07mars.html Now that there's conclusive evidence that at least part of Mars was once a water-soaked place where living things could have wriggled, swam or slithered, it takes only a few more leaps of speculation to wonder how they might have died. .... In a Martian rock that originally carried a few million microbes, a 10 percent survival rate would still leave a few hundred thousand Martian microbes to populate Earth. Or maybe there never were native Martians or Earthlings at all, and life originated from a third planet. "We can always blame it on Venus,'' Dr. Jakosky said. Well first there was panspermia, where spores travelled through the cosmos in comets or on the solar wind etc, and tocuhed down in suitable environments and began to generate a heat signature, then the colonizers go out and and look for planets with that heat signature, and then probes are dispatched and more seeding takes place, then further crews go out and examine the environment and design life forms suitable for those environments, guys like this... http://www.crystalinks.com/ancientastronauts.jpg go out and genetic engineer some species based on future needs and an ecosystem is designed. Then eventually a moonship is dispatched with natives in the terraformed interior and they are deposited on the planet. As far as they are concerned, when they are finally deposited, it looks like a new earth and sky, and now there are rainbows, when before there weren't any. Then, the slave masters arrive when enough building has taken pace, and live like kings and queens and get as fat as hippos, and never work a day in their lives. Sound familiar? Actually ------- no. |
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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
Thats been mentioned several times in this newsgroup:
(1) If life arises somewhere in the Solar System, it is likely to infect all other hospitable planets through meteor transfer. Hospitable planets may include Earth, old Mars, Europa, the upper clouds of Jupiter, Ganymede, Titan ... (2) Due to its smaller size, the surface of Mars may have become geologically stable a 10s or 100s of millions of years before Earth. Life could have arisen there first and infected Earth. |
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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
"rick++" wrote in message m... Thats been mentioned several times in this newsgroup: (1) If life arises somewhere in the Solar System, it is likely to infect all other hospitable planets through meteor transfer. Hospitable planets may include Earth, old Mars, Europa, the upper clouds of Jupiter, Ganymede, Titan ... (2) Due to its smaller size, the surface of Mars may have become geologically stable a 10s or 100s of millions of years before Earth. Life could have arisen there first and infected Earth. Wouldn't that be more likely, rather than earth infecting Mars, or is it possible for meteor transfer to go outward in the solar system? rj |
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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
In article ,
randyj wrote: ...the surface of Mars may have become geologically stable a 10s or 100s of millions of years before Earth. Life could have arisen there first and infected Earth. Wouldn't that be more likely, rather than earth infecting Mars, or is it possible for meteor transfer to go outward in the solar system? There's no particular inward/outward bias -- one direction is pretty much as easy as the other. What does matter is that it's much easier to get rocks *off* a small planet with weak gravity and a thin atmosphere. Mars is a particularly favorable case. Getting a rock off Venus or Earth is quite difficult, requiring a very large impact, something that happens very seldom nowadays. Most of the rocks of planetary origin in the inner solar system are from Mars or the Moon. (Mercury is a minor contributor -- the problem there is not that outward transfers are hard, but that a rock from Mercury has to get a *long way* outward without encountering the Sun first. Mercury is very deep in the Sun's gravity. We have one unusual meteorite which *might* be from Mercury, but nobody can be sure -- we don't have surface data from Mercury to compare it against.) -- MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. | |
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NYT article speculating about life on Mars
"Henry Spencer" wrote in message ... In article , randyj wrote: ...the surface of Mars may have become geologically stable a 10s or 100s of millions of years before Earth. Life could have arisen there first and infected Earth. Wouldn't that be more likely, rather than earth infecting Mars, or is it possible for meteor transfer to go outward in the solar system? There's no particular inward/outward bias -- one direction is pretty much as easy as the other. What does matter is that it's much easier to get rocks *off* a small planet with weak gravity and a thin atmosphere. Mars is a particularly favorable case. Getting a rock off Venus or Earth is quite difficult, requiring a very large impact, something that happens very seldom nowadays. Most of the rocks of planetary origin in the inner solar system are from Mars or the Moon. (Mercury is a minor contributor -- the problem there is not that outward transfers are hard, but that a rock from Mercury has to get a *long way* outward without encountering the Sun first. Mercury is very deep in the Sun's gravity. We have one unusual meteorite which *might* be from Mercury, but nobody can be sure -- we don't have surface data from Mercury to compare it against.) -- MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. | Thanks for that, very informative as always. Very much appreciate your replys. rj |
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