Wow! Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Primitive Life, NASA Says

To augment this thread, there is a thread also discussing the news (you have to go to somewhere on the second page to start the discussion, this thread was waiting for the news conference to start...but, if you skip the first page, you miss Phage making a joke).

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The consensus forming on that thread is that the Ph balance being in the "livable" range is the major news from the press conference.

The biggest news there is that phage made a joke....

Originally posted by Destinyone

Originally posted by flexy123
Mars soil seems to be the perfect soil to grow plants,

"
The powder from the drilling turned out to have a wealth of chemicals in it, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. These are ingredients for life, scientists said.
"

Probably better than the # I am using here in Spain trying to grow my peppers

Too bad they didn't send a liter of water to Mars as part of the scientific experiments. Dump it on the soil, come back a week later for further analysis. Just to see if the initial analysis had changed.

Des

That would be impossible at the current time since the pressure on Mars would make the water boil/evaporate/freeze all at the same time. For this to be possible, it would first need a major terraforming action with the goal to get the atmospheric pressure down, until then water couldn't exist on the surface.

do you notice how they have to use the word "primitive" to downplay it just a little ...lol
life is life when it comes to life not originating on earth, if it could support primitive life then i guess "intelligent" life isn't out of the question...ya think...they must honestly think we are lower life forms that cant handle the "whole" truth.
great news though!

WOW could you believe that, rover found minerals that NASA knew were there.
C'mon NASA, we want meat, in large ammounts!!!

How refreshing??

Arken, you deserve a beer mate...cheers


Edit:

Nice to see that this idea of life been supported at this stage by NASA.

reply to post by neoholographic


NASA says do they?

And now somehow that means anything at all?

LOTS of people have been saying this since the 70's, the Viking experiment which showed positive test results for life, and then was denied...the 1996 ALH84001 meteorite showed fossile microbes, that are now becoming more acknowledged by the mainstream, but still argued against passionately...mostly by armchair amateurs on here.

It's obvious flowing water was all over Mars, always has been obvious just by looking at the myriad evidence of scaring on the geology from water erosion and river flows.

Hoagland has been saying this since at least the 90's, but is vilified at every turn, again mostly by the same armchair critics falling over themselves to be the first to cast the first insult his way.

And now...NASA has thrown it's hat into the ring...whoooweee NASA, only about 40 years too late with the announcement...which now means pretty much very, old news.

Originally posted by zilebeliveunknown
WOW could you believe that, rover found minerals that NASA knew were there.
C'mon NASA, we want meat, in large ammounts!!!

Actually it's healthy to disclose such news in a step by step manner so as to avoid mass hysteria and to make the idea believable or even acceptable by the masses.

Unfortunately, many are not as aware about the possibility of life on mars or they simply don't give a whit as much as we do here on ATS.

Just throwing that out there...

Peace

reply to post by InnerPeace2012

Interesting, but it doesn't hold water any more. As poster above you stated this dragging is happening for over 40 years, if now isn't the time, when? 40 more years?

Of course Mars had microbes. It still does. The Earth sprays them out like a lawn sprinkler. Bacteria and virii fling off the planet constantly and has since life first arose here. Our gravity is not enough to keep them here. Every moon and planet with the exceptions of Venus and Mercury have been contaminated. There are microbial spores on Pluto. From Earth. They get pushed along by the solar wind. And every place it is even remotely possible for them to live has them living there.

I would not be surprised to learn the local stellar systems have been contaminated too. Earth has been spewing microbes for 3 billion years. That is a long time for them to spread.

It is even possible that Earth's life was spread here by another passing planet billions of years ago. Space travel is no problem when you can go dormant for tens of thousands of years like bacteria can.

This is no surprise at all.

reply to post by Druscilla


Oh yeah. I was meaning to ask this...what exactly is your avatar of?

Originally posted by Robonakka
Of course Mars had microbes. It still does. The Earth sprays them out like a lawn sprinkler. Bacteria and virii fling off the planet constantly and has since life first arose here. Our gravity is not enough to keep them here. Every moon and planet with the exceptions of Venus and Mercury have been contaminated. There are microbial spores on Pluto. From Earth. They get pushed along by the solar wind. And every place it is even remotely possible for them to live has them living there.

I would not be surprised to learn the local stellar systems have been contaminated too. Earth has been spewing microbes for 3 billion years. That is a long time for them to spread.

It is even possible that Earth's life was spread here by another passing planet billions of years ago. Space travel is no problem when you can go dormant for tens of thousands of years like bacteria can.

This is no surprise at all.

Please provide evidence of your statements.

"The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for micro-organisms," Paul Mahaffy, SAM principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.
The fine-grained John Klein rock also contains clay minerals, suggesting a long-ago aqueous environment — perhaps a lake — that was neutral and not too salty, researchers said.

We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably — if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it, said Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena.

news.yahoo.com...


Step by step....... Step by step....

Why is everyone so fascinated by Mars? Could have doesn't mean did. The place is a dead rock. It's time to move on. There's nothing there.

This melodrama, drummed up by NASA, is designed to keep the funding coming in so they don't dry up and blow away. They are becoming less and less relevant.

reply to post by 123143


Everyone's so fascinated because Mars is allegedly the closest thing we have that resembles Earth.

This I find very funny, because although we humans have for centuries looked for other life out there in the universe (cause to most people, we're the only ones that could ever possibly exist in the massively massive universe), whenever we find something that could point to it as a clue, we're also the first ones to downplay it and be as skeptical as possible.

We could have a 1080p video of an alien walking across the surface of Mars to his ship, and we would say "Oh, well it's obviously just a result of an unusual angle of the sunlight reflecting off the Martian surface that causes this illusion. For me to believe.....I'll need to speak and shake hands with it."

reply to post by Dawnbreaker


That's ridiculous. It's an arid rock. It's never going to be anything BUT an arid rock.

Originally posted by 123143
reply to post by Dawnbreaker

 

That's ridiculous. It's an arid rock. It's never going to be anything BUT an arid rock.

Thank you very much for this precious truth......

Originally posted by Arken

Originally posted by 123143
reply to post by Dawnbreaker

 

That's ridiculous. It's an arid rock. It's never going to be anything BUT an arid rock.

Thank you very much for this precious truth......

Use your eyes. Only a fool would think there is any hope of a future there and any past is irrelevant.

reply to post by 123143

Use your eyes. Only a fool would think there is any hope of a future there and any past is irrelevant.

Use your Mind, (if you have one)...

Only a fool would think there isn't/was't life up-there.

And the "past" is very important because is right "the place" from where you came....

You read too many comic books.