Martian lake was able to support life for thousands of years

An ancient lake on Mars was capable of supporting life for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, researchers reported today based on findings from NASA's Curiosity rover. In March, NASA announced that the lake was once capable of supporting microbial life, but little more was known. Now researchers have shown that the lake existed around 3.5-3.6 billion years ago and actually contained an "Earth-like" environment. "There would have been some snow, maybe ice up in the mountains around the crater rim," John Grotzinger, project scientist for Curiosity, said at a press conference this morning. "It's pretty darn similar to Earth."

About 3.5 billion years ago — around the time life is thought to have first arisen on Earth — Mars had a large freshwater lake that might well have been hospitable to life, scientists reported Monday.
The lake lay in the same crater where NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity landed last year and has been exploring ever since. It lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, and possibly much longer.

www.theverge.com...

www.sciencemag.org...

reply to post by nighthawk1954


This is why extradimensional beings don't just come down and yell, "Hello Earthlings!" over their loudspeakers.... We've already destroyed one planet with our warring ways, will we make it a second, in light of World War III?

not going to bother doing a search but scientest did a exparment once.
using a vacum chamber and plants simalated mars .
at first teh plants started dieing but after a wile they started growing again.
and that was as mars is now .
But tired of ooo look mars may have had life. For god sake land a probe near the poles in the spring as they mealt the area TURNS GREEN.
alge? copper? well tired of rocks go check the ICE which btw is co2 ice and water ice.

reply to post by nighthawk1954


This is pretty big.

If Mars had a lake, and has been around for 3.5 billion years, it is quite plausible that life was existent there. Considering our Sun's losing angular momentum and the planets are drifting slightly outwards each year it is entirely possible (cba to do the maths) that in the long distant past (billions of years) Mars was much closer to the Sun and infact lay in the 'habitable zone' and it has simply 'died' as a planet the further it got away.

It has been officially claimed that Mars probably had great oceans billions of years ago and an oxygen rich atmosphere. Just throwing an idea out there, I'm not sure if my logic is completely sound on that and I don't know how a planet of Mars size and composition would react to such things, but if that was the case then it could have been exploding with life!

Billions of years is such a ridiculous time to comprehend. A whole human like civilisation can grow and disappear in millions yet alone billions. Regarding simple microorganisms, it seems pretty much a given that they are all across the universe, and possibly a significant few of our solar systems planets over however many billions of years.

reply to post by midnightstar


What Mars is missing is atmosphere and an ozone layer that would filter UV and other radiations - basically stuff that would kill living cells.

This news is big. Wonder if they will find any traces of life. S&F

reply to post by SuperFrog

This news is big. Wonder if they will find any traces of life. S&F

I agree...Also a fresh chewing gum for the ancient astronaut theory followers. Tsoukalos will again be pulling evidence from his arse

And don`t get me wrong, I do respect a man`s opinion though...

Shouldn't this be in space exploration instead of aliens ad UFOs ?

nighthawk1954
Mars had a large freshwater lake that might well have been hospitable to life, scientists reported Monday.

YAWN!

Wake me up when they actually find evidence of that potential life. Otherwise, they need to stick with the headline: LAKE COULD HAVE HELD LIFE -- BUT DIDN'T

Puzzling Streaks On Mars May Be From Flowing Water
Dark seasonal streaks on slopes near the Martian equator may be a sign of flowing salt water on Mars, liquid runoff that melts and evaporates during the planet's warmer months, scientists say.

www.space.com...

i think we are searching for life in the wrong planet

mars moon phobos or jupiter's europa however are really interesting

Blue Shift
Wake me up when they actually find evidence of that potential life. Otherwise, they need to stick with the headline: LAKE COULD HAVE HELD LIFE -- BUT DIDN'T

How many times and how good the research for remains of life been on Mars? just some probes. if something happened so long ago as in millions or so, any form of life could have vanished so hard that it may definitely not be found there. Also I don't see any excavations or anything significant being made. Perhaps if one day they finally send humans there and who can drill deep in the surface...

Mars looks like the future of the Earth, I don't see any reason why the ideas of people living on it, moving to earth like Lemur to not be a possibility (especially with humans' bizarre advancement as species towards others and I mean not physiologically)