Mars may have had life 4 billion years ago

www.sciencedaily.com...

ScienceDaily (July 29, 2010) — A new article in press of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters unveils groundbreaking research on the hydrothermal formation of Clay-Carbonate rocks in the Nili Fossae region of Mars. The findings may provide a link to evidence of living organisms on Mars, roughly 4 billion years ago in the Noachian period.

Brown explains: "We suggest that the associated hydrothermal activity would have provided sufficient energy for biological activity on early Mars at Nili Fossae. Furthermore, in the article we discuss the potential of the Archean volcanics of the East Pilbara region of Western Australia as an analog for the Nochian Nili Fossae on Mars. They indicate that biomarkers or evidence of living organisms, if produced at Nili, could have been preserved, as they have been in the North Pole Dome region of the Pilbara craton."

I am really not surprised if it turns out life could be there. I mean mars to me is like a mother planet.

I want you guys to say why this does or doesn't surprise you that life could be on mars.

Here's a picture of Mars with water 4 million to today. looks like a miniature Earth. Wonder what happened to the little planet.

Originally posted by Romantic_Rebel
Here's a picture of Mars with water 4 million to today. looks like a miniature Earth. Wonder what happened to the little planet.

If we count the plate tectonics mars used to have then mars would resemble Earth very similarly.


I wonder could other planets with plate tectonics show different formations even if the 2 planets are proportional to each other?

Similar to any star that is less than 3.2 solar masses but more than 2 always become a neutron star after a gravitational collapse.

I am wondering if Mars was the first planet in this system to have life similar to ours, then was destroyed (catastrophic planetary changes, or arrogant, destructive humanoids).

could planet Earth be the second "experiment" or second "chance", and could our planet be headed in the same direction like Mars did?

This doesn't suprise me because there is 'prolly life there now. Yes, I'm talking microbes and stuff, but life none the less. All the evidence points in that direction.

This is very interesting, especially as one of my friends i went to highschool with works for the european space agency, he is a aerospace engineer, and they have recently put him in training to build a mars rover..... and from what i have been told, they will be sending the rover to mars in 3-5 years.

There was an episode of Sifl & Olly where they interviewed Mars. It went like this:

Mars: "I had more people than you once, you know."

S&O: "What happened?"

Mars: "You'll find out."

Exactly. At some point in time, providing the sun lasts long enough, Earth's interior will cool and Earth will be in the same boat as Mars. There is quite a bit of geological evidence to support flowing water and thus potentially an atmosphere capable of harboring life once existed on Mars.

I hope at some point we discover remnants of stromatolites on Mars.

ETA: xxcaliber, check out this article. I can post several more if need be. Saying the Earth's interior will never cool doesn't make a whole lot of sense according to the law of conservation:
Earth's Heat Sources




[edit on 30-7-2010 by Protostellar]

[edit on 30-7-2010 by Protostellar]

My personal theory on Mars based things I've read in books, and on the internet, and from looking at those weird anomolous photos of Mars, and college astronomy class twenty four years ago. The theory is that Mars probably was in an orbit closer to the sun and earth in the past. I believe something struck the planet Mars and glanced off of it making the huge scrape across the side if the equator region. This huge bump/ accident knocked Mars into its current orbit and knocked the water off it. The Earth took on the water, I read somewhere Earth has more water now than it did orginally. The people on Mars were probably similar to the Egyptians, were killed, and the ruins were left behind to see. I feel Earth and Mars were both orginally colonies or seeded civilizations, and Mars just didn't make it. Earth may suffer the same fate ultimately if we don't develop Weapons to destroy in comming asteroids, and if we don't leave to colonize other areas in our solar system. We really do live on a magnficent gift, and it is fragile.

earths interior will never cool as its earths mass taht creates the heat in the first place .
mars on the other hand is only 1/3 the size of earth but even with taht I am willing to bet its interior is still liquid (without the iron ball spinning to make a magnitic fild)
and personly if any one here has studied mars you will NOTE there is a creater 3000 miles across ( the size of the US) so a very very big rock hit mars.
and when that riock hit (FACT the creator is there)
it exploded as rocks hitting at 30k mhp will .
mars being much smaller and thiner air to begin with the explosion would have BLOW 3/4 of the air to escape volisty . In orther word on that one day mars died lost its air and most of its water because of one big rock .
now how long agaio was this we dont know how old that creator is yet but we can find out . wouldnt it be a shock if this impact was 50 k yaers agaio

reply to post by xxcalbier


What causes the heat at the core of the earth is radioactive decay not the gravity there.

(And you should really watch your spelling and grammar.)

[edit on 30-7-2010 by Gentill Abdulla]

Mars lost it's magnetosphere long ago due to it's smaller size. That made it vulnerable and it's atmosphere was eventually blown away in one or several severe solar storms over time.

We know Mars still has some atmosphere as we have pictures of dust devils moving about the rovers. It also appears there are some remnants of at least aquatic life. The pictures of what appears to be sand dollars & sea urchins in the mars sand is enough for me.


Phoenix Lander Video Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University






[edit on 30-7-2010 by verylowfrequency]

Billions?

nah, I guess its far more recent.

Not 4 billion years ago. I see no reason why life on Mars shoud have appeared any earlier than on Earth, and given it's smaller size, quite possibly later.

But maybe a few hundred million years ago, yes.

Then, because Mars is so much smaller, its core cooled. It lost its magnetic field. Without a magnetic field the solar wind started stripping its atmopshere away, whilst at the same time any primitive life was suddenly subject to cosmic rays.

Life died out. Mars died. A failed chance.

However, this couldn't have happend all that lomg ago as Mars still has some atmosphere and just maybe some primitive life managed to survive the comsic ray barrage, buried in the soil or the ice ....

Maybe Nibiru smackd Mars into its orbit 26,000 years ago? Killing all
Martian people/ life. It will be really interesting when the astronauts go to Mars and find out about that Cydonia region. I hope I am alive to read all about it. How exciting!!

Originally posted by Gentill Abdulla
I am really not surprised if it turns out life could be there. I mean mars to me is like a mother planet.
I want you guys to say why this does or doesn't surprise you that life could be on mars.

I won't be surprised at all if we find life on Mars, nor will I be surprised if it turns out life originated there and we are all descendants of martians, meaning it COULD be a mother planet for life on Earth.

However while I think it's reasonable to speculate about that possibility, I must admit I don't quite consider Mars a mother planet yet until we find some evidence to suggest that it is.

Originally posted by Essan
Not 4 billion years ago. I see no reason why life on Mars shoud have appeared any earlier than on Earth, and given it's smaller size, quite possibly later.

Couldn't Mars have cooled to habitable temperatures sooner than Earth did, BECAUSE of it's smaller size? The greater surface area to mass ratio and less radioactively generated heat compared to Earth would cause it to cool more quickly creating favorable conditions for life on Mars while Earth was still a sea of molten lava.

openthefuture.com...

News today from NASA that they've confirmed the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere, concentrated in three areas (one of the major sources, Nili Fossae, is shown here). For a variety of reasons, this offers the strongest evidence yet that Mars may have an active biology under the surface...Then there's the possibility that said Martian microbes would have a biology essentially identical to that found on Earth. The most plausible explanation for that would be that Earth life actually started on Mars (which cooled faster than Earth, so would have started its biology sooner) and was exported via Martian rocks ejected from massive impacts and hitting Earth as meteorites.

Now do you see a reason why life on Mars could have appeared earlier than on Earth? It's because Earth stayed too hot for life longer than Mars did.

I'm not sure the methane proves there is still life in Mars, but it's possible. There could be liquid water, and simple life forms (microbes?) living below the surface.

[edit on 31-7-2010 by Arbitrageur]

nice thread but i believe in panspermia.

earth and mars have/had the same type of life except for the variables that would shape it to survive.

from what i've seen in the rover pics, no doubt life is there now and was there big time not too long ago.

as too if it started first or later, i don't know. i don't think it matters.


we could have picked up some extra when it was mashed?

i think life starts when it can. 2 days or 1billion years.

reply to post by Gentill Abdulla

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Mars had life 4 billion years ago.

Our understanding of the universe is at an early grade level in comparison to the post graduate level we still need to attain. It seems that every day I come on here there’s a thread about a new discovery that challenges our current knowledge assumptions of space and beyond.

In regards to the temperatures and conditions on Mars, either in the present or the past, they may suggest that we didn’t originate from there but it doesn’t take into account other forms of life, micro organisms or otherwise. Extremophiles on earth proved that life can exist in places where we didn’t believe it was possible decades or centuries earlier.

Slightly off topic, but if Mars' conditions were favorable at some point in the past and was our mother planet, that only answers the question that life didn’t originate here. It still leaves the unanswered questions of how we got there, if we originated there and how we got here.

We have so many unanswered questions.

ok, in their words, mars had water, still does in 1 form or another, dubious pictures, it MAY have had life 4billion years ago.

now, here on earth we know stomatelites formed billions of years ago.

think!

it is 45 million MILES away, not light years, we share the same sun, born from the same space crap! lol,

we had 5 major extinction events on earth and we froze into a snowball 750mil years ago.

how and what survived?

why would mars have a different biology than earth? same kind of stuff there, right?

life won't die, probably even if the planet got sucked into a black hole.

so there is and always was life there, intelligent, maybe got off in enough time. who knows, yet.

for heavens sake, homo saps lived through the ice age and god knows what.

let alone the parasites that are still with us.

no doubt mars had/has life, then and now.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me, but I would quite honestly shed real tears of joy if proof of extraterrestrial life, even microbial life, were verifiably discovered. It would mean that at least two planets in one solar system (Earth and Mars) were at some time capable of supporting life. It would suggest that where life can evolve and thrive, it does. To have confirmation of what is for now only an assumption or hypothesis would quite frankly be an immense relief.

It wouldn't prove that other intelligent life exists definitively, but it would make it much more likely than it already is. Certain factors of the Drake equation are currently assumptions, and if they're wrong - if in fact they are actually much lower than we assume they are - the probability of advanced, intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy actually becomes quite low. It's only when the current assumptions are used that we end up with any real probability of intelligent life capable of communication. If we find proof of even microbial life on Mars, one or two of those factors can be increased with a solid, factual basis, and the probability for intelligent life goes up along with them.

I await that day eagerly.