Terraforming Mars!

[Ferox4]

You don't go eradicating something unique until you've sucked every tiny little bit of information you can out of it.

Funny - isn't that exactly what we continue to do to out own planet......

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Think for a minute - if you find life on Mars, life that is native to Mars, it will be the first extraterrestrial life found. For all we know, it might be the only such life we'd ever get to examine. The possible gains from studying it are unimanginable (whereas a new place for humans to live is thoroughly imaginable).

You're right. I can't imagine any possible gains from studying it.

IF life is found on Mars (and I am sure it will be) then I don't imagine it will be very exciting or alien in any way.

I expect it will be very much like the life we've seen on Earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, DNA and RNA-- the usual.


Wulf

 

[tarchon]

You're right. I can't imagine any possible gains from studying it.

IF life is found on Mars (and I am sure it will be) then I don't imagine it will be very exciting or alien in any way.

I expect it will be very much like the life we've seen on Earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, DNA and RNA-- the usual.

That in itself would be a stunning discovery. If it did have DNA - and I think the likelihood that a truly independently evolved form of life would have DNA is stunningly remote, despite the BS in sci-fi novels - the next step would be to sequence it and see how similar it is to terrestrial sequences. Even the most divergent terrestrial organisms share a large fraction of their genes, so having something that didn't share a common origin would say volumes about the contingency of biochemistry as we know it. Some evidence suggests that primitive terrestrial life originally was RNA-based and possibly that doublet codes preceded the familiar triplet code. Would Martian life be like that? Would it use something else? It could answer questions like "How significant is lateral gene transfer?" Are all terrestrial organisms genetically similar because they have a common ancestor, or did multiple lineages share genes over time? One dish of Martian bacteria could be worth a couple hundred journal articles.

 

[Umbran]

IF life is found on Mars (and I am sure it will be) then I don't imagine it will be very exciting or alien in any way.

Unless you're expecting that what life we find there is life we brought there ourselves, then this is highly unlikely. The chances of alien life being particularly similar to our own is comparable to the chances that a monkey with a typewriter would bang out a copy of "Heroes of High Favor: Halflings".

I expect it will be very much like the life we've seen on Earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, DNA and RNA-- the usual.

Well, the elemental components will be the same, sure. But the chemical ones? Not likely. Heck, life on Earth didn't always use DNA for information coding. Life on Earth didn't even always have data coding at all. Why should alien life also use the same mechanisms?

Even if alien life did use some of the same chemical units, how they'd use them would be different. We're talking different metabolic methods, different organelles performing cellular functions in different ways (that's assuming there's an analog to cellular structure). Whole new ways to do the all the things that we do. Of course there'd be lots to learn. ANd learning how someone else does a thing is often the best way to understand your own methods.

 

[Kemrain]

Io? Are you sure you don't mean Europa? Io seems a far-fetched candidate for life.

Beat me to it, Joshua. Io seems a poor candidate for life as we know it. Europa is a decent candidate, as far as I understand. Hydrothermal vents on earth have lots of life, I've heard theories about earth life origionating down there, and we have evidence thatthere may be hydrothermal vents on Europa, too. Chemosynthesis, instead of photosynthesis. Cool ideas.

- Kemrain the Chemosynthetic.

 

[Abstraction]

I think Wulf might be referring to the scientific theory that planets in our solar system, and quite possibly different solar systems, are not as separate as we might think. Over the last few million years, material from mars and earth have migrated to each other due to asteroid impacts. It may well be that most life in the universe originated from the same seeds, so to speak. Unless I'm remembering wrong, isn't it quite common to find amino acids in extraterrestrial rock? I remember something about how scientists couldn't explain that extraterrestrial amino acids, if having a basically random chemical origin, are all "left" wound like the amino acids in creatures on Earth. Chemically-created acids should have an equal chance of winding left or right.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Io? Are you sure you don't mean Europa? Io seems a far-fetched candidate for life.

Hmm, not sure then. I thought Io was the ice moon that had water underneath its icy surface.

 

[Staffan]

No, Io is the one with all the volcanos.

 

[Kemrain]

Hmm, not sure then. I thought Io was the ice moon that had water underneath its icy surface.

No, Io is the one with all the volcanos.

Dambit.. Too slow.. Yes, Io is, I believe, the most volcanicly active object in the solar system.

- Kemrain the, um, Vulcan? Ionian? Ion? Ionite?

 

[Turanil]

Heck, life on Earth didn't always use DNA for information coding. Life on Earth didn't even always have data coding at all.

Hey! It's the first time I heard about this! Until now I have been always convinced that DNA had been the basis of life since the beginning. Do you have a link of a website where I could learn more about this? Thanks.