Terraforming Mars!

[Umbran]

I suppose I have a more gnostic approach. Life exists by purpose--

Ah. I take it the other way. Purpose is a construct of life.

Even is life does exist through purpose, there's a large number of ways to fulfill any given purpose. Why would every place use one system.

I'd even think that purpose driven life would require that differences arise - local conditions vary. To fulfill the same purpose under different conditions, you'd need different systems.

See, you should have picked one that I wrote, you'd have had a wittier angle.

I used the one I'm most familiar with, because it is sitting on my shelf.

At any rate, I would say the chances of "alien life" being particularly similar to ours are astronomically better than the chance that "life" would arise spontaneously in two different places in two totally different forms. That is to say, I would bet on more similarities than differences.

Go look back at the Precambrian Era. There have already on this planet been life forms radically different to our own. If we've already had things that weren't particularly similar here, why should we expect them to be similar elsewhere?

 

[Pbartender]

Where did you get that pic Pbartender?

I made it, using one real-color photographic map of Mars, one grey-scale elevation map of Mars, and Photo Shop.

The map is actually "upside down"... South is to the top, and North is to the bottom. Rotating the image 180° reorients it to a more familiar view.

 

[rgard]

And despite the 'Employees must wash their hands' sign in the NASA restrooms...

More than that, we don't want to go around seeding microbial life either. It would be kind of embarrasing to find "life on Mars" only to discover that it was E. coli that stuck to one of the Viking probes.

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QUOTE]

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I don't purport to know to what purpose evolution has taken the path it has, but I do believe that the path it's taken is the best possible path for whatever purpose that may be.

Go look back at the Precambrian Era. There have already on this planet been life forms radically different to our own. If we've already had things that weren't particularly similar here, why should we expect them to be similar elsewhere?

I guess we could quibble on about what defines "radically different." I guess my point is that as such time as we discover anything that fits our definition of life, it is then by definition so similar as to offer us little new understanding. (A little unfair, I guess...)

We'd have to discover something that radically challenged our definition of life.

So... What have we learned from pre-Cambrian life-- for all intents "alien" life to ours-- that has so greatly enhanced the human condition that (by analogy) it would outweigh the advantages of terraforming Mars?

 

[Turanil]

The map is actually "upside down"... South is to the top, and North is to the bottom. Rotating the image 180° reorients it to a more familiar view.

Congratulations for that pic! However, I think I notice a little mistake... I mean, these green areas on the map denote vegetation. Well, plants that will be imported to Mars will have been bio-engineered to be adapted to the place. Now, Mars is far from the Sun and thus doesn't get much heat and light. As such, plants there couldn't afford to repel green light (in being green, the plant doesn't absorb light in the green spectrum, so get less energy). It means they probably will have to be bioengineered as to be black... :\ Hum, well, lets see how thinkgs are done when terraforming begins anyway.

 

[tarchon]

So... What have we learned from pre-Cambrian life-- for all intents "alien" life to ours-- that has so greatly enhanced the human condition that (by analogy) it would outweigh the advantages of terraforming Mars?

Molecular evolution is relevant right now to understanding pathogens like bird flu, Ebola, disease-resistant TB, and HIV, which are all pretty relevant to the human condition. Terraforming Mars I figure would cost quadrillions of dollars, take thousands of years, and in the end probably wouldn't work anything like we planned. It might take 100,000 years just for the crust to stabilize after all the mineralogy started to change.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Molecular evolution is relevant right now to understanding pathogens like bird flu, Ebola, disease-resistant TB, and HIV, which are all pretty relevant to the human condition.

I'm confused. Is the life on Mars completely different, and thus completely irrelevant to our own microbes, or is it similar enough to offer us some medical insight?

Terraforming Mars I figure would cost quadrillions of dollars, take thousands of years, and in the end probably wouldn't work anything like we planned.

Oh. Ok. Let's not do it then.


Wulf

 

[Pbartender]

Congratulations for that pic! However, I think I notice a little mistake... I mean, these green areas on the map denote vegetation. Well, plants that will be imported to Mars will have been bio-engineered to be adapted to the place. Now, Mars is far from the Sun and thus doesn't get much heat and light. As such, plants there couldn't afford to repel green light (in being green, the plant doesn't absorb light in the green spectrum, so get less energy). It means they probably will have to be bioengineered as to be black... :\ Hum, well, lets see how thinkgs are done when terraforming begins anyway.

The only trouble with that thinking is that we currently only know one biochemical that will convert sunlight to energy... Chlorophyll... That chemical by its very nature is green. Producing a plant will black leaves really wouldn't help, since the effective chemical will still repel the green light, unless you come up with an entirely new type of chlorophyll.

If we start work with the basic 'plants' that we know, such as blue-green algaes and lichens, it seems that it would be easier to bio-engineer the plants to live off of less heat and light (and in rusty soil with a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere), than to chemically engineer a new pigment that does everything chlorophyll does, but more efficiently.

 

[tarchon]

The only trouble with that thinking is that we currently only know one biochemical that will convert sunlight to energy... Chlorophyll... That chemical by its very nature is green. Producing a plant will black leaves really wouldn't help, since the effective chemical will still repel the green light, unless you come up with an entirely new type of chlorophyll.

Some organisms do already use extra pigments to supplement the chlorophyll, though the chlorophyll is still at the heart of the process. There's been a lot of speculation as to why the fundamental photosynthetic pigment has that peculiar absorption gap - there might have been some advantage to it long ago, or maybe it's just the best thing that came along.

 

[tarchon]

I'm confused. Is the life on Mars completely different, and thus completely irrelevant to our own microbes, or is it similar enough to offer us some medical insight?

That's what we don't know and won't ever know if we dump a bunch of terrestrial algae on it and hope for the best. The problem with objectively evaluating microbial evolutionary processes on Earth is that we know they get a lot of their genetic material by trading it around, which is even starting to look like the primary mechanism for emergence of new pathogenic organisms. Unfortunately, that tends to muddle the cladistics, so it's not really clear whether all microbes have very similar biochemistries because of common ancestry or because they all end up trading around the most useful genes. Having a really isolated population, or at least one with a very different history could say a lot about what processes really dominate microbial evolution. There's also the persistent "panspermia" question that lingers around the edges of the lateral gene transfer phenomenon, and what may or may not be living on Mars has a very direct bearing on that.