Mars: Emerging or Dying?

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Mars is assumed to be dead/dying after having been Earth-like earlier in its history. That view is convenient for people who want to feel free to explore, colonize, mine, terraform, or otherwise do with Mars what they will.

What if, however, Mars is nascent and the core-melting and subterranean water are early signs that Mars is evolving to be a larger and more Earth-like planet?

How could Mars be growing, though?

PLANETARY PRECIPITATION FROM SOLAR WIND

The sun is constantly ejecting material and it has been throughout its life. If the solar system was once a protoplanetary disk/cloud, then the planets are basically condensates of the solar atmosphere. Now the solar sky seems to have all but cleared between the sun and Mars, except for the solar wind and of course the energy that the sun delivers to the planet.

Consider a strange hypothesis for a moment that planets evolve mechanisms for absorbing energy from sunlight and transmitting it underground. Why would such a mechanism evolve? Simply because energy seeks and creates whatever paths it can to work its way into whatever direction it's being blocked from going. This is a corollary of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy.

PERCHLORATES
Martian chlorophyll.

Perchlorates have been found on the surface of Mars. This compound contains energy, probably as a response to sunlight. As chlorophyll evolved to absorb and store solar energy on Earth, these perchlorates may be evolving to do so on Mars.

Since Mars isn't shielded by a magnetic field or thick atmosphere, it is logical that the solar energy would be transported from the surface down underground, similar to the way sunlight on Earth gets absorbed by the forest canopy and transmitted down to the ground level via the trunks of trees. Maybe there are similar mechanisms that have evolved on Mars to transport captured energy underground.

DEPOSITION OF SOLAR WIND AND MASS BUILD-UP ON MARS

If solar wind is depositing dust on Mars, which is building up, it is admittedly an incredibly slow geological process. However, if energy is being absorbed and transported underground, that energy may be building up and causing the core to heat and melt. It may be that once the core melts sufficiently to emit a more protective magnetic field around the planet, more complex forms of life will be able to evolve.

In short, it may be that Mars is gradually building up mass and internal energy from the sun, which will gradually cause the evolution and complexification/diversification of life forms, similar to what has happened on Earth, except Martian life would be uniquely the product of its own evolutionary creation process using the materials available to it there and the energy dynamics of the climate where it evolves, e.g. in underground caves (maybe the same way life first evolved on Earth by absorbing heat from volcanic vents at the bottom of the oceans).

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Did you watch a youtube video, and you're now summarizing here? You apparently know very little about Mars.

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@Setanta,

Knowing very little about a subject, many subjects, has never stopped you from busting out all over, Set. This sounds like your usual fare, Set opinions with zero evidence/discussion.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Did you watch a youtube video, and you're now summarizing here? You apparently know very little about Mars.

Do you understand that it is possible to discuss alternative theories to the ones advanced by NASA, etc.?

1 Reply

@livinglava,

For starters, your claim that life on this planet (the one I'm assuming you inhabit with the rest of us here) originated in submarine, volcanic vents is unsubstantiated by you. I seriously doubt that you can substantiate it, other than, perhaps, with a youtube video. Extremophiles in volcanic vents, the boiling ponds around the geysers at Yellowstone and the ice rivers of Antarctica derived from already existing life forms, and then colonized those environments. There is no good reason at all to believe that they arose independently in such environments.

The atmosphere of Mars is so thin that at any appreciable elevation, water will break down into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen. The lowest elevation on Mars has a pressure that varies between 18 and 20 millibars--to put that into our context, the atmospheric pressure at mean sea level on this planet is 1013 millibars. As for Antarctica, it is balmy compared to Mars. The mean temperature on Mars at most elevations runs from 182 K to about 200 K--water freezes at 273 K. The warmest place on Mars is a south-facing slope in the immediately sub-equatorial region of the Martian southern hemisphere, in the daytime, in summer. The temperature on such a sunny slope might, might, reach 21 or 22 C--which is about 70 F. It plunges back into extreme sub-zero temperatures at night.

The soil of Mars is so salt that it is doubtful that even halophiles from Earth could survive independently in those conditions. Volcanism ended on Mars more than a million years ago, so even if your silly claim about life arising in volcanic vents were true, it ain'ta gonna happen on Mars. As for the Solar Wind (an inaccurate term), it's not depositing particles to any appreciable amount, but it is stripping away the upper atmosphere of Mars.

It is not simply NASA (I don't know and don't care what beef you have with them) who have confirmed this data. The Russians have landed rovers on Mars. Both the ESA and ISA have satellites orbiting Mars. Britain's rover failed to deploy its solar panels. The ESA had a joint operation with Russia which landed a rover, but it crash-landed. I don't believe the ISA (Indian Space Agency) ever tried to land a rover. The point, however, is clear--there is a wealth of data supporting the narrative of conditions on Mars as I have described them, and from more sources than just JPL/NASA.

Come on . . . post the link to the youtube video that inspired you. I could use a good laugh.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

For starters, your claim that life on this planet (the one I'm assuming you inhabit with the rest of us here) originated in submarine, volcanic vents is unsubstantiated by you. I seriously doubt that you can substantiate it, other than, perhaps, with a youtube video. Extremophiles in volcanic vents, the boiling ponds around the geysers at Yellowstone and the ice rivers of Antarctica derived from already existing life forms, and then colonized those environments. There is no good reason at all to believe that they arose independently in such environments.

Another of the world renowned Setanta no evidence proclamations. It's just "'Cause Setanta says so".

And what is even more stunningly hypocritical, you chastise the other side for having no evidence.

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@livinglava,

Too many “maybes”, “what if’s”, and unsupported assumptions. Good SciFi has at least some grounding in real science, otherwise it’s just fantasy, and fantasy gets really painful when it pretends to be science.

If you want to speculate on something or write a story you need to give it a credible foundation and then extrapolate from there. And the more credible the extrapolations are at each step, the more compelling the speculation.

As it stands right now, it’s like hearing hooves in the distance and saying “maybe it’s a herd of unicorns”, without explaining why that makes more sense than a herd of horses.

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I would like to point this out, once again:

Quote:

It is not simply NASA . . . who have confirmed this data. The Russians have landed rovers on Mars. Both the ESA and ISA have satellites orbiting Mars. Britain's rover failed to deploy its solar panels. The ESA had a joint operation with Russia which landed a rover, but it crash-landed. I don't believe the ISA (Indian Space Agency) ever tried to land a rover. The point, however, is clear--there is a wealth of data supporting the narrative of conditions on Mars as I have described them, and from more sources than just JPL/NASA.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

For starters, your claim that life on this planet (the one I'm assuming you inhabit with the rest of us here) originated in submarine, volcanic vents is unsubstantiated by you. I seriously doubt that you can substantiate it, other than, perhaps, with a youtube video. Extremophiles in volcanic vents, the boiling ponds around the geysers at Yellowstone and the ice rivers of Antarctica derived from already existing life forms, and then colonized those environments. There is no good reason at all to believe that they arose independently in such environments.

Obviously everything we 'know' about the distant past is theory built around what can be observed directly in the present and defined as supporting the theories constructed. Imo, science is more about the critical thinking process than about deferring to 'established' theories, so I post this here to engage in critical discussion, not argue about conflicts between established science and science fiction.

I think the farther back you go, the hotter the Earth was. Nowadays we can look at underwater volcanic vents as being relatively segregated from the rest of the oceans and the (cooled) land, so extremophiles are associated with those special hot spots like volcanoes and geysers, but the farther back you go, the less distinction there would have been between those hot spots and the rest of the environments where liquid water was available to support cellular evolution.

Quote:

The atmosphere of Mars is so thin that at any appreciable elevation, water will break down into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen. The lowest elevation on Mars has a pressure that varies between 18 and 20 millibars--to put that into our context, the atmospheric pressure at mean sea level on this planet is 1013 millibars. As for Antarctica, it is balmy compared to Mars. The mean temperature on Mars at most elevations runs from 182 K to about 200 K--water freezes at 273 K. The warmest place on Mars is a south-facing slope in the immediately sub-equatorial region of the Martian southern hemisphere, in the daytime, in summer. The temperature on such a sunny slope might, might, reach 21 or 22 C--which is about 70 F. It plunges back into extreme sub-zero temperatures at night.

Are you just noting this or does it have some bearing on what I posted?

Quote:

The soil of Mars is so salt that it is doubtful that even halophiles from Earth could survive independently in those conditions. Volcanism ended on Mars more than a million years ago, so even if your silly claim about life arising in volcanic vents were true, it ain'ta gonna happen on Mars. As for the Solar Wind (an inaccurate term), it's not depositing particles to any appreciable amount, but it is stripping away the upper atmosphere of Mars.

First, it's not my silly theory that there could be underground life. There has supposedly been water discovered underground and there are methane vents suggesting some kind of methane-producing activity going on.

As for the solar wind stripping away atmosphere, that happens on Earth too, but the magnetic field protects and holds some ionized atmospheric gas, as well as channeling some solar ions to the poles as aurora. In short, there is no clear separation between solar wind and upper atmosphere, because either can lose material to the other.

It may be that heavier elements of the solar wind get deposited on Mars while lighter ones are carried off. Iron and oxygen are two of the most prevalent elements in solar wind, I believe, and iron oxide is also what makes Mars red, isn't it?

Quote:

It is not simply NASA (I don't know and don't care what beef you have with them) who have confirmed this data.

I have no problems with NASA. You don't have to dislike some person or agency to question their theories. Science isn't about agreeing with your friends and disagreeing with your enemies. It's about thinking critically and constructing alternate hypotheses and theories to expand potential avenues for discussion and applying knowledge critically.

Quote:

The Russians have landed rovers on Mars. Both the ESA and ISA have satellites orbiting Mars. Britain's rover failed to deploy its solar panels. The ESA had a joint operation with Russia which landed a rover, but it crash-landed. I don't believe the ISA (Indian Space Agency) ever tried to land a rover. The point, however, is clear--there is a wealth of data supporting the narrative of conditions on Mars as I have described them, and from more sources than just JPL/NASA.

Collecting and having data doesn't take the place of analyzing how observed data fit with theoretical models and what other models could explain the same data.

Quote:

Come on . . . post the link to the youtube video that inspired you. I could use a good laugh.

No, I read an article that discussed Mars as having a lush ancient past, which has no all but gone extinct. I question whether that's the only possible interpretation of the current situation or whether it might actually be that life is nascent on Mars and it is gradually evolving a hotter core, stronger magnetic shield, and gaining mass/gravity and thus the capacity for a denser atmosphere.

Here's the article that got me thinking about this topic:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/could-life-evolve-on-mars

1 Reply

The loss of the Martian atmosphere to the so-called solar wind is described in this article from Science Daily. This line at the beginning of the article is telling in regard to the narrative that you propose:

Quote:

Solar wind and radiation are responsible for stripping the Martian atmosphere, transforming Mars from a planet that could have supported life billions of years ago into a frigid desert world, according to new results.

The brutally cold temperatures on Mars are confirmed in this article from Space-dot-com

The salinity of the Martian soil and regolith are described in this article from Space-dot-com.

Mars is a fascinating place. I've made a careful study of conditions on Mars ever since the first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy was published twenty-five years ago. I highly recommend those novels as Mr. Robinson was careful to use the best scientific information available at that time. He avoids the faults that Roswell describes in his post--he hears hoof-beats and thinks, at least, "probably not unicorns." I only caught him in a couple of errors. He writes of the year without a summer (a severe but brief climactic event on this planet) as 1810--it was actually 1816. He also blames Giovanni Schiaparelli for all that old canals on Mars bullsh*t. In fact, Schiaparelli--the first astronomer to systematically catalog the albedo features of Mars--said that he had seen hydrological flow features (the existence of which has been confirmed by every survey mission to Mars). He called them channels. In Italian, the word for channels is canali--and English language journalists (journalists are the bottom-feeders of the literary world) immediately began trumpeting the discovery of "canals" on Mars. Overall, Robinson gets very few things wrong in his narrative about the colonization of Mars.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

If you wish to join the legion of those who mistrust scientific findings because they are not consonant with what they would like to believe, you may help yourself. Everything I posted in the post to which you refer, and my most recent post has the point of just how very, very unlikely it is that life could arise now on Mars. If you don't want to believe that, that's no skin off my nose. However, don't expect me to have any respect for your thesis when you basically piss down my leg and tell me it's raining.

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Do you care to provide evidence for "methane vents?" The Curiosity rover, working Gale Crater, just south of the Martian equator, reported a methane bloom--which is nothing like a methane "vent." However, the mission controllers at JPL were suspicious that it might have been a data artifact, and they recalibrated the detector. No methane has been detected since the equipment was recalibrated.

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No thanks for sending me to "Daily Beast." I tried to read their "About" link, which did not work, and the site is so poorly designed that it kept jumping around as I tried to read the article. I won't be going back there.

There is no possibility of Mars developing a "stronger, hotter" magnetic field. It has no magnetic field, because the core of the planet has cooled off (apparently, completely). That is why, in my original post, I mentioned that volcanism ended there more than a million years ago. After the eruption of the four giant volcanoes of Tharsis, there was probably no longer sufficient heat in the core to sustain a magnetic field, if in fact there ever was one.

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By the way, your "methane vents" comment is a perfect example of what Roswell means by hearing hoof-beats and thinking "unicorns!"

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Here is a relief map of Mars:

http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/WebImg/Mars2-ArabiaTerra-USGS-of02-282.jpg

On the left there are four gargantuan volcanoes. The three that run south-southwest to north-northeast sit atop the Tharsis plateau. This is now generally considered to have been a gigantic magma dome. The volcano in the center of that line of three is Pavonis Mons (Peacock Mountain). The southern rim of its caldera sits on the equator. To the right, you will see a feature known as the Hellas Planitia. The name is misleading, it is not simply a plain, it is an impact crater. It is oblong from east to west because the object, a planetisimal about 125 miles in diameter, came in, probably very fast and low. Most of the ejecta was thrown to the west, suggesting the speed, and the oblong nature of the impact crater suggests that it came in low. Below is a more detailed map of the Hellas basin:

https://www.psi.edu/sites/default/files/images/epo/explorecraters/hellas/hellas_overall.jpg

Note the Hellespontus Montes to the west, while there are no similar mountains to the east. That provides more evidence that the object came in low and fast. Many, but by no means all planetologists studying think that the magma dome which created the Tharsis plateau was caused by that impact. Enough scientists consider Thatsis to have been caused by a magma dome that most of them refer to it as the Tharsis bulge. Whether or not it was caused by the planetisimal which created the Hellas basin is less certain.

The point is that whatever caused the eruption of the four mightiest volcanoes in this star system, that very likely explains why volcanism has ended on Mars. With no hot core, there will not be any "hotter" magnetic field around the planet because there is no longer a mechanism to cause such a magnetic field.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Do you care to provide evidence for "methane vents?" The Curiosity rover, working Gale Crater, just south of the Martian equator, reported a methane bloom--which is nothing like a methane "vent." However, the mission controllers at JPL were suspicious that it might have been a data artifact, and they recalibrated the detector. No methane has been detected since the equipment was recalibrated.

I don't know anything about "vents" of Methane on Mars. But the latest report from NASA confirms methane on mars in general, and a seasonal periodicity of methane in the atmosphere. This was disclosed in detail in the last report from NASA here: https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8347/nasa-finds-ancient-organic-material-mysterious-methane-on-mars

Please do not infer from this post, any support for the speculations being presented in this thread, I'm just providing this for clarification.

I started a thread on this back when it was announced. It was very exciting news: https://able2know.org/topic/463571-1

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

There is, however, an important distinction to be made between the presence of methane in the regolith, with an obviously ancient origin, and methane blooms or methane vents, both of which suggest methane being presently produced on Mars. (I saw your thread, btw, and I was aware at the time of the Curiosity find. They kinda got too excited at JPL, and subsequently reported a methane bloom, which they could not subsequently confirm.)

I find the topic of organic chemistry on Mars very interesting, but I see no good reason to assume there is life there now, or will be in the future, absent human intervention.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

Quote:

Good SciFi has at least some grounding in real science, otherwise it’s just fantasy, and fantasy gets really painful when it pretends to be science.

So true, Ros, so why do you believe in fantasy?

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

They kinda got too excited at JPL, and subsequently reported a methane bloom, which they could not subsequently confirm.)

Do you have a link to their update, I must have missed it. Thanks. I was more impressed by the seasonal periodicity than I was any blooms though.

Setanta wrote:

I find the topic of organic chemistry on Mars very interesting, but I see no good reason to assume there is life there now, or will be in the future, absent human intervention.

I find it interesting as well, but it sounds like I'm a bit more optimistic about the presence of extant microbial life than you are.

I think the JPL scientists are actually being extremely cautious about expressing their excitement. I understand their results well enough to know that the evidence not only doesn't rule out life, but it is very much in line with what could be expected of some form of life. I can also sense an excitement in their live interviews which I have not seen before. They won't admit it of course, but I think that they think there is extant life up there, right now.

I'm anxiously awaiting more data from JPL.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

I posted something about this (the methane bloom) in EB's Rovers on Mars thread. I'm not good at this search thing, but I'll see if I can find it. This does not contradict your information on finding evidence of methane in ancient times,

My skepticism about life anywhere on Mars now comes from an acceptance of the "Big Hit" hypothesis. This video from the Science Channel at Youtube explains the basic thesis, although not the one which I consider most plausible. I don't think early, primitive life forms on Mars could have survived anywhere on the planet, and certainly not have come back and developed into the extremophiles which they would have to be to survive in the current environments on Mars.

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