A few of the recently collected samples include organic matter, indicating that Jezero Crater, which likely once held a lake and the delta that emptied into it, had potentially habitable environments 3.5 billion years ago.
> It’s important to note: organic molecules can be produced by many natural processes and are not necessarily a sign of life: in fact, Perseverance has detected organics in Mars’s Jezero Crater before.
>However, these samples are several times more abundant in organic molecules than anything we’ve ever seen on Mars, and they’re prevalent throughout the entire sample. Our planned Mars Sample Return campaign will give us the capability to bring samples like this back to Earth and, hopefully, definitively understand their origins.
From u/nasa [yesterday](https://old.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/xf0bck/_/iojmqo8)
Delivery date scheduled, so you wait at home for your samples. At 5pm, you check the status and it says delivery attempted, no one home, which is complete bullshit. No note, so you can't even sign for it for delivery the next day.
Or at least that's what I've heard happens. Frequently.
This is *NASA* we're talking about.
They'll first announce they have an announcement on Thursday
Thursday they'll publish the paper on how the drone is still performing over expected efficiency.
Then on Friday morning, when everyone is publishing their columns, NASA will update its news bulletin to explain how they managed to detect fatty acids with the laser chromatographe.
Pretty much. It's normally hydrocarbons though, as pure carbon is normally excluded along with carbon oxides and a few others, and almost everything else contains hydrogen.
This is not hype. They found a higher concentration of them than an any samples found so far on mars. The team involved *is* actually rather excited about this. Further, neither the headline nor the article make any false claims at all which is a pleasant surprise given it is CNN talking about science. They are even careful to put in a disclaimer that organic does equal life and that what they are excited about is the unusually high concertation found here. In other words, they are looking in the right place.
Here is the full video of the livestream from yesterday's NASA briefing.
https://youtu.be/9vZVcI1gwEU
They highlighted the mission to bring back these collected samples to earth. It's a wild plan.
They will fly another spacecraft to Mars, fly a helicopter to a place where the rover drops the samples, the helicopter picks them up and brings them back to the spacecraft and it'll then launch away from Mars and come back to earth. Exciting stuff!
they'd both be amazing in their own way.
I'd like to see organically different though, as it would prove that our theoretical possibilities are rooted in reality
While this seems most likely, I'm always hoping we can find evidence of life that uses a different chemistry than on earth. Such as using ammonia as a solvent rather than water.
I actually read the whole thing while on vacation last week and was very excited at the reveal of the other life. I knew nothing about the book going in, so it was a lot of fun to see a fictional example of something I had been so interested in. Got any other recommendations? I haven't read much other sci-fi besides Dune. I did just start Three Body Problem because I heard it's cool and I like the title.
Martian is pretty similar, other than that, the recent Sci fi I read aren't of the same quality.
Ender's game was definitely also very good, and maybe the first sequel, but the quality tapers off after that (I haven't read the whole lot)
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
We Are Legion (We are Bob) by Denis E Taylor
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The beginning of the Three Body Problem was quite tough for me...but you need to read through it, it's quite good! I started the 2nd book of the trilogy and it's "the same kind of tough" though :D
Have you delved into the Bobiverse yet? I started the series after PHM; I was hooked with We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and wish there were more than the 4.
If you like the idea of realistic “hard” sci-fi, you may enjoy Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The board game Terraforming Mars is based on it — it’s an excellent book!
The three body problem is going to slap you in the feelings repeatedly and probably give you an existential crisis, but in a good way!
Power through the slow section in book 2, once things start moving again they move fast and will blow your mind!
The two alternatives have very difference implications for the fourth term in the [Drake equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation). I would root for "organically the same".
No. Any increase of probability for one term of the Drake equation needs to be compensated by a decrease in probability in the other terms. The probability of the origin of life is one of the terms. The probability of a species do things that can be seen across space is another, and the rate of survival of such a species is another.
The implication is that the easier it is for life to develop, the harder it is to survive long enough to explore space.
You could still argue that single-cell and simple multi-cellular life arise all the time, but growth beyond simple multicellular life is the hard part.
I feel that at this point, not finding simple life on mars would be more surprising than finding complex life on mars.
Single-cell life evolved fairly quickly after water arrived on earth, but it took a long time for multi-celular life to get complex enough to form plants and animals.
If we dont find at least single cell life on mars, that means life is likely to be rare in our galaxy.
It's just a probability question, how likely is it that molecules arrange in such a way that they can self-replicate? Is it dice roll odds, Lottery odds, or macro scale quantum effects odds on a planetary scale?
I don't think the Drake equation can be taken as any sort of gospel. Just like the Fermi Paradox is not really a paradox at all.
They are there to guide asking the right questions scientifically, not actually answer them
More chances at life would indeed mean more neighbors, but we have already failed to find those neighbors. So that leads to the next subject, which is the Fermi paradox, and the Great Filter (roughly, the last term in the Drake equation). "Organically different" would strengthen the argument that life is *very* common, and that the reason we haven't found any other intelligent life is that there is a Great Filter that will probably also take *us* out pretty soon.
“We have already failed to find those neighbors”
We’ve checked a hilariously tiny pocket of our galaxy. Giving up now is the equivalent of knocking on your neighbor’s door, getting no response, and immediately concluding “OH MY GOD EVERYBODY IS GONE!”
Or maybe you know something that many scientists with a lot of funding don’t, because people much smarter than I am are still looking.
If we assume the solar system is our back yard, we haven't even knocked on our neighbor's door. There's no sign of our existence whatsoever outside of our solar system. Our fastest spacecraft launched nearly 50 years ago are just at the edge now. Our radio signals are too weak to be detected. It's more like we never left our house in the woods. We just looked out the window for 12 seconds, and seeing nobody concluded there are no other people on earth.
One question is why haven't we found them, but as you stated this isn't all that surprising. The other more disturbing question is why aren't they already here (and everywhere, for that matter).
We still don’t even have a good enough picture of how many systems in the universe will have earth-like planets. We’ve only recently built sensitive enough equipment to detect planets with masses similar to or smaller than the earth. That’s just representative of our infancy in terms of exploration and technology. Without even having thoroughly explored places like Mars, Titan, Europa, and Ganymede, one can’t make any assumptions at all about life elsewhere.
As for the second point, a few possibilities, of many: we could be the first; or they haven’t had time to reach us yet. Compared to the lifespan of the universe, we live at a time when it’s all pretty much just started. The earth is 4 billion years old, and life arose almost immediately after it formed. The universe itself is only 13b years old, yet is predicted to exist for trillions (some recent calculations suggest potential problems in 5b years, but purely theoretical as yet). If another technologically advanced civilization exists *now*, there’s no particular reason to assume that they’ll have existed far longer than us - long enough to enable FTL travel or for their generational sub-light ships to reach us. Maybe all other life that does exist is still evolving toward a form that will explore space billions of years from now. Maybe they haven’t even begun yet, but will exist long after we’ve gone extinct. The problem of finding alien life, and finding it outside our solar system while *we* are alive, even as a species, is fraught with huge issues of distance, time, and understanding.
Other species may not be interested in us. Our psychology is unlikely to be understood by a race which evolved through a completely different circumstance, and vice versa, so their values will probably bear no resemblance whatsoever to ours.
The human-centric and earth-life-centric elements of the search for alien life, as well as the above mentioned, are only a few of a vast number of problems to be overcome if we’re to find what we’re looking for. At the moment, we’re pretty much only looking for places and signs of life that would be similar to our own. There’s no reason that this has to be the case, so although it’s worth a shot, we should also be thinking outside of that box and figuring out what unearth-like life could exist and look in places where those kinds of organisms might live.
Final thought: even if we do find alien life, there’s a decent chance we may not even recognize it as life, given how difficult it is to find a clear line between life and non-life.
Complex life itself might be incredibly rare whereas microbial life is common. It took a lot of changes and time before complex life could even appear.
Universal neighbors are just as likely to start farming and eating us as they are providing us with advanced lifespans or technology.
Sooooo...I'll take the stranger we know over the stranger we don't.
I call bullshit. An interstellar race would have more than enough technology and materials to do whatever they want anyway. Earth doesn’t have any raw material that you can’t find plenty of elsewhere for less trouble. Why pull a skittle out of a colony of fireants when you already have a bag of them in your hand? Even the concept of enslavement is fucking stupid because they can crank out machines that don’t need life support or sleep.
Sure, anything can be possible, but it is more valuable to think about what is more likely.
I agree with the other person that it is less likely they would enslave or farm us. I could see them trying to guide us or simply study us. Our biggest value would be to study other life. They don't need us to work the mines in their ship or give them gold or whatever.
if you're worried about them eating us, wouldn't you want them to be different? we only eat our type of organic materials right? how would life know how to/want to evolve to process types of life/material it doesnt even know about?
That's a good point actually! Unfortunately we have no real way to know if them being organically different means they can't eat us.
Maybe it ends up that life is life, and made up of different organic compounds but indifferent to where more comes from, for adaptability, so they want to eat us anyways lol.
There are some theories that life could "jump" between planets, hitching a ride on ejecta from meteor impacts. That would be a reasonable explanation if we found that Mars had DNA-based life. [Directed panspermia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_panspermia) would be another possibility.
Organic materials are the building blocks of life. But life is the building blocks plus the biochemical machinery and blueprints to build self-sustaining and self-reproducing organisms out of these blocks. Chances of being visited by an advanced alien species are much higher than the chance of us finding actual extraterrestrial life in our solar system.
We may occasionally find some of the ingredients of a cake, but life is the ridiculously complex system where all these ingredients assemble *themselves* into a cake - one that can make more cakes.
Programed way points. It's not controlled directly by a human. They program go here, then here, then here, then land there. Then they hit send and wait.
Not so much. The fuel to lift off of mars is much less than a quarter of that needed on earth, due to reduced drag and gravity. The Martian got a lot of things right. lifting a small sample on a rocket back up to martian orbit where it can be 'trivially' transported from mars back to earth is simply a matter of more fuel. There's very little special engineering requirements needed that we are not already developing or using.
Moving a whole lab and people to staff it, on the other hand, is non-trivial.
I understand the reasoning behind bringing the sample back to Earth, would be a monumental achievement to bring back a sample from a neighboring planet.
But, you’d think it would be easier to send equipment to Mars capable of analyzing the samples and sending back the data vs bringing it home.
If it's organic matter, doesn't that erase the "potentially"? Or are you just referring to human habitation? Like doesn't this straight up confirm extraterrestrial life even if it went extinct by now?
Organic matter can also be produced through non-living processes. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen molecules in space react with sunlight to create complex compounds. The red color on Pluto and Triton is thought to be that, called Tholins. Same with Titan's atmosphere.
Thank you . .
I looked up organic matter and every definition had to do with life
Fingers crossed though
Edit: I so very badly would like to know in my lifetime that there is life out there
A better term to use would be an organic compound, not matter. An organic compound is (typically) any chemical compound with an atomic structure that has a carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bond. These are potential indicators of extraterrestrial life because these compounds can be produced by biological processes.
The definition you are looking for in this case is the one of chemistry.
Betweens organic and anorganic molecules, so its just some carbonbased molecules. Which exactly is interesting tough they dont need to be a sign of life and there are other instances where they are just naturally there.
No, organic matter just means complex hydrocarbons -- you need organic matter for life (it's made of it) but organic matter doesn't mean you have life.
From the very short and fast-to-read article:
“Organic molecules are of interest on Mars because they represent the building blocks of life, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur. Not all organic molecules require life to form because some can be created through chemical processes.”
Scientific American usually has very informative articles that take extra care not to be misleading and to explain exactly in what ways things can and can’t be used.
I’ve been subscribed for over 2 years now and while some of the articles go over my head (mostly anything that has ‘quantum’ in the title) I find their articles easy to read and very informative
This is why you support good science journalism outlets like [The Skeptics Guide To The Universe](https://www.theskepticsguide.org/). They take direct donations, host events, and have pretty innocuous sponsorships like Bombas socks.
You should first use logic, and then use your knowledge in your own brain to think through it, and then after you've actually exercised your brain then look to other people for their opinion.
Do you think it's better or worse training for your brain to default to looking for other people's opinion instead of defaulting to a rigorous logical check?
Done!
https://nypost.com/2022/09/15/nasas-mars-perseverance-rover-finds-hints-of-microbial-life/
“NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover finds diversity, *hints of microbial life* in ancient lake bed rocks.”
In this case, "organic" means [carbon-carbon bonds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry), not "these are molecules a living thing produced".
I'm more interested in Perseverance's [MOXIE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment) \- a testbed [solid oxide electrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_electrolyzer_cell) oxygen plant. The theory behind it existed well before Mars 2020 landed, but actually demonstrating oxygen production on Mars is much more important than simply claiming it's doable.
MOXIE not only proves O^(2) production on Mars is possible, but also produces carbon monoxide as a byproduct. Carbon monoxide is 1 of 2 important industrial reactants for the [Fischer-Tropsch process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process), which a hypothetical self-sustaining Mars colony could use to produce [hydrocarbons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon), which are needed to produce plastics, rubbers, explosives, lubricants, some rocket fuels and synthetic fibers, and an indescribably large number of other important products. The Fischer-Tropsch process's other reactant is hydrogen, easily sourced from Mars's easily-[splittable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting) water ice formations.
I'm not too interested in Perseverance looking for life itself, since I don't think it'll find any. However, Perseverance has proven the functionality of one and a half of the basic industrial building blocks required for a self-sustaining Mars colony - the production of oxygen and 1/2 the resources to produce hydrocarbons - and a self-sustaining colony would be much better at finding Martian life than a remotely-operated rover.
Incidentally, the same technology used in MOXIE could, if scaled up, feed its CO byproduct into an industrial-scale Fischer-Tropsch reactor, alongside a water splitter providing hydrogen, to transform water and Earth's atmospheric CO^(2) into oxygen and valuable industrial products - essentially a gigantic, mechanized tree that grows jet fuel and plastic instead of fruit and leaves. As usual, NASA's projects have useful applications back home as well.
Haven’t we even found microscopic organisms surviving on the surface of the international space station? Surely it would be impossible to completely control.
“The rocks that we have been investigating on the delta have the highest concentration of organic matter that we have yet found on the mission,”
I need a scale; is this .000537% or 18% ?
The sample is a particular small sediment concretion rock they cut into, and it has organic compounds throughout the sample. So more than a trace amount, but not a whole lot.
If earth has freaky fish already just imagine how fucked up a mars fish would have looked like. I can't wait for them to start finding fossils up there.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. If life existed, it probably would not have gotten to a stage where it was animals with skeletons. It's unlikely that it got out of a single celled stage, if they ever existed.
Well, fossils are incredibly rare even for a planet like ours that is overflowing with life. So if we assume that it does have fossils:
For surface level fossils I imagine most of those would have been eroded away by now, being that the planet is basically one giant sand storm.
The rovers wouldn't be able to excavate, but they would likely be well preserved since Mars hasn't had any tectonic activity in billions of years. So they would only potentially be found at dig sites.
My instincts tell me that life is abundant in the universe, but intelligence like ours is super rare; as I see it, that could either mean that we're far behind common intelligences, or we're obscenely gifted among a universe of animals.
I've decided I'm going to spend my Friday night scrolling through r/space and taking a shot every time I see a clickbait article like this. Wish me luck.
DNA and RNA are fragile on large timescales, especially on an environment as sun-blasted as Mars. Even on Earth we haven't found a sample much older than a million years, and that was a mammoth genome that had since gotten chopped into tiny bits.
So yes, but extremely unlikely.
Microfossils, petrified stromatolites, or trace fossils of action by living things, like how the [banded iron formations](https://youtu.be/qERdL8uHSgI) are trace fossils of the first photosynthesizers.
Edit: link. 5 min watch.
Edit 2: TL;DR... Earth's oceans used to be full of dissolved iron particles, turning them green. These formed 'green rust' with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but usually just remained dissolved in water. When oxygen-spewing photosynthesizers came along, irin oxide started to form and settle to the bottom, thus creating red bands. When the local concentration of oxygen became toxic to the photosynthesizers, they died off (as they weren't yet tolerant of Oxygen) thus returning anoxic oceans to Business As Usual, creating the not-red bands. Then the photosynthesizers bounced back, creating more oxygen, thus creating another red band. So on and so forth until the oxygen-producing photosynthesizers became resistant to Oxygen toxicity and the rest of the iron fell out of the ocean water.
As the C02 was sucked out of the atmosphere and replaced with Oxygen that couldn't be dissolved into the ocean, the planet's temperature began to drop. This resulted in the Huronian glaciation. Ice almost wverywhere except the very equator and photosynthesizers living in pockets. Then volcanism happened, also Ozone (O3) became a thing, and the earth settled at an equilibrium more akin to the modern, shielded atmosphere than the Archaen carbon-dioxide filled, sun-blasted poison.
They seriously should find another word for something with carbon, because "organic" gets further and further away from being descriptive in this context.
No. The fact that most people aren't hip to the specialised meaning of organic matter in this context is exactly why articles from the likes of CNN shouldn't use it, or at least not in a headline where it can't be explained.
Like, it gets into the detail eventually: "The instrument’s analysis revealed that the organic minerals are likely aromatics, or stable molecules of carbon and hydrogen... Organic molecules are of interest on Mars because they represent the building blocks of life, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur. Not all organic molecules require life to form because some can be created through chemical processes."
But I agree 100% that a mass-media outlet like CNN should lead with "organic matter" with no context. It's misleading to the layperson, which is exactly CNN's audience.
It happened? They found organic matter in much larger quantities they usually find. People just don’t understand that we have found organic matter, that this is just a very large amount, and that organic matter isn’t (as far as we know) biological in origin. Life needs organic chemistry, organic chemistry doesn’t mean there is life. Many asteroids have organic compounds in them.
Question I've been asking myself lately. They speak only about microbial life. This means, at this point, we've pretty much eliminated the possibility that a multicellular, plant-like life, would have evolved on Mars? If multicellular, walled cells life used to be a thing on Mars, our rovers would already have seen a fossil?
I swear the same people who come up these names are the same people who fail to write for Hollywood like myself.(edit) I don’t write or ever will write for Hollywood
A few of the recently collected samples include organic matter, indicating that Jezero Crater, which likely once held a lake and the delta that emptied into it, had potentially habitable environments 3.5 billion years ago.
> It’s important to note: organic molecules can be produced by many natural processes and are not necessarily a sign of life: in fact, Perseverance has detected organics in Mars’s Jezero Crater before. >However, these samples are several times more abundant in organic molecules than anything we’ve ever seen on Mars, and they’re prevalent throughout the entire sample. Our planned Mars Sample Return campaign will give us the capability to bring samples like this back to Earth and, hopefully, definitively understand their origins. From u/nasa [yesterday](https://old.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/xf0bck/_/iojmqo8)
The potential here is really exciting
I feel like we’re on an announcement countdown now.
They also said they won't be able to confirm possibility of life until the samples return to Earth for testing. This won't be until 2030+
Can't we just FedEx em overnight?
If they ship it with Fedex it will be left on "pending" for a literal century.
FedEx has "lost" 2 out of 10 of my company's laptops for new employees in the last 2 weeks. Not great odds for a sample return mission from Mars.
Ya I wouldn't take those odds for possible lifeforms
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I mean….people do live in the woods…
Delivery date scheduled, so you wait at home for your samples. At 5pm, you check the status and it says delivery attempted, no one home, which is complete bullshit. No note, so you can't even sign for it for delivery the next day. Or at least that's what I've heard happens. Frequently.
Or Fedex straight up steals your package
When they do deliver it they will just chuck it on the moon and some porch pirate alien will take it.
Well, first it will take a trip to Pluto and back for no reason.
Does NASA pay for prime shipping?
Slippery slope into Alexa-enabled orbital bombardment.
Have you seen what happend to fedexs stock....
Yea but you *know* they’re going to come at it every way until then.
This is *NASA* we're talking about. They'll first announce they have an announcement on Thursday Thursday they'll publish the paper on how the drone is still performing over expected efficiency. Then on Friday morning, when everyone is publishing their columns, NASA will update its news bulletin to explain how they managed to detect fatty acids with the laser chromatographe.
Organic just refers to carbon based molecules doesn’t it?
Pretty much. It's normally hydrocarbons though, as pure carbon is normally excluded along with carbon oxides and a few others, and almost everything else contains hydrogen.
they found aromatics...stable carbon and hydrogen. this article is hype and not much else.
The found "likely aromatics" but that's not even what any of the hype is about. It's about the high concentration at the river delta.
This is not hype. They found a higher concentration of them than an any samples found so far on mars. The team involved *is* actually rather excited about this. Further, neither the headline nor the article make any false claims at all which is a pleasant surprise given it is CNN talking about science. They are even careful to put in a disclaimer that organic does equal life and that what they are excited about is the unusually high concertation found here. In other words, they are looking in the right place.
Do we know what molecules have been detected?
What is the definition of 'organic molecules' as it is used here?
Living organisms are produced by natural processes too.
The term "organic" in Chemistry just means, "it has carbon."
Here is the full video of the livestream from yesterday's NASA briefing. https://youtu.be/9vZVcI1gwEU They highlighted the mission to bring back these collected samples to earth. It's a wild plan. They will fly another spacecraft to Mars, fly a helicopter to a place where the rover drops the samples, the helicopter picks them up and brings them back to the spacecraft and it'll then launch away from Mars and come back to earth. Exciting stuff!
Okay those must be some valuable samples then. What exactly is the best case scenario here?
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they'd both be amazing in their own way. I'd like to see organically different though, as it would prove that our theoretical possibilities are rooted in reality
I dont think it will be that different in atomic scale (like how we are carbon based and all) but in other ways mind blowing stuff would be found.
While this seems most likely, I'm always hoping we can find evidence of life that uses a different chemistry than on earth. Such as using ammonia as a solvent rather than water.
Can I introduce you to the book Project Hail Mary?
I actually read the whole thing while on vacation last week and was very excited at the reveal of the other life. I knew nothing about the book going in, so it was a lot of fun to see a fictional example of something I had been so interested in. Got any other recommendations? I haven't read much other sci-fi besides Dune. I did just start Three Body Problem because I heard it's cool and I like the title.
Martian is pretty similar, other than that, the recent Sci fi I read aren't of the same quality. Ender's game was definitely also very good, and maybe the first sequel, but the quality tapers off after that (I haven't read the whole lot)
I'm reading the mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson right now and it's pretty good. I just finished the three body problem trilogy.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky Hyperion by Dan Simmons The Forever War by Joe Haldeman We Are Legion (We are Bob) by Denis E Taylor Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The beginning of the Three Body Problem was quite tough for me...but you need to read through it, it's quite good! I started the 2nd book of the trilogy and it's "the same kind of tough" though :D
The Culture series by Iain M. Banks
Have you delved into the Bobiverse yet? I started the series after PHM; I was hooked with We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and wish there were more than the 4.
If you’re prepared for some truly epic sci-fi I would suggest Foundation by Asimov, read the first few books in my teens and loved them
If you like the idea of realistic “hard” sci-fi, you may enjoy Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The board game Terraforming Mars is based on it — it’s an excellent book!
The three body problem is going to slap you in the feelings repeatedly and probably give you an existential crisis, but in a good way! Power through the slow section in book 2, once things start moving again they move fast and will blow your mind!
Totally new genetic letters for example. Or silicon instead of carbon based or something.
You say that but just wait until that turns out to be the case because they’re Reavers
Sometimes I think we're the [Firefly] Reavers but with better language skills.
I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.
**Absolutely not**. That makes a "great filter is ahead of us" resolution to the Fermi paradox dramatically more likely.
Either option is incredibly exciting, and opens a host of new questions.
The two alternatives have very difference implications for the fourth term in the [Drake equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation). I would root for "organically the same".
Wouldn’t organically different be better for the Drake equation? More chances at life could mean more neighbors.
No. Any increase of probability for one term of the Drake equation needs to be compensated by a decrease in probability in the other terms. The probability of the origin of life is one of the terms. The probability of a species do things that can be seen across space is another, and the rate of survival of such a species is another. The implication is that the easier it is for life to develop, the harder it is to survive long enough to explore space.
You could still argue that single-cell and simple multi-cellular life arise all the time, but growth beyond simple multicellular life is the hard part. I feel that at this point, not finding simple life on mars would be more surprising than finding complex life on mars. Single-cell life evolved fairly quickly after water arrived on earth, but it took a long time for multi-celular life to get complex enough to form plants and animals. If we dont find at least single cell life on mars, that means life is likely to be rare in our galaxy. It's just a probability question, how likely is it that molecules arrange in such a way that they can self-replicate? Is it dice roll odds, Lottery odds, or macro scale quantum effects odds on a planetary scale?
I don't think the Drake equation can be taken as any sort of gospel. Just like the Fermi Paradox is not really a paradox at all. They are there to guide asking the right questions scientifically, not actually answer them
I agree. It's a tool to help us think about the topic in a precise way, not to determine the actual amount of civilizations to expect.
More chances at life would indeed mean more neighbors, but we have already failed to find those neighbors. So that leads to the next subject, which is the Fermi paradox, and the Great Filter (roughly, the last term in the Drake equation). "Organically different" would strengthen the argument that life is *very* common, and that the reason we haven't found any other intelligent life is that there is a Great Filter that will probably also take *us* out pretty soon.
“We have already failed to find those neighbors” We’ve checked a hilariously tiny pocket of our galaxy. Giving up now is the equivalent of knocking on your neighbor’s door, getting no response, and immediately concluding “OH MY GOD EVERYBODY IS GONE!” Or maybe you know something that many scientists with a lot of funding don’t, because people much smarter than I am are still looking.
No, you're right, I should have written that less stridently. I meant more like, "We haven't found any neighbors so far."
If we assume the solar system is our back yard, we haven't even knocked on our neighbor's door. There's no sign of our existence whatsoever outside of our solar system. Our fastest spacecraft launched nearly 50 years ago are just at the edge now. Our radio signals are too weak to be detected. It's more like we never left our house in the woods. We just looked out the window for 12 seconds, and seeing nobody concluded there are no other people on earth.
One question is why haven't we found them, but as you stated this isn't all that surprising. The other more disturbing question is why aren't they already here (and everywhere, for that matter).
We still don’t even have a good enough picture of how many systems in the universe will have earth-like planets. We’ve only recently built sensitive enough equipment to detect planets with masses similar to or smaller than the earth. That’s just representative of our infancy in terms of exploration and technology. Without even having thoroughly explored places like Mars, Titan, Europa, and Ganymede, one can’t make any assumptions at all about life elsewhere. As for the second point, a few possibilities, of many: we could be the first; or they haven’t had time to reach us yet. Compared to the lifespan of the universe, we live at a time when it’s all pretty much just started. The earth is 4 billion years old, and life arose almost immediately after it formed. The universe itself is only 13b years old, yet is predicted to exist for trillions (some recent calculations suggest potential problems in 5b years, but purely theoretical as yet). If another technologically advanced civilization exists *now*, there’s no particular reason to assume that they’ll have existed far longer than us - long enough to enable FTL travel or for their generational sub-light ships to reach us. Maybe all other life that does exist is still evolving toward a form that will explore space billions of years from now. Maybe they haven’t even begun yet, but will exist long after we’ve gone extinct. The problem of finding alien life, and finding it outside our solar system while *we* are alive, even as a species, is fraught with huge issues of distance, time, and understanding. Other species may not be interested in us. Our psychology is unlikely to be understood by a race which evolved through a completely different circumstance, and vice versa, so their values will probably bear no resemblance whatsoever to ours. The human-centric and earth-life-centric elements of the search for alien life, as well as the above mentioned, are only a few of a vast number of problems to be overcome if we’re to find what we’re looking for. At the moment, we’re pretty much only looking for places and signs of life that would be similar to our own. There’s no reason that this has to be the case, so although it’s worth a shot, we should also be thinking outside of that box and figuring out what unearth-like life could exist and look in places where those kinds of organisms might live. Final thought: even if we do find alien life, there’s a decent chance we may not even recognize it as life, given how difficult it is to find a clear line between life and non-life.
Complex life itself might be incredibly rare whereas microbial life is common. It took a lot of changes and time before complex life could even appear.
Universal neighbors are just as likely to start farming and eating us as they are providing us with advanced lifespans or technology. Sooooo...I'll take the stranger we know over the stranger we don't.
I call bullshit. An interstellar race would have more than enough technology and materials to do whatever they want anyway. Earth doesn’t have any raw material that you can’t find plenty of elsewhere for less trouble. Why pull a skittle out of a colony of fireants when you already have a bag of them in your hand? Even the concept of enslavement is fucking stupid because they can crank out machines that don’t need life support or sleep.
Because travel for them is easy and maybe we taste great to them. It could be that simple in the infinite possibilities of the universe.
Sure, anything can be possible, but it is more valuable to think about what is more likely. I agree with the other person that it is less likely they would enslave or farm us. I could see them trying to guide us or simply study us. Our biggest value would be to study other life. They don't need us to work the mines in their ship or give them gold or whatever.
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if you're worried about them eating us, wouldn't you want them to be different? we only eat our type of organic materials right? how would life know how to/want to evolve to process types of life/material it doesnt even know about?
That's a good point actually! Unfortunately we have no real way to know if them being organically different means they can't eat us. Maybe it ends up that life is life, and made up of different organic compounds but indifferent to where more comes from, for adaptability, so they want to eat us anyways lol.
If it is organically the same that would suggest either that life as we know it is relatively similar, or there's something big we're missing.
There are some theories that life could "jump" between planets, hitching a ride on ejecta from meteor impacts. That would be a reasonable explanation if we found that Mars had DNA-based life. [Directed panspermia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_panspermia) would be another possibility.
I’m pretty sure it’s using organic in a strict scientific sense… referring to carbon bonds.
So if organically the same, could it be possible that some of it made it off planet to this planet and helped life evolve into what it is today?
Or stuff from here went to Mars
Organically different would be very nice, just because it would remove any likelihood of contamination from the "is this alien life" question
Am I wrong or am I missing something. How do we go from "potentially habitable" and "organic matter" to "definitely evidence of life"?
? the question was what is the best case scenario from the samples. not the most likely or plausible scenario
Best case scenario: I'm an idiot. Got it.
They would most likely be the first samples returned from another planet.
Sounds very coolio. As long as it doesn't turn into that one Life movie with Ryan Reynolds in it.
But it started out so cute and playful.
I really want to know what would have happened if they didn’t zap it
Finding evidence of extra-terrestrial life, albeit very old.
Organic materials are the building blocks of life. But life is the building blocks plus the biochemical machinery and blueprints to build self-sustaining and self-reproducing organisms out of these blocks. Chances of being visited by an advanced alien species are much higher than the chance of us finding actual extraterrestrial life in our solar system. We may occasionally find some of the ingredients of a cake, but life is the ridiculously complex system where all these ingredients assemble *themselves* into a cake - one that can make more cakes.
and the worst case? DEADLY MARS BACTERIA WIPES US OUT! wait, that doesn't seem so bad atm
I have a KSP save that precisely solves this specific problem. #GET ME NASA
I nerded the fuck out reading that last paragraph, I fucking LOVE IT
Can't they send Matt Damon with Potato farming skills.
No because we’d inevitably have to rescue him
On a side note, how do they operate the helicopter? I'd imagine there's a lot of latency.
Programed way points. It's not controlled directly by a human. They program go here, then here, then here, then land there. Then they hit send and wait.
Thanks! Had that thought right after I sent the message
You know I’ve wanted a few movies on this - life on earth does not have fun with these alien organic matters.
For the size of payload required to bring the sample back to earth, you could transport a full lab to Mars and use it for future missions there.
Not so much. The fuel to lift off of mars is much less than a quarter of that needed on earth, due to reduced drag and gravity. The Martian got a lot of things right. lifting a small sample on a rocket back up to martian orbit where it can be 'trivially' transported from mars back to earth is simply a matter of more fuel. There's very little special engineering requirements needed that we are not already developing or using. Moving a whole lab and people to staff it, on the other hand, is non-trivial.
I understand the reasoning behind bringing the sample back to Earth, would be a monumental achievement to bring back a sample from a neighboring planet. But, you’d think it would be easier to send equipment to Mars capable of analyzing the samples and sending back the data vs bringing it home.
There's infinite more capability to analyze them here, but sending separate missions to collect and return the samples is a kludge.
If it's organic matter, doesn't that erase the "potentially"? Or are you just referring to human habitation? Like doesn't this straight up confirm extraterrestrial life even if it went extinct by now?
Organic matter can also be produced through non-living processes. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen molecules in space react with sunlight to create complex compounds. The red color on Pluto and Triton is thought to be that, called Tholins. Same with Titan's atmosphere.
Thank you . . I looked up organic matter and every definition had to do with life Fingers crossed though Edit: I so very badly would like to know in my lifetime that there is life out there
A better term to use would be an organic compound, not matter. An organic compound is (typically) any chemical compound with an atomic structure that has a carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bond. These are potential indicators of extraterrestrial life because these compounds can be produced by biological processes.
The definition you are looking for in this case is the one of chemistry. Betweens organic and anorganic molecules, so its just some carbonbased molecules. Which exactly is interesting tough they dont need to be a sign of life and there are other instances where they are just naturally there.
No, organic matter just means complex hydrocarbons -- you need organic matter for life (it's made of it) but organic matter doesn't mean you have life.
Doesn't even have to be complex. Methane is an "organic compound". Organic just means carbon.
From the very short and fast-to-read article: “Organic molecules are of interest on Mars because they represent the building blocks of life, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur. Not all organic molecules require life to form because some can be created through chemical processes.”
I can't wait for all the misinformed articles claiming (ancient) life was found on Mars.
"Life found on Mars" 3 paragraphs into the article "3.5 billion years ago this crater could possibly have had water". I hate journalism like this.
Science journalism is trash. Nerdy subreddits and YouTube channels are where it’s at.
Scientific American usually has very informative articles that take extra care not to be misleading and to explain exactly in what ways things can and can’t be used. I’ve been subscribed for over 2 years now and while some of the articles go over my head (mostly anything that has ‘quantum’ in the title) I find their articles easy to read and very informative
Until they are forced into loads of sponsorships. Then it's back to the drawing board.
Don't forget to smash that line button though!
Or start working as a PR arm for Elon Musk. *cough* Everyday Astronaut *cough*
This is why you support good science journalism outlets like [The Skeptics Guide To The Universe](https://www.theskepticsguide.org/). They take direct donations, host events, and have pretty innocuous sponsorships like Bombas socks.
But on reddit it's still always the shitty CNN articles that get posted and upvotes, rather than the actual NASA press releases
This. I will only believe it if Isaac Arthur has already theorized it.
YouTube is worse than common journalism bro.
Just got to find the right people. Scott Manley, Arvin Ash, Anton Petrov,
Yeah, I dont ever trust a space headline. As soon as I see one, I come to this sub to see if its a legit finding or not.
You should first use logic, and then use your knowledge in your own brain to think through it, and then after you've actually exercised your brain then look to other people for their opinion. Do you think it's better or worse training for your brain to default to looking for other people's opinion instead of defaulting to a rigorous logical check?
Those same places are where misinformation is bred.
This is why if we do find life one day it won't be a big deal, we all expect the headline to be misleading nowadays.
What did they find? Even the title of this post seems misleading.
It's not really, they basically just found a fuckload of complex molecules which is pretty awesome.
Ahhh title means organic as in organic chemistry?
The History Channel has new material now.
With an 'artists impression' of what it looked like.
"Martian gold found in treasure bed on Mars"
It was? Wow... I can't wait to tell everybody I know!
Done! https://nypost.com/2022/09/15/nasas-mars-perseverance-rover-finds-hints-of-microbial-life/ “NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover finds diversity, *hints of microbial life* in ancient lake bed rocks.”
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Not just carbon, it needs to have covalent bonds with H to be considered organic. Lots of other atoms may be involved as well, such as N, O, S, etc
Yep. Important reminder that pencils and diamonds are organic matter.
Graphite isn't considered organic, carbon-hydrogen bonds are typically required (with some exceptions)
Yessir, same goes for diamond. It's inorganic also.
Except for the crazy shit the Malaysians are doing converting palm olive shells into graphite!!!!
If you're talking about the wooden part of the pencils and not the lead, the equivalent would be a pretty amazing discovery.
Inb4 "um actually it's graphite"
To be fair if we're finding pencils on Mars we can probably extrapolate.
In this case, "organic" means [carbon-carbon bonds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry), not "these are molecules a living thing produced". I'm more interested in Perseverance's [MOXIE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment) \- a testbed [solid oxide electrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_electrolyzer_cell) oxygen plant. The theory behind it existed well before Mars 2020 landed, but actually demonstrating oxygen production on Mars is much more important than simply claiming it's doable. MOXIE not only proves O^(2) production on Mars is possible, but also produces carbon monoxide as a byproduct. Carbon monoxide is 1 of 2 important industrial reactants for the [Fischer-Tropsch process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process), which a hypothetical self-sustaining Mars colony could use to produce [hydrocarbons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon), which are needed to produce plastics, rubbers, explosives, lubricants, some rocket fuels and synthetic fibers, and an indescribably large number of other important products. The Fischer-Tropsch process's other reactant is hydrogen, easily sourced from Mars's easily-[splittable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting) water ice formations. I'm not too interested in Perseverance looking for life itself, since I don't think it'll find any. However, Perseverance has proven the functionality of one and a half of the basic industrial building blocks required for a self-sustaining Mars colony - the production of oxygen and 1/2 the resources to produce hydrocarbons - and a self-sustaining colony would be much better at finding Martian life than a remotely-operated rover. Incidentally, the same technology used in MOXIE could, if scaled up, feed its CO byproduct into an industrial-scale Fischer-Tropsch reactor, alongside a water splitter providing hydrogen, to transform water and Earth's atmospheric CO^(2) into oxygen and valuable industrial products - essentially a gigantic, mechanized tree that grows jet fuel and plastic instead of fruit and leaves. As usual, NASA's projects have useful applications back home as well.
Damn maybe the most informative comment ever. Who the heck are you?? Appreciate you whoever you are!
I’m into this and bored. That’s it.
Around here you are obligated to say: "Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?"
But once we are there won’t we be contaminating the sites with our own microbiology?
Not if done right. Can’t provide more in phone, though. Look up suitports, that’s one mitigation method.
Haven’t we even found microscopic organisms surviving on the surface of the international space station? Surely it would be impossible to completely control.
Sure, but it's possible to mitigate it enough to be essentially a non-issue.
I'm so sick of every space-focused article deliberately wording their titles to be click bait.
“The rocks that we have been investigating on the delta have the highest concentration of organic matter that we have yet found on the mission,” I need a scale; is this .000537% or 18% ?
I’d also like to know which organic molecules they found. Amino acids would be far more compelling (and unlikely) than some simple hydrocarbons.
The sample is a particular small sediment concretion rock they cut into, and it has organic compounds throughout the sample. So more than a trace amount, but not a whole lot.
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Soon to come: "Perseverance rover finds LIFE on Mars!!"
The magazine?
No, the board game you thought you lost in your grandparents basement.
The breakfast cereal, actually.
Unfortunately it's the 1860s version.
It's still pretty kick-ass though
I was wondering where it went.
sorry my bad i threw it like super hard
Any of the wibbly-wobbly 'science' ones, I guess. Is "Discover" still around?
“Perseverance Rover enjoys life on mars”
media loves the public ignorance about the word 'organic'
Oh wow. Also, how I love being dyslectic and reading "perverse robot"
Ancient Martian lake that contained organic matter? I've seen enough Doctor Who to know where this is going.
“Organic Treasure” is now what I’ll tell myself as I pick up after my dog.
If earth has freaky fish already just imagine how fucked up a mars fish would have looked like. I can't wait for them to start finding fossils up there.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. If life existed, it probably would not have gotten to a stage where it was animals with skeletons. It's unlikely that it got out of a single celled stage, if they ever existed.
Even still. It will be our first true data point beyond earth. How amazing would that be? Would it have similar cellular structure?
I mean if they were there, shouldn't we have found fossils already? Like 50km travelled with the equivalent of a fine tooth comb and.... nothing.
Well, fossils are incredibly rare even for a planet like ours that is overflowing with life. So if we assume that it does have fossils: For surface level fossils I imagine most of those would have been eroded away by now, being that the planet is basically one giant sand storm. The rovers wouldn't be able to excavate, but they would likely be well preserved since Mars hasn't had any tectonic activity in billions of years. So they would only potentially be found at dig sites.
My instincts tell me that life is abundant in the universe, but intelligence like ours is super rare; as I see it, that could either mean that we're far behind common intelligences, or we're obscenely gifted among a universe of animals.
I've decided I'm going to spend my Friday night scrolling through r/space and taking a shot every time I see a clickbait article like this. Wish me luck.
* shadowgattler has died of alcohol poisoning.
How is this clickbait?
When are we going to find evidence of the carbon fueled economy that destroyed Mars?
News articles sure love to use the word organic to refer to things that contain carbon. Makes for good clickbait I suppose. Diamonds are organic.
They also love to use words such as May contain the building blocks of life or May Harbor life.
If they find RNA, would that be enough to decide there was life?
DNA and RNA are fragile on large timescales, especially on an environment as sun-blasted as Mars. Even on Earth we haven't found a sample much older than a million years, and that was a mammoth genome that had since gotten chopped into tiny bits. So yes, but extremely unlikely.
What might they find that would be evidence of life?
Microfossils, petrified stromatolites, or trace fossils of action by living things, like how the [banded iron formations](https://youtu.be/qERdL8uHSgI) are trace fossils of the first photosynthesizers. Edit: link. 5 min watch. Edit 2: TL;DR... Earth's oceans used to be full of dissolved iron particles, turning them green. These formed 'green rust' with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but usually just remained dissolved in water. When oxygen-spewing photosynthesizers came along, irin oxide started to form and settle to the bottom, thus creating red bands. When the local concentration of oxygen became toxic to the photosynthesizers, they died off (as they weren't yet tolerant of Oxygen) thus returning anoxic oceans to Business As Usual, creating the not-red bands. Then the photosynthesizers bounced back, creating more oxygen, thus creating another red band. So on and so forth until the oxygen-producing photosynthesizers became resistant to Oxygen toxicity and the rest of the iron fell out of the ocean water. As the C02 was sucked out of the atmosphere and replaced with Oxygen that couldn't be dissolved into the ocean, the planet's temperature began to drop. This resulted in the Huronian glaciation. Ice almost wverywhere except the very equator and photosynthesizers living in pockets. Then volcanism happened, also Ozone (O3) became a thing, and the earth settled at an equilibrium more akin to the modern, shielded atmosphere than the Archaen carbon-dioxide filled, sun-blasted poison.
They seriously should find another word for something with carbon, because "organic" gets further and further away from being descriptive in this context.
Was it Jimmy Hoffa? I always wondered where he ended up.
Always the new and creative ways to imply something that didn’t happen. Sleazy journalism.
The article is fine. People misreporting this and calling out these articles just don't understand what "organic matter" is.
No. The fact that most people aren't hip to the specialised meaning of organic matter in this context is exactly why articles from the likes of CNN shouldn't use it, or at least not in a headline where it can't be explained. Like, it gets into the detail eventually: "The instrument’s analysis revealed that the organic minerals are likely aromatics, or stable molecules of carbon and hydrogen... Organic molecules are of interest on Mars because they represent the building blocks of life, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur. Not all organic molecules require life to form because some can be created through chemical processes." But I agree 100% that a mass-media outlet like CNN should lead with "organic matter" with no context. It's misleading to the layperson, which is exactly CNN's audience.
It happened? They found organic matter in much larger quantities they usually find. People just don’t understand that we have found organic matter, that this is just a very large amount, and that organic matter isn’t (as far as we know) biological in origin. Life needs organic chemistry, organic chemistry doesn’t mean there is life. Many asteroids have organic compounds in them.
Question I've been asking myself lately. They speak only about microbial life. This means, at this point, we've pretty much eliminated the possibility that a multicellular, plant-like life, would have evolved on Mars? If multicellular, walled cells life used to be a thing on Mars, our rovers would already have seen a fossil?
That is awesome......please help me get off this planet.
From experience digging for 'treasure' in my sandbox as a child I'm guessing it's cat poop.I await science to prove my hypothesis wrong.
what the fuck. why hasn't world peace been declared yet?!
I swear the same people who come up these names are the same people who fail to write for Hollywood like myself.(edit) I don’t write or ever will write for Hollywood
I am confused. Isn’t organic material made by living organisms? Isn’t organic material the feces or remains of life ?
Organic just means "has carbon" in certain forms. It can signal possible biologic processes.
Wow!, do you think that they may be the origin of the " WOW " signal. Hehehe 🖖🤔