- #36
dontdisturbmycircles
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Cold dirty water most likely. Very acidic perhaps?
Maybe the bottled water companies will start selling Mars water?
Maybe the bottled water companies will start selling Mars water?
turbo-1 said:I'm a bit skeptical about the big news. Yeah, it's interesting to notice that crater walls have undergone landslides/sandslides over a period of years, but that should be an expected observation, not a surprise. Mars is not the Moon. It has an atmosphere, and may also exhibit seismic activity, so we should see weathering, erosion, and settling. If nothing on the surface ever changed, that would be the more surprising observation. It seems to me that it is a huge stretch to observe little slides on steep slopes and claim that they are proof that liquid water exists on the Martian surface. Great "gee whiz" factor, but pretty shaky science, IMO.
SimplePie said:I don't think the current evidence supports a geologic explanation as you seem to suggest. For example, the deposits at the botom of the erosion channel in the pictures have "finger-like branches" and diverted around obstacles. I think if it was due to geologic processes, we would see a more coarse texture.
Now, I'm not sure the liquid water explanation is conclusive yet... the pictures were not high enough resolution to overwhelm the other explanation -- it might be formed by CO2, as a lot of the computer models in the past have shown.
NASA gets funding when people are excited about their projects. Claiming to have evidence for liquid water on the surface of Mars based on these images is great public-relations and poor science. The public hears "water on Mars" and assumes that the those smart guys at NASA have incontrovertible proof backing up the assertion. There is no such proof.Some researchers were skeptical that liquid water was responsible for the surface feature changes seen by the spacecraft . They said other materials such as sand or dust can flow like a liquid and produce similar results.
"Nothing in the images, no matter how cool they are, proves that the flows were wet, or that they were anything more exciting than avalanches of sand and dust," Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston said in an e-mail.
That's just the point. There are major storms on Mars as well as temperature fluctuations, so you would expect to see slides of dust and sand on steep walls over the years, as well as other signs of natural weathering, such as the formation and erosions of dunes, etc. The claim that these photos are evidence of erosion caused by flowing water is quite far-fetched. Anyone who has seen sand-slides on a dune or footage of an avalanche knows that solids can exhibit collective behavior that is quite similar to that of liquids.Mk said:Why is there necessarily water if there is just a few big spots that appeared over a seven year period?
i usually think a few steps forward.Ivan Seeking said:I think there might be a few more steps in between.
We certainly have plenty of issues to address here on earth, but I don't believe that we have to forego space exploration.dimensionless said:It's interesting but I don't think finding microbes on Mars, or colonizing Mars should be mankids primary scientific endever. While I think it's cool, I also think it is unlikely to be useful to us until we have a breakthrough in energy production (fathom the implications of efficient fusion energy).
I'm convinced now!Yonoz said:Is this proof enough for you skeptics?
I've tried, believe me. It's become a habit.Anttech said:Yonzo, I already told you to stop drinking Retsina and listening to late night radio...