life on mars

It's a Godawful Small Afair, to the Girl with the Mousy Hair...

Well, we've found evidence of 'life on mars' haven't we? Fossilized bacteria? Am I misremembering?

Hard-science, though, I doubt it. If there were life on mars to the extent that you could get a story out of it, we'd have probably found SOMETHING by now, I'd suspect.

Though there's space folk here much wiser than I.

You mean, INTELLIGENT life? Martians having stories etc?

Assuming all the planets formed around the same time, the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and that would be putting your Martian life pretty far back to the origins of the planet itself. It might not have had time to evolve into anything "story" worthy ...

Is there a reason it has to be FOUR billion years ago?

Setting it at TWO billion years ago might give you more wiggle room (time enough for Mars life to have begun and evolved swiftly)

I dunno about Mars geology, in the context of Life. Mars seems to have undergone more drastic events than on Earth (?) and a harsher environment ... that might either slow evolution down (knocking life back into the stupidity of microbes again and again) or speed evolution up (the idea being, What Doesn't Kill Us, Makes Us Evolve Faster)

I've thought about doing one of those as well, but could never find a timline that was plausible.

there is evidence that water flowed on mars, there are dry river beds all over mars , a dig found water just below the surface. So at one point Mars was flowing with water. Now I don't know about 4 billion years ago but now there is not enough oxygen to support human life and it is mad cold there. But it is a story! Perhaps your "life" was adapted to the conditions.

Anyway they are still looking for life on mars which they suspect if there is any would be trapped a way in water somewheres.

dempsey said:

Well, we've found evidence of 'life on mars' haven't we? Fossilized bacteria? Am I misremembering?

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They found a meteorite that had pretty definitely been knocked off Mars, and inside it they found . . . thingies. Said thingies looked somewhat like fossilized bacteria, but they were way too small. The options, as I understand them, are:

(1) they are a genuine Martian life-form—although maybe not a whole lot like Earth bacteria, because microbiologists have no idea how you could cram a whole bacterium, or even bacterium-like life-form, into that small a space, or . . .

(2) they're inorganic anomalies that happen to look a whole lot like fossilized bacteria through sheer coincidence.

As I understand it, the scientific community is leaning toward explanation two. Gotta admit it's simpler.

There is, however, a lot of evidence for water on Mars—flowing water—a lot more than there is now. So I'd say past life is a pretty good possibility. (Actually, I think current life is still a possibility, in isolated pockets. Nothing multicellular, though.)

Izunya

it might be interesting to impose complexity on bacteria forms.

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Sounds like the ravings of either a Tyrant, or a Diety plotting its dark Creationist enterprise, sir!

In either case, sleep with one eye open, and fear the revolutionary uprisings of bacterial mobs bearing tiny pitchforks or microbial guillotines!

AMCrenshaw said:

Do I have to?

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Yes.

Even if intelligent life forms had developed on Mars, they would likely not have left any (non-fossilized) signs that would last a few hundred thousand years, much less the billions that have passed since then. Plate tectonics would have eliminated some of the fossilized stuff, too. We don't exactly have dig operations going on in the Martian crust, so it's hard to say.

(Personally, I doubt any such life existed, but you can make up pretty much whatever you want.)

In either case, sleep with one eye open, and fear the revolutionary uprisings of bacterial mobs bearing tiny pitchforks or microbial guillotines!

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AMCrenshaw said:

Do I have to?
AMC

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Not if the viral swine flu nails us first, no.

We are remarkably free/
to do as we will/
Since we've sighted the plague/
a-comin' over the hill!

SPMiller said:

Even if intelligent life forms had developed on Mars, they would likely not have left any (non-fossilized) signs that would last a few hundred thousand years, much less the billions that have passed since then. Plate tectonics would have eliminated some of the fossilized stuff, too.

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Mars doesn't have plate tectonics.

caw

You don't have to be good at telling the truth you just have to be good at lying to write fiction. That includes spinning the truth, but you don't need irrefutable proof to write a story about something. Haven't you read the Martian Chronicles? Fun, but certainly not likely.

Doing research for a story isn't so you can tell the truth properly, it's so you can lie effectively.

blacbird said:

Mars doesn't have plate tectonics.

caw

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Limited evidence has suggested it might have had tectonics for a period of time, though you're correct that it has since stopped. The presence of any surface features at all rather makes a strong case for it.

SPMiller said:

Limited evidence has suggested it might have had tectonics for a period of time, though you're correct that it has since stopped. The presence of any surface features at all rather makes a strong case for it.

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Not really. In fact, the immensity of the Martian volcanoes suggests exactly the opposite, that the crust of Mars is fixed in place and has been so for a long time, allowing those plumes of lava to continue to spew forth from "hot spots" and build Oympus Mons and other volcanoes to dimensions unseen on Earth. If Mars had active mobile crustal plates with attendant spreading centers and subduction zones, they only existed in its earliest history, and none of its surface features reveals any clear evidence for such.

Mars also has no core-driven magnetic field, indicating that it currently lacks fluid interial material. Remnant magnetic "echoes" have been detected in some Martian surface rocks, indicating that it once did have a planetary magnetid field, but that, too, has long disappeared.

Earth has tectonic plates in large part because the lithosphere (crust) is exceedingly thin, likely because a large proportion of the lighter silicate material near the Earth's surface was stripped away in the primordial collision with another planetary body that formed our moon. Mars never experienced such an event, that we're aware of, and its crustal material is proportionally much thicker. Being considerably larger than Mars, Earth also has remained hot enough to continue to have a major molten interior.

caw

I don't feel like getting into this.