Water found on Mars

[Penthesilea]

here's a follow up to archibald's post.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

[Fallso]

Didn't they also find water in the atmosphere of one of the other planets too? Might've been Venus or Mercury..I forget.

[Dalecia]

Didn't they also find water in the atmosphere of one of the other planets too? Might've been Venus or Mercury..I forget.

I highly doubt Mercury lol. Possibly Venus.

[Woozie]

http://www.planetary.org/news/2008/0...nished_to.html

[Jotaru]

Yes, I believe that I am a quantum uncertainty.

Good call. For some reason (mostly cuz I just woke up when I posted, I guess) I wasn't even considering quantum theory. I do love it so, it makes everything interesting.

[Kaylia]

As much as I believe in science over faith and free will over predistination, I'm starting to think more and more that the former kinda contradicts the latter. If its all just some perfectly oiled working action-reaction chain formed of molecules, that would imply that free will is just our perception of the pre-destined response to any given action. Yay/nay?

If we want to talk about free will, I would rather look at it from a time/space perspective rather than molecular. Would probably be easier to answer it this way.

Personally, I think it all come down to how you describe yourself. My being is aware of itself no matter how I look at it, and it can take complex decision based on stored information. Even if the process can be explained entirely with physics, I will call it free will because the decision come from my body, rather than a direct reaction to an outside source.

I was more asking how hydrogen and carbon atoms end up "doing things" when assembled in a particular fashion. Can we create life in a test tube without using something organic to start with?

You can find many organics compound created in space, ranging from simple molecule to more complex one. None of this is considered alive, but we know it was needed for life to start. While we arent able to put those thing together and make a living being, no huge stretch was used to explain how it could evolve into something like amino acids and living being eventually.


Why can't we reproduce it in lab? I guess it's just a matter of probability and technical constraint. The Earth is huge, and it happened over many hundred years most likely..it's hard to reproduce exactly what happened without knowing perfectly the initial condition. I wouldnt be surprised if creating life is something scientist manage to do in the next 100 years, if not earlier.

[Khamsin]

Why can't we reproduce it in lab? I guess it's just a matter of probability and technical constraint. The Earth is huge, and it happened over many hundred years most likely..it's hard to reproduce exactly what happened without knowing perfectly the initial condition. I wouldnt be surprised if creating life is something scientist manage to do in the next 100 years, if not earlier.

True, it happened over a few years, but it was all random at the time. Life didn't have to start, it could just as easily (and more probably) not happened at all, and the universe today would be a barren, empty wasteland full of rock and space and nuclear reactions with no observers, sentient or non, neither prokaryote nor eukaryote, to witness any of it.

However, if scientists can figure out how to assemble a living cell from scratch with nothing more than a tank of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, then it at least won't be random this time, so the process should be much quicker.

If we can create life someday, we can create it to our design and engineer something neat, something that will become intelligent and sentient, and then fire it off in a tiny capsule in space toward some distant galaxy where we've determined a suitable planet resides. At least for a tiny capsule containing no more than a few cells, it'd require much less energy to preserve and launch them compared to a giant ship capable of supporting humans, and they might eventually reach their destination and multiply some day.

Bonus points if we can pick the destination first, and engineer the cells to be able to survive in an environment that wouldn't necessarily work for us.

We've seen what can result from random processes, so it'll be cool to see what can result from science once life is fully understood.

[Jotaru]

And then ten billion years down the road, there will be a thriving planet full of all sorts of who-the-hell-knows-what, and they'll have some crazy religion that some big man in the sky sent them to that planet to reproduce and be happy and drink fermented plant water.

[Woozie]

What if there's already beings on the planet we send our human-invented cells to and we give them all some incurable fatal disease? D:

[Kaylia]

That's not always true Khamsin. Certain reaction only works when they are done slowly in a particular environment. I'm not saying there is no way to add a catalyst or anything, but the evolution of amino acid into a life form might be a slow process ...but who knows.

Anyway, it's probably easier to modify our own DNA and make super human then making your own lifeform from scratch.

[edit]
You could just send a sperma and eggs if you want to keep mankind alive. Sending them manmade life form is kinda pointless imo.

[Gunitsoldier]

Thank god, thought it was another one of those water glass on a mars bar pictures.

[Maguspk]

Spermatozoid and Ovulum? Pardon my ignorance but I'm going to guess you mean like the sperm/egg of a human? How would that survive?

I wonder the implications of creating life. Would people be up in arms about experimenting on it and even sending it into space? Supposing it was considered sentient like to the extent a Dolphin is..maybe it's more akin to sending monkeys into space but it just seems like a really slippery slope for us to be playing on...

[Kaylia]

Spermatozoid and Ovulum? Pardon my ignorance but I'm going to guess you mean like the sperm/egg of a human? How would that survive?

I wonder the implications of creating life. Would people be up in arms about experimenting on it and even sending it into space? Supposing it was considered sentient like to the extent a Dolphin is..maybe it's more akin to sending monkeys into space but it just seems like a really slippery slope for us to be playing on...

Same as the cells he was talking about? They can both be frozen.

[sirdude]

[QUOTE=Kaylia;2132133]Well, I'm 100% sure every atoms that exist in our universe are in the periodics tables.


How can you be 100% sure that we know of everything that exists in our universe? Take into account that we haven't even explored the depths of our own oceans, that statement sounds very bold.


ps: i failed my qoute

[Woozie]

Well, I'm 100% sure every atoms that exist in our universe are in the periodics tables.

How can you be 100% sure that we know of everything that exists in our universe? Take into account that we haven't even explored the depths of our own oceans, that statement sounds very bold.

We know this based on the translational symmetry of the universe. There's a principle in physics that states that the universe is homogeneous; that it's invariant under discrete or continuous translational operations. Basically, what this means is that the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe. Because of this, we can deduce that since the only possible atomic structures in our local observable universe are on the periodic table or can be made in labs, etc, then this must be the same throughout the universe (and through our own oceans too, of course). Whatever atomic structures aren't allowed locally aren't allowed anywhere else, and therefore we don't have to explore every area of our universe to know what is and isn't possible throughout our universe.

Edit: My quote failed too, what the heck?

Edit 2: fixed the quote (I think)

Edit 3: Nope, not really.

Edit 4: There it goes

[sirdude]

We know this based on the translational symmetry of the universe. There's a principle in physics that states that the universe is homogeneous; that it's invariant under discrete or continuous translational operations. Basically, what this means is that the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe. Because of this, we can deduce that since the only possible atomic structures in our local observable universe are on the periodic table or can be made in labs, etc, then this must be the same throughout the universe (and through our own oceans too, of course). Whatever atomic structures aren't allowed locally aren't allowed anywhere else, and therefore we don't have to explore every area of our universe to know what is and isn't possible throughout our universe.

Edit: My quote failed too, what the heck?

Edit 2: fixed the quote (I think)

Edit 3: Nope, not really.

Yes, but we as human beings are limited to being localized not only to this planet, but this galaxy. Saying that it is impossible to think that somewhere else in the universe, things are not the same is not wrong. Saying that things that aren't on Earth can't be anywhere else is just as ridiculous as saying you are 100% sure there are aliens 100,000,000 light years away.

[Kaylia]

Yes, but we as human beings are limited to being localized not only to this planet, but this galaxy. Saying that it is impossible to think that somewhere else in the universe, things are not the same is not wrong. Saying that things that aren't on Earth can't be anywhere else is just as ridiculous as saying you are 100% sure there are aliens 100,000,000 light years away.

Your telescope can see 13 000 000 000 light years away (up to the beginning of the universe), and what you see is more of the same. The elementary particles are the same everywhere, and you wouldn't be here if they were acting differently

Knowing those elementary particles pretty well, we know it's only possible to build certain specific atoms with them. 1 proton hydrogen, 2 proton helium...etc. You can't have 1½ proton that make some special exotic matters.

[Woozie]

Our laws of physics requires this to be the case about our universe. Translational symmetry actually goes hand in hand with conservation of momentum. It's a consequence of netwonian/classical physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. Those three branches of physics are the only ways we can describe our universe. To state that the laws of physics can be different in different areas of the universe would be to say that QM and Relativity are both wrong. Of course, you're entitled to believe that if you want, but every single observation and experiment ever made is in agreement with our current laws of physics and we have never found any contradictions to conservation of momentum. This would mean that even if QM and GR were wrong, any new theory would either have to include conservation of momentum or be inconsistent with observation and thus be invalid anyways.

The only area of physics that isn't really understood right now are blackholes, and even those don't contradict conservation of momentum in any way.

[Woozie]

Also, it's wrong to say that we're limited to this galaxy. As Kaylia stated, our observations reach much further. I'm assuming that her estimate is based on the age of the universe being about 13 billion years. Actually, because the universe is expanding, and what we're seeing was once closer to us, it actually makes the size of the observable universe 46 billion light years, not 13, but the point remains the same. I'll post sources when I find them.

Edit: Here's one of wikipedia's sources. Wikipedia actually states that the observable universe is 92 billion light years (I guess they're saying 46 light years in two opposite directions = 92 light years. I don't know if this is a vaild way if looking at this, but I've read elsewhere 46billion). This article here explains how we can see stars 46 billion light years away in a universe that's only about 13 billion light years (it actually says 47 billion here).

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#DN

This is also interesting http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/22/stars.survey/

[Kaylia]

Can put it that way too I guess

But yeah, we won't find Magicium or Kryptonite anywhere (and no, I dont want anyone to post that lame kryptonite discovery)