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Kurd Lasswitz wrote "Two Planets" in 1897, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39598983

> Lasswitz's Martians differ little from man physically, but ethically, intellectually, scientifically, and socially they are the prototype of the ideal human being. They seek to educate man, asking in return only air and energy to supplement the diminished supplies in their own, older world.

The story revolves around a group of German scientists who, when seeking the North Pole, come upon a Martian settlement there..

A young German reader of "Two Planets", Wernher von Braun, would develop ballistic missiles for Germany/USA, rockets that launched the first US space satellite and the NASA launch vehicle that took Apollo to the Moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

> Leo Szilard, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars, used this term. In an answer to the question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth (called the Fermi paradox) despite the high probability of it existing, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians."

The group included Erdos and von Neumann.

Wernher von Braun himself also wrote probably the first serious treatise on human missions to mars as well as a science fiction novel on the topic in 1948. Apparently the original German novel remains unpublished, but there is an English translation available. It’s set in 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

Check out the second link’s section about “the Elon”.

"Elon Gates to reach the stars"

Are the Elon Gates made of sugar, I. E. Zucker? Elon Zucker Gates to reach the stars?

Who can tell? All we know for sure is that taking in economic considerations elon gates the timeline.

(I'll show myself out.)

Possibly worth also including just how controversial Wernher von Braun is.

Von Braun is a highly controversial figure widely seen as escaping justice for his Nazi war crimes due to the Americans' desire to beat the Soviets in the Cold War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

What does that have to do with the comment you're replying to?

Edit: This is an honest question, I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any. It certainly doesn't seem like a clear-cut "he was an objectively evil man but we looked the other way" based on the Wikipedia article. It could very well be his account, which from a brief skim seems reasonable, is accurate?

A lot of people feel a strong need to participate in a conversation whether or not they have anything to contribute.

So they bring up Von Braun when the topic of space stuff comes up because they don't really know much about space but they want to participate in the conversation so they think of the closest pop culture thing that they can think of.

It's one of my biggest pet peeves when talking about space stuff because I'm a super passionate layman who has taking a few astrophysics and astronomy courses.

Any adult who is even vaguely interested in space knows very well who Von Braun was and his history. This is the start of space exploration. So yes I tend to agree with you, but this is a general forum, don't expect much more.

Any recommendations on a forum better suited to the topic?

> I'm not familiar with the extent of his crimes, if any.

He was the Nazis' best rocket engineer, responsible for, among other things, the V2s that devastated much of London. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.

> By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, he probably should have been tried and convicted. But he was never even accused, because the US wanted his rocket expertise--by the time of the Nuremberg trials, he was already working for the US Army.

Absurd. For starters, by the standards of the nuremberg trials, there's no way in hell he would be convicted. For comparison, among the men actually acquitted by the nuremburg trials were Franz von Papen, Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power, and Hans Fritzsche, a high ranking propagandist who was in the Fuhrerbunker in the last days of the war and after his acquittal took part in a cabal attempting to re-nazify West Germany.

The nuremberg trials targetted only the very highest level Nazis - only the top 5 highest ranking officers in the entire german military were indicted. Even if von Braun had been an enthusiastic Nazi (and there's quite a bit of evidence he wasn't), he was way too low level to have been tried nonetheless convicted by the Nuremberg trials.

> The nuremberg trials targetted only the very highest level Nazis

The initial ones did, but there were subsequent ones targeting entire organizations--one of which was the SS, to which Von Braun belonged.

There was only one round of Nuremberg Trials. There were subsequent Nuremberg tribunals conducted in the same courthouse, but these were a US only effort, and not what people are referring to when they say "the Nuremberg Trials"

Those subsequent tribunals were still quite limited, with only about 1600 people being tried. For context, there were over a million members of the SS.

Further, the punishment for most of those convicted in these tribunals was forced labor, so had Von Braun been tried and convicted at that time, odds are he still would have most likely wound up working for the US developing their rockets. So the claim that the US shielded him doesn't really make sense.

> Hitler's vice chancellor from 1933 to 1934 and the man who pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to power

Are you saying that supporting Hitler before the war should have been a war crime?

I don't see him saying that, so probably not. But being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime either.

Looking at Wikipedia there seems to be something going on with Braun's involvement in forced labour and war prisoners. I don't see an outline of what the problem is; maybe there is something serious but if there is a problem Wikipedia doesn't seem to detail it. If building horrible weapons is a war crime then I think Fat Man and Little Boy probably take the cake.

>But being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime either.

How familiar are you with jus ad bellum and jus en bello?

Most legal scholars conclude German use of force against the UK was a violation of jus ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello.

The Nuremberg Trials were primarily focused on prosecuting individuals who were deemed to bear the greatest responsibility for the atrocities committed during World War II and the Holocaust.

Many legal scholars of international law and use of armed force agree WvB was should have been tried for the deaths of thousands of forced workers and civilians. His value to the US government definitely saved him, but for that he’d at least have been tried.

> WvB was should have been tried for the deaths of thousands of forced workers and civilians

Perhaps. But this doesn't change the fact that there were thousands or at least hundreds of others guilty of bigger crimes (at least directly) were never prosecuted. Only a tiny minority of war criminals were actually tried after WW2. And almost none of those who escaped justice (or received a slap on the wrist at most) were rocket scientists or were later hired by the US government.

The whole "denazification" process in Germany was very lenient and superficial relative to the severity of the crimes that were committed during and before the war. von Braun was very far down the ladder of responsibility...

> ad bellum and the indiscriminate nature of V-1 and V-2 rockets including their use against civilians was a violation of jus en bello.

Also on that.. how is this not the same as Order No. 154 (unrestricted submarine warfare). Dönitz was exonerated of war crimes because allies admitted that they were doing the same (IIRC Allied admirals even testified on his behalf). Certainly this would apply to the case of indiscriminate bombings? And von Braun wasn't even giving the order so by the standards of the day (or modern standards) I don't see who could he be legally tried for this.

The whole slave worker thing was another matter of course but almost nobody was prosecuted for stuff like that anyway..

> How familiar are you with jus ad bellum and jus en bello?

Yeah they're terms of art. When US or British people use them they mean that aggression by English speakers is appropriate (really we should characterise any aggression as fundamentally defensive in nature) but aggression by people using barbarian tongues is inappropriate (if it damages the commercial interests of English speakers it might be better termed an affront against the divine nature of things). There are some complexities depending on trade agreements and current military alliances.

For example you can see strong defensive plays by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere in the middle east. But then you have examples of aggression by the USSR back in the day in the same countries which was largely unprovoked.

> being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime

Neither is being a chancellor. von Braun was much more than the super-selective characterization of "rocket scientist". His were the actions of a war criminal to anyone except his supporters and the people who benefited greatly from him not being considered as such.

Eye witness testimonies say that von Braun personally picked slave laborers from concentration camps to work and eventually be tortured and killed in the factories he personally supervised. These facts are undisputed by any historical account. The only reason he got away with these crimes is that he was useful to the US space program.

Saying "but being a rocket scientist during a war isn't a war crime" sounds willfully ignorant or just apologetic and that's not the kind of thing you want to excuse. Nobody's blaming him for being a brilliant rocket scientist, only for willingly killing thousands of unwilling prisoners in just a few short years.

If you want an analogy that doesn't involve a history book, imagine hearing that Amazon's or Tesla's CEOs pretended they had no idea that thousands of warehouse or factory workers they had hand picked from prisons were killed or raped every year at work according to rules and procedures signed off by those very same CEOs who routinely patrol the floors to see those rules are enforced. Would you still be here saying "but being a CEO isn't a crime"?

> The only reason he got away with these crimes is

That's not really true though. Most nazis who were committing crimes on the same level (or even more serious ones) got away with them.

They are the two predominate areas of the laws of use of force and armed conflict.

>Strong defensive plays by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere…

Do you know the difference between what you referenced above and the Nuremberg Trials from the standpoint of International Law?

The obvious difference is one is a trial and the other is a set of invasions. At that point I suspect the average international lawyer would be forced to admit that, even from a legal perspective, these two things are different.

No, I'm saying that the Nuremburg trials (rightly) were not a broad inquisition that would convict anyone they could find who was associated with the nazis unless they were under the protection of one of the victorious powers.

Also, fyi the Nuremberg trials were not restricted to war crimes, with many defendants being convicted of crimes against peace or crimes against humanity for their propagation of the Nazi regime and leadership roles in atrocities like the Holocaust. Many of the defendants who were convicted were businessmen, propogandists, and members of the civilian government.

Genuine question - unless he was directly involved with the genocide, was he not doing the exact same thing the allies were doing? It’s not a war crime to participate in a war for your country.

The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians in mass numbers.

The atrocity is that von Braun's V-2 factory was an extermination-through-labor camp. About 12,000 people were forcibly worked and tortured to death to produce those weapons—numerically more deaths than V-2, as a weapon, caused in Britain. von Braun was aware of this, complicit in this, oversaw parts of it as a high-ranking SS officer: his Wikipedia entry quotes a survivor testifying "von Braun went to the concentration camp to pick slave laborers".

Assuming this is true (I have no reason to believe it's not) it's clearly a damning indictment of von Braun himself. And it calls into question his accounts, so it seems like odds are he was "actually" a Nazi as opposed to someone affiliating with the party to avoid punishment or execution.

I still don't see what that has to do with the original comment that mentioned him. If we're talking about him in depth, absolutely mention it and dig into it. I guess the thing I'm having trouble reconciling in my head is the need to, upon a passing reference to someone orthogonal to the main point, say it's "worth including" that they're a controversial figure. The controversy seems irrelevant to me. It seems to border on virtue signaling, this need to say "oh by the way, Nazis are bad" when that (objective fact) has nothing to do with anything.

I see your other comment and I get the point you're trying to make but I don't think it has anything to do with speaking respectfully or with any sort of courtesy about a Nazi, just about trying to make a point.

I can see your point, but I think it's worthwhile to understand the full context, even if it's irrelevant on the surface.

I wasn't familiar with von Braun before reading this thread, and I appreciate the extra info. Complex figure. Maybe even a really bad guy. But, also interesting that his work was useful in getting us to the moon.

Maybe we can all appreciate that dichotomy.

Even more interesting to note, is without your initial pushback, I wouldn't have read more detail about him, so I owe your resistance to actually exploring this facet of the man's alleged history to getting me to actually read a bit about it.

> The US bombed German civilians and Japanese civilians in mass numbers.

Yes, agreed. I'm not arguing that the standards of Nuremberg were actually the right ones.

A significant chunk of the adult male population of Nazi Germany was involved with the genocide. Hitler made sure there was blood on as many German hands as possible. In retrospect the Allies were extremely lenient[0] on Germany and Japan and they probably could have punished them way, way worse.

As for Allied war crimes, many of those were only criminalized after-the-fact. For example, the justification for nuking Nagasaki was "well, there's a factory nearby, so that's a valid military target".

[0] For example, "fiduciary duty to shareholders" was a valid excuse that saved several businessmen at Nuremburg, despite them running forced labor camps that were deadlier than Auschwicz.

The justification at the time for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was field testing two different novel bomb designs .. the urgency came from Germany's surrender and unavailability to use as a test bed and from the rapid depletion of pristine targets in Japan.

The H&N bombings followed close on the heels of bombing 72 other cities (including Tokyo) as part of an ongoing HE + incendiary campaign with list of targets.

These specific targets were selected for atomic tested as they had not been bombed before and served as "clean" test beds for the before and after comparisons, in addition to having some containing topography.

What's important to remember is that they were selected from a long list of targets that were all scheduled to be bombed, the fact that they were low priority from a military standpoint is what had "saved" then from not already having been bombed.

When Hiroshima was bombed the only prior atomic test at Trinity was on a tower with a lot of external controls .. it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb let alone "end the war".

The military compulsion to battlefield test a weapon that had consumed more R&D budget than any ever before in history was intense, and the WW's were rapidly closing out with Germany defeated and Russia closing in on Japan.

After the bombings, immediately after, came a lot of retro fitting justifiction, more so with the Cold War .. but it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.

People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.

For more, and a deeper dive in the many takes on dropping the bomb, see:

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...

for example (it has many references to many historic viewpoints)

Yes, and it's not even like there was a prior plan to use two bombs and see what happened - the military was fully planning to continue the atomic bombings as the cores became available (the third expected to be available by late August). It was only Truman intervening that stopped it at two.

It seems, unsurprisingly, that the military didn't really see the atomic bombs as anything other than a really big bomb - it was only later that they came to be seen as something qualitatively different, and "a bomb so big it is war-ending" is really only something you can know in hindsight.

> It seems, unsurprisingly, that the military didn't really see the atomic bombs as anything other than a really big bomb - it was only later that they came to be seen as something qualitatively different

That, arguably, came with advances in delivery methods. A-bombs alone don't end wars. Multiple sides each putting them on advanced bombers and intercontinental missiles, made to hit quickly and be effectively impossible to stop - that's when nuclear weapons graduate from being just bigger bombs to being existential threats and/or tools for keeping world peace.

> The justification at the time for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was field testing two different novel bomb designs

That was probably one reason, but by no means the only one, nor even IMO a very significant one (and the article you link to, which is a good one from a good historian whose entire nuclear secrecy blog is worth reading, does not make the claim you are making--it gives a number of justifications that were made at the time, and the one you give is not one of them).

The Gar Alperovitz book referenced in the article is also worth reading, as is another historical study, Racing the Enemy [1] by Hasegawa. The latter book is not solely about the decision to use the bomb, but more generally about the process by which the war with Japan ended, but that decision and the process that produced it of course play a large role.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...

> it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb

AFAIK there was no doubt that the implosion method used in the Nagasaki bomb would work after the Trinity test. And there was never any doubt that the gun-type method used in the Hiroshima bomb would work--they didn't even bother to test it before the Hiroshima bombing. The only question was what the practical yield would be under bombing conditions. But that could have been assessed by bombing tests on uninhabited locations, as was done after the war.

> it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.

People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.

These things are quite true. They do not, however, mean that wanting to field test two different bomb designs was a significant factor. Based on my reading I don't actually think it was one at the political level (what the military people thought was another matter, but the key decisions were made at the political level). Politically, I think the biggest factors involved were uncertainty about what it would actually take to get Japan to surrender, and the desire (at least once Truman came into office) to keep the Soviet Union from playing any part in postwar Japan, and more generally to deter them from expanding further.

All good points, and as you say there's little on the record that supports my take on why the two post trinity bombs were always going to be used.

Circling back to at the time, there are copious notes on materials, orders, deployments, and boxes of documentation, and then there is relatively little on the underlying thought given to whether the two bombs should even be used at all. At the time. No shortage of after the fact recollections of course.

While I'm not a historian, more an applied geophysics dabbler, I'm familiar with the material, I've met and talked with Alex Wellerstein, I once interviewed Mark Oliphant, and I've spoken with a number of the technical people who came out for the Emu Fields and Montebello tests.

In the context of an ongoing bombing campaign and truly vast amounts money and resources spent on creating new weapons it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the bombs would not have been field tested. If that kind of take is a foundation then everthing written becomes bookkeeping and for the record.

In life, where there's momentum politics will often follow rather than lead.

Regardless, I simply have an opinion (well, many and not all consistent with each other) and not a book or a career; I principally enjoy jolting people who have a particular fixed view of many events in history to become aware of wider fields of opinion and to consider how consensus views evolve over time.

> For example, the justification for nuking Nagasaki was "well, there's a factory nearby, so that's a valid military target".

Erm, what? The justification for nuking nagasaki was that demonstrating overwhelming might would swiftly end the war (it did) while continuing conventional war would cause many more casualties over time.

Maybe you mean to say that because a lot of ships, bombs and military equipment were made there (though it wasn't merely "a factory nearby") they dropped the bomb there rather than somewhere else.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

Many would consider those war crimes also.

yes, but that side "won". so the important take away is that if you're going to commit war crimes, you must win the war to avoid being charged

The damage the V2s inflicted on London paled in comparison to the destruction of continental European and Russian and Japanese cities.

The V2 killed more (enslaved) people who were building it than it did in its attacks. It was only 'successful' as a propaganda weapon.

...And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the heads of every allied airforce, and all of their immediate subordinates and sub-subordinates should have been dancing the hemp fandango.

I'll also point out that a lot of Nazi military officers and civilian leaders and industrialists, despite significant involvement in the regime's crimes were not found guilty[1] in those trials.

---

[1] Even in the Soviet-ran ones - and as every loyal comrade knows, the courts of the glorious Soviet Union are the fairest, most humane, and most merciful justice system the world has ever conceived, especially when it came to the question of judging fascists.

> And by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, the heads of every allied airforce, and all of their immediate subordinates and sub-subordinates should have been dancing the hemp fandango.

That's a very good point, although the Nuremberg trials used torture to get confessions, so literally anybody could have been convicted.

Did they? Is that why so many walked? Were the ones that were hanged not actually intimately involved in orchestrating a war of aggression and the murder of human beings on a scale unprecedented in the history of the modern world?

Do you have any proof of this?

- "Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala stated that von Braun went to the concentration camp to pick slave laborers:"

- "... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses.[63]"

I agree with your comment. Let's never speak in respectful language about a Nazi SS officer. It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it, as if there were some obligation of diplomacy—as if you owe tactfulness or professional courtesy to Nazis.

> It's a loud silence when someone circles around the topic without mentioning it

It's a unique feature of American/Western historiography that would incline you to believe this. I find it interesting we don't have to tack on similar disclaimers when it comes to any other similarly horrible group throughout history; the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche -- forget about it: we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers. But mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil.

> we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers

Well, we can also speak of Wernher von Braun or even contemporary figures that way. It's only more likely that someone comes along and points out that we shouldn't forget about the context.

When we speak of ancient history, the context is already forgotten beyond what has been documented. There are no living witnesses nor people who directly related to them. (Of course, archaeological and historical research can find more evidence.)

However we do speak of them passionately anyway, even if the discussion is less emotional. You bringing up the examples that you brought up is a perfect example. People immediately understand what you mean. Anyone who agrees with you will have to feel passionately about these long past events.

We all know about the cruelties that came with the Ceasars etc. because people documented them and didn't let it go. We don't need to point it out because it is common knowledge. Do go to a history conference and claim that Julius Caesar was a totally fine and nice guy and you'll see that people can get passionate very quickly.

Discussions get stirred up more quickly for contemporary figures whose power to let information disappear or fade away can sometimes extend beyond their own deaths - for as long as there are people alive who may be affected by the image created.

> However we do speak of them passionately anyway, even if the discussion is less emotional. You bringing up the examples that you brought up is a perfect example. People immediately understand what you mean. Anyone who agrees with you will have to feel passionately about these long past events.

I would say an unemotional actor will recognize that those examples are objectively analogical. But that's not really here or there because I'm not saying one cannot have a well-founded moral reaction to the past. I'm saying it's an accident of our location in history that only Nazis receive this treatment -- well-deserved as it may be -- and admittedly one should expect any group to harbor resentment towards a vanquished enemy for some time. But this forum and particularly the context of this thread requires some stationary, objective analysis, which is impossible with the ankle-biting "by the ways."

> the brutality of the Caesars, the Chinese emperors, the Comanche [...] we can speak of them dispassionately, as non-temporal observers [...] but mere broaching of the subject of the Nazis requires confession that, let's repeat it in unison, they were evil.

There's the thing about temporal closeness and impact on actual politics and ideology. Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world.

And there are still people alive who lived through some of the horrors the Nazis inflicted upon the world. None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship. Nobody, to my mind, seriously worships Imperial China or wants a return of the Caesars. There are no Comanche atrocities apologists (of note).

But Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers. It's important to note Von Braun was an unapologetic nazi and that he should not be celebrated as a person.

> None lives today who saw Caesar's dictatorship.

It's also funny to brand Caesar as an evil dictator. He was a revolutionary with very benevolent tendencies, both toward the masses and to his enemies. Dictatorships like Sulla's, which came before, were the brutal ones. What the people back then saw Caesar as was as a populist hero fixing a crumbling, broken, and corrupt system. Later, the people of the Empire would think back of the Republican era as one of horror and chaos -- because that's what you get with mob rule.

It's all very relativist.

I think, in the far future, people will regard the Nazis as a point on a continuum and all current governments today as not that far away on that continuum -- not like we do, thinking Hitler was the devil.

Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances. Maybe it's more productive to regard that environment as "evil" than raising people up to Anti-Christ status when the environment churns them out. In Caesar's case, that was a broken senatorial system and a provincial military system not designed to deal with how large and ambitious Rome started getting; in Hitler's, it was how brutally the European powers treated Germany after WW1 and the nearby rise of communism.

I agree that, with enough distance and with no danger of another Hitler, future historians will be able to see that dark period in human history more dispassionately.

We're not there yet, not when this is still relatively recent history and when we haven't yet dealt with Nazism's offspring.

> Also, both Caesar and Hitler were products of their environment. Normal people responding a certain way to their circumstances.

I don't know about Caesar, but I certainly don't buy this argument for Hitler. The minute he supported the Final Solution or decided to get rid of 80% of Eastern Europe, he crossed the line. There were people at the time of Hitler, even in Germany, who were horrified by Nazism -- not as in "I don't agree with this", but "I cannot believe this is happening". Some were executed for objecting to it. I'm sure more were silently horrified, not brave or reckless enough to openly reject it, but in private repulsed by it. There were people who hid or helped Jews (and I'm not arguing here Jews were the only victims of Nazism, mind you!).

Hitler was a product of his time and upbringing, but he was also an evil man. There are no excuses for the Holocaust or Generalplan Ost or the many evils of Nazism, when we know people from that time were horrified by it. Evil may be banal, as Arendt put it, but it's still evil.

> Nazism and Fascism's brands of ultra rightwing ideology still looms large in part of the world.

Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods. These terms we use (rightwing, fascist) are new terms for ancient political dispositions. If I describe someone as imperialist, patriarchal, sexist, antisemitic, and racist, am I more likely to be talking about the Nazis, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Abbasids or the Puritans?

> Nazism and its modern day offshoots are still worshipped by enough people that every mention of people related to Nazism must be peppered with these disclaimers

My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

> Not as distinct from basic impulses we can detect in all periods

I disagree. Nazism and Fascism are largely influential today but Caesar isn't.

> My understanding of human psychology does not incline me to think this is a remotely successful strategy.

I cannot vouch for your understanding. I do know Nazism and Fascism must be loudly denounced whenever found. They must not be allowed to fester in the darkness.

Add in communism and religious fundamentalism and I think you’ve just about covered it.

> Nazism and Fascism are largely influential today but Caesar isn't.

Sorry, but this is when I just have to tune out. It's like when people say, "America has no culture," or something similar.

Feel free to tune out. I find your arguments unconvincing.

> It's like when people say, "America has no culture," or something similar.

I do not live in the US so I couldn't care less about what people say there.

I don't know which country you live in, but it's a claim I've seen made just about everywhere.

Both America and Caesar are so influential that it's difficult for people to recognize their influence. Fish in water, etc.

You might enjoy this: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...

They did that with all the Japanese to get info on biological weapons. Or check out the Monster of the Shōwa era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi), who was originally held for war crimes, and then became prime minister.

Does this mean that Americans helped a criminal to escape justice?

Not one, many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#:~:text=those%20captu...

[dead]

And if we’ve come that far, we may as well mention Tom Lehrer’s classic song “Wernher Von Braun,” which, along with the rest of his work, Lehrer so generously released into the public domain:

https://tomlehrersongs.com/wernher-von-braun/

That song shows up in For All Mankind.

> "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians."

Do Germans also have jokes like "how many Hungarians does it take to screw in a light bulb"?

Those exist here at the expense of different peoples, depending where you are in Germany. Most popular, from what I can tell, are East Frisians, but that has to do with a comedian who made a lot of those jokes (Otto Waalkes).

East Frisian jokes on WP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Frisian_jokes

One thing that has annoyed me is in the 1970s the Viking landers did experiments to check for the presence of life on Mars known as the Labeled Release experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_exper... which dropped a nutrient solution with radioactive Carbon-14 to detect if there was any off gassing to detect if anything metabolized the soil. And both experiments showed positive results but it has been dismissed since chemical reactions could not be ruled out. But here is the thing, the experiments then did a sterilization control where they heated up the soil to 320 F for 3 hours and attempted the experiment again and no gasses were detected which is something you'd expect to see if the gasses were produced by microbes and not chemical processes.

Now is this a positive detection of life? No because other possible factors can not be ruled out. But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? After the Viking missions we never conducted any further experiments that could rule out any other possible chemical reactions to get closer to confirming the presence of microbial life.

So I would say with the Labeled Release experiments coupled with the seasonal Methane detections strongly imply that there is still microbial extremophiles on Mars.

Read the wikipedia link and it seems there are credible explanations for what is going on:

> "With unsterilized Terrestrial samples, though, the addition of more nutrients after the initial incubation would then produce still more radioactive gas as the dormant bacteria sprang into action to consume the new dose of food. This was not true of the Martian soil; on Mars, the second and third nutrient injections did not produce any further release of labeled gas."

> "Albet Yen of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has shown that, under extremely cold and dry conditions and in a carbon dioxide atmosphere, ultraviolet light (remember: Mars lacks an ozone layer, so the surface is bathed in ultraviolet) can cause carbon dioxide to react with soils to produce various oxidizers, including highly reactive superoxides (salts containing O2−). When mixed with small organic molecules, superoxidizers readily oxidize them to carbon dioxide, which may account for the LR result. Superoxide chemistry can also account for the puzzling results seen when more nutrients were added to the soil in the LR experiment; because life multiplies, the amount of gas should have increased when a second or third batch of nutrients was added, but if the effect was due to a chemical being consumed in the first reaction, no new gas would be expected. Lastly, many superoxides are relatively unstable and are destroyed at elevated temperatures, also accounting for the "sterilization" seen in the LR experiment."

> This was not true of the Martian soil; on Mars, the second and third nutrient injections did not produce any further release of labeled gas

But that's probably because martian microbes are less tolerant of high temperatures when compared to Earth microbes. But, yes I am aware there are other non life factors that could have resulted in a positive detection. But my point is why would we never follow up with further experiments to test for possible chemical reactions?

Because we have enough evidence already to draw conclusions? Space exploration is expensive.

> But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? After the Viking missions we never conducted any further experiments that could rule out any other possible chemical reactions to get closer to confirming the presence of microbial life.

According to Wikipedia, the radiation levels are too high:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Cosmic_radiation

> Even the hardiest cells known could not possibly survive the cosmic radiation near the surface of Mars since Mars lost its protective magnetosphere and atmosphere.[63][64] After mapping cosmic radiation levels at various depths on Mars, researchers have concluded that over time, any life within the first several meters of the planet's surface would be killed by lethal doses of cosmic radiation.[63][65][66] The team calculated that the cumulative damage to DNA and RNA by cosmic radiation would limit retrieving viable dormant cells on Mars to depths greater than 7.5 meters below the planet's surface.[65] Even the most radiation-tolerant terrestrial bacteria would survive in dormant spore state only 18,000 years at the surface; at 2 meters—the greatest depth at which the ExoMars rover will be capable of reaching—survival time would be 90,000 to half a million years, depending on the type of rock.[67]

People have said the same thing many times yet we keep discovering extremophiles thriving the some of the most hostile environments. And in 2020 they conducted an experiment on the ISS that exposed Earth bacteria to direct cosmic radiation for 3 years and it turns out they survived https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-dis.... And this was just Earth bacteria that did not evolve under these conditions, any remaining microbes on Mars would have developed adaptions to survive in such conditions.

So we just need to find a recently excavated impact crater, a few thousand years old, and send a probe there, to inspect freshly exposed layers.

>But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life?

simples.

If life is definitively detected on Mars there will never be another mission to determine if life is present on Mars. So what clever scientists have figured out is that they need to do all the science that they want before checking for life.

I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there. The prestige of either potentially studying alien life, or of having the ability to set foot on the fundamental origin of life on our own planet would be even more historically significant than Apollo.

> I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there.

Nope. More probable for it to get quarantined, for fear of cross contamination. IIRC NASA purposefully doesn't land craft on the locations with conditions closer to habitability in Mars today, fearing stowaway microbes from our probes run amok and eradicate any extant martian biota, just like rabbits and other critters brought by Europeans wrecked ecosystems in Australia.

IIRC a big part of Perseverance's mission is to stash away pristine, provably untouched samples of Mars, because NASA sees a human landing on Mars in the nearish (ie 20-30 years) as an inevitability.

I don't think they'd quarantine the planet due to it, even moreso because even if the US decides to quarantine it, other nations might not and even then, there'd be value to sending a crew to say, a station in Mars orbit or on Phobos/Deimos, for more effective control over survey vehicles and to reduce the feedback loop between retrieving samples from the surface and studying them.

Maybe we are about to discover that we came to Earth after messing up Mars.

You jest, but I seriously believe we are likely martians. Early panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of astrobiological questions about origin of life and LUCA complexity.

To be clear, Mars’ descent into inhospitality was totally natural and the result of a smaller planet with stripped atmosphere just outside the habitable zone as the Sun cooled. I doubt Martian life developed to be multicellular. But I bet when we go we’ll find fossils of algae colonies and cyanobacteria, and maybe even some living remnants underground.

> as the Sun cooled

Sun becomes hotter with time passed, not cooler.

> Early panspermia from Mars settles a LOT of astrobiological questions about origin of life and LUCA complexity.

Does it solves questons or just moves them to another planet?

But then how did life get on mars?

Mars had 3/4 billion more years to develop, compared with the Earth. Mars formed first, and cooled first due to its smaller size.

One of the outstanding problems in astrobiology I mention is that the Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya, and the oldest fossils of presumably DNA based life (since it matches existing life we can study) was 3.7Gya. Mars was hospitable ~4.5Gya. So either life emerged IMMEDIATELY on Earth and did a complexity speed run before slowing down and remaining stagnant for the next billion years or so, or it emerged on Mars first and Earth was seeded once it was cool enough.

> Earth was inhospitable until 3.8Gya

There is much uncertainty about this. The early Earth was a volatile place with a lot of raw materials and energy available, and a lot of chemistry happening. I wouldn't rule out that some part of Earth may have had the right conditions for life right from the beginning. Certainly if we expect life to be able to survive a ride on a piece of ejecta from Mars, it's plausible to imagine it surviving in some boundary niche amidst the heat and fury of the Hadean Earth.

> wouldn't rule out that some part of Earth may have had the right conditions for life right from the beginning

Even if it was, it wouldn't have survived the impact that created the Moon.

Bear in mind that hypothesized impact is estimated to have occurred around the 4.5Gya mark. That’s still a lot further back than 3.8Gya. And I still wouldn’t categorically rule out microscopic life/life-precursors surviving the event somehow.

Geological evidence shows that the earth’s crust was molten until 3.8Gya. This corresponds with the ending of the late heavy bombardment on the moon, which Apollo samples dated. It’s hard to imagine life persisting in or around a magma ocean.

What if Mars collided with Earth and that's what killed Mars and transferred life to Earth and also made the moon?

I think generally speaking people refer to life arriving and then staying as the start of life on Earth. You're probably right that it could have been and likely was spontaneously popping up and then disappearing on Earth prior to the pretty massive window as when we believe life to have "began" on Earth.

Complexity speed run to stagnation isn’t suspect at all, thats exactly what you’d expect when there is suddenly a new environment to exploit for life. Mutations are always happening. At some point a subpopulation will emerge that has a lucky few mutations that grant it an edge relative to others in fitness, then it will dominate the environment until the factors that confer success either change, or these mutants fall short of a more fit upstart mutant population. Its something you see play out even today, when an invasive species is introduced to a new environment where its traits serve it well, and quickly outcompetes native species.

Its also why we better be damn sure the mars sample return is absolutely sterile lest we contaminate our planet with extraterrestrial microbes.

At this point, given how much Mars had been roved, why hasn’t some fossil record been discovered yet?

At the very least, I would expect something akin to chalk left behind by proto-diatoms that had calcium carbonate skeletons.

Other posts answered, but only if you already know the answer. The rovers we've used on Mars have done an extremely superficial job of scouring the planet. The most recent rover Perseverance has, to my knowledge, the most capable drill with a max depth of 2.4 inches. [1] And the drill is used extremely sparingly because it tends to break quickly, as it did on Curiosity. And of course it can only drill, not excavate/cleave. The first humans on Mars will likely provide more information in a week than decades of probes and rovers have.

[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...

I am imagining an astronaut digging with a shovel and 2.5 inches below the surface are just dinosaur skeletons and stuff. Or something even more fantastical.

Exactly. There's absolutely no reason to think that advanced life did not exist on Mars except for the lack of evidence. That sounds funny, but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in a case like this where the planet has been probably sterilized on a time frame of potentially billions of years.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is a massive and extremely hardy structure that will outlast all modern buildings. Yet it's substantially deteriorating after less than 5,000 years, and it will eventually just completely disintegrate, absent the already ongoing preservation/restoration efforts. It might take 20,000 years, maybe a million. A quick search on the internet suggests nobody really knows, other than that it will happen. And now we're talking about time frames of billions of years. So what would a sterilized, perpetually radiated, atmosphere free Earth over billions of years look like, paired with never-ending massive dust storms (as on Mars)? Well, probably not especially unlike Mars does today. But oh what treasures would await you far below the surface!

I don't necessarily think anything does await us, but who knows? It's a tantalizing possibility that we won't be able to dismiss until we have humans on Mars. It's vaguely analogous to the early observations of 'canals' on Mars [1] whose explanation ranged from running water to active geoengineering from another advanced species on the planet. Their exact meaning was debated all the way into the mid 20th century, until we finally were able to get probes that could take 'high res' photos of the surface that showed they were definitely just optical illusions. A disappointing discovery, but nonetheless emphasizing that the importance of actually testing things instead of just relying on indirect instrumentation/data of this era or that.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals

Kurzgesagt did a video on this.

Though they discuss how advanced civilizations could have existed on Earth and we might not even know it because there wouldn’t be much left and what was left might be so unusual that we might chalk it up to natural phenomena.

https://youtu.be/KRvv0QdruMQ

There's been less than 150 miles of Mars roamed by mostly small rovers that often could barely do more than take pictures and do some basic soil chemical analysis. Do you expect to see obvious dinosaur remains with an RC car with a small shovel driving around in Kansas for 100 miles, especially if you don't even know what a dino even looks like?

I think there have been less than 100 drill holes by curiosity and perseverance the deepest being ~3” and none of those samples have returned to earth. Not sure how deep any potential fossil layers might be but that doesn’t sound like a lot.

How would we know? It’s not like like we have a geologist over there with a rock hammer breaking open rocks to look for fossils.

Yet.

I think it’s actually pretty darn stupid that we aren’t running one way missions.

I, and I bet other people bored on Earth with nothing to look forward to, would gladly sign up for a one-way trip to Mars.

The people who would be valuable in that role, namely highly trained scientists, mostly aren't interested in what's effectively a suicide mission. They have better options and things they're tied down to on Earth.

Feels like a conspiracy when you run into these super simple, realistic use cases of generic but progressive ideas.

Things kids can think up, that we can most certainly do that would put us insanely ahead but ... we just don't?

Like, why do we visit the moon but not have people stay there at all? Why are there no structures there?

Why do we ignore the Earth's mysteries a lot and go directly to Mars?

They don't carry petrographic microscopes, nor dig deep boreholes.

Drilling a couple of inches into the surface a handful of times isn’t going to find any fossils.

> At this point, given how much Mars had been roved

I mean maybe its a lot compared to 20 years ago but in absolute terms? It’s practically nothing, isnt it?

How does earth get seeded?

Look up ALH-84001. The debate about whether the structures inside this Martian meteorite are fossils is too long for a HN post. But in analyzing the rock it was shown that the during the entire trip from when it was blasted out of Mars to when it fell in Antarctica would have been survivable for rock boring microbes. Not just theoretically, but hard evidence. There are structures that would have been destroyed if the rock was heated enough to sterilize, but they survived the trip. Hundreds of tons of rock like this from Mars land every year.

> Hundreds of tons of rock like this from Mars land every year.

277 total Martian meteorites — with the largest weighing 14.5 kg — is not hundreds of tons yearly.

That's how many have been conclusively classified as Martian out of "the 72,000 meteorites [total] that have been classified". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite)

That's obviously not the actual total that have ever made it here.

https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/fac...

> Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day.

That has been going on for billions of years. If the 277/72,000 proportion holds that's a lot of material.

> Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day.

Most of it gets destroyed on entry, right? No organic matter surviving?

No, most are smaller rocks and generally decelerate to terminal velocity in the upper atmosphere. It’s the big ones that have too much momentum and penetrate further at speed, causing them to go boom.

The underlying reason is that momentum scales with volume but air resistance scales with surface area.

While I recognize your logic, and even mostly agree, the point still stands that it cannot be conclusively and definitively said (as least as far as we've been alive/can tell) that hundreds of tons of Martian meteorites fall to Earth every year. Or even tons at all.

Tons of meteorites in general, sure — but not from Mars.

It is likely given these numbers at least some tons of Martian rock land here annually, which makes the seeding of life concept feasible. I'm on board with "not hundreds of tons", but it's a lot closer estimate than 277 ever.

(48.5 * 365) * (277 / 72,000) = 68 tons per year as an extremely speculative estimate here, ignoring entirely probable variances in what hits us (much of which is sand-grain sized) versus what we identify... and again, any estimate here we have to multiply by a few billion years.

Related talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekJQUS7WP78&t=57s&pp=ygUPS2lyc...

If there were extra-terrestrial intervention, it would only have needed to be a one-time event.

And it wouldn't be technologically hard to do it such that no trace remains over those timescales.

So, yes, that's "crazy". On the other hand, it's unfalsifiable in the absence of other theories.

The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. It is not on someone else to disprove such a claim.

There are much saner theories for panspermia.

Like? You're coming across as very dismissive for no reason.

There are meteorites on Earth which very likely originated from Mars. They're believed to have been launched into space by an impact, eventually finding their way onto Earth. If we're looking for the most realistic options for panspermia to have occurred, they'd be due to a natural event of this sort.

It’s very much like how islands in the sea are colonized by life. Some event causes a blob of living creatures to enter the sea on a raft and they drift until they make landfall somewhere else. Sometimes they survive long enough in the new place to reproduce.

Rats leaping from a sinking ship swimming to shore we were.

I'm not arguing against that.

I'm just saying unfalsifiability is a bitch, and it's hard to find hard evidence on geologic timescales.

Volcanic eruptions throwing rocks into space. A large impact throwing a huge number of rocks into space.

Couldn't it just be that simple life isn't rare as long as the conditions exist for it to form. It took a very very very long time for even oxygen producing life to form after that.

That still doesn't answer the question. How did life start on Mars?

That's a different question though, and you're right that this wouldn't be answered in the scope of this discussion.

The longer time period would be partially offset by Mars having over three times lower surface area than Earth, though.

Your numbers give Mars an extra ~800 million years. Nothing even close to 3/4 billion.

Besides, deciding what was inhospitable for early life is an exercise of noisy assumptions. I'd bet the error margin is larger than that difference.

3/4, as in the fraction 3 out of 4, 75%, not 3-4

To be fair, 3/4 billion is an unusual way to write that. Much more common is 750 million, or even 0.75 billion.

3/4 billion = 750 million, no?

Long billion vs short billion?

Didn’t the “long billion”, aka a trillion, stop being used sometime in the early 20th century on British English, if not earlier?

Some of our books in UK school in the 1980s listed 10^12 as a billion. That doesn't mean it wasn't officially changed in the early C20th though.

?????????

800 million is greater than 3/4 billion?

Maybe he misread it as 3-4 billion?

I misread it that way too. Fractions aren't commonly used for things like millions, billions, etc.

I remember seeing somewhere a graph where someone plotted the "complexity" of life vs. time, I think on a log plot, and found a straight line. The line goes to (log) 0 around 5 billion years before the formation of the solar system. The inference from this admittedly dubious exercise was that life originated somewhere before our Solar system, spread here, and continued to evolve here.

I think it was maybe from this source? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

What definition of "complexity" lets it be linear across the Cambrian Explosion?

Size of genome, I think. Not clear how they estimate that for deep time.

Exactly, panspermia isn't an answer, it's kicking the can down the road.

The only thing panspermia can tell us is that it's ok if we can't find evidence for the genesis of life on Earth.

Which is an important advance because genesis of life on Earth is getting harder and harder to answer as we gather more evidence. Pushing it to another environment (and longer time frame) does in fact solve a number of problems.

I'd say it just ignores any problems.

However, haven't we roughly recreated the process in a lab in the last couple of decades?

And we may never have the answer because we simply can't know because no one was there because nothing was there. But there's a plausible enough explanation that we don't need to invoke the extraterrestrial and all of its problems.

And I think that's part of the appeal of panspermia, it makes life extraterrestrial. And if it is extraterrestrial in origin, then it could have happened elsewhere. Whereas if the genesis of life is contained to Earth, then the chances go down that it happened somewhere else.

No there hasn’t been any (successful) abiogenesis experiments yet.

What evidence? Do we no longer figure ~4by bp?

All science is the process of kicking the can further down the road.

Excellent comment. Kalām cosmological argument.

I get your point, but the idea that life originates on Asteroids and populates planets on impact is, imo, likely. It does shift the question to “how did it start there” :)

After going back through all the elephants, life started with Great A'Tuin.

It's turtles all the way down . . .

do asteroids even have all the elements / compounds necessary to support the building blocks of life?

Apparently, yes.

But they don't have nearly as many opportunities to react as in a hot planet with an atmosphere. So pushing that life started there instead of only recognizing it's a very unlikely (but still possible) possibility isn't sustained by evidence.

Yes. In fact some have surprisingly complex organic chemistry—amino acids and everything.

They have the chemical elements, but they do not have a source of energy that could create life.

For the appearance of life, a planet with a hot interior and volcanism is necessary, so that minerals that are stable only at high temperatures in the interior are ejected to the surface, where after cooling down they are no longer in chemical equilibrium, providing the energy necessary to drive the synthesis of organic macromolecules (by producing through chemical reactions with water reduced compounds like dihydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can reduce the abundant carbon dioxide and dinitrogen to eventually generate amino-acids).

The solar energy cannot play any role in the appearance of life, because harvesting it requires systems that are much more complex than those that appear naturally in the inorganic minerals and fluids.

While the Earth had certainly all the preconditions for the appearance of life right here, it is likely that Mars also had them in the beginning.

What another poster has said is plausible, i.e. the only reason for supposing that life could have been brought on Earth from another place is that life has appeared rather quickly on Earth, even if this is an event with a much lower probability than all the other events that have occurred after that during the evolution towards more complex forms of life, which have required billions of years to happen.

If life has been transferred to Earth from elsewhere, Mars is the only plausible source, because it had the conditions necessary to generate life long enough before Earth and because fragments from Mars have been frequently transported to Earth, where they fall as meteorites, after being ejected from Mars by impacts that happened there, which is easier than from other planets due to the lower gravity.

Despite the fact that it is not impossible, I doubt that life has been brought from Mars, but it is indeed puzzling that life seems to have appeared very quickly on Earth.

There are also facts that are hard to explain by the hypothesis of transfer from Mars. If that happened, than the forms of life that have been transferred must have consisted of at least one kind of autotrophic "bacteria" and at least several distinct kinds of viruses, to explain all the existing living beings as their descendants.

There is considerable evidence for the fact that the current genetic code of the nucleic acids is the product of a long evolution process. In the beginning there must have been a simpler code where many more combinations were equivalent and which encoded no more than 10 amino-acids, perhaps only 6 or even only 4 in its original variant. So very ancient "bacteria" may have superficially looked like modern bacteria but they must have had a quite different metabolism. In the hypothesis where life has moved between planets, there would be an open problem of when had the transfer happened during this early evolution of the genetic system.

On Earth there has remained no survivor with a much simpler genetic code (though there are a few examples of only slightly simpler genetic codes than the canonic variant). Perhaps the earlier living beings were completely uncompetitive with the modern ones, so they have been eaten or they have starved to death. In the case of a transfer from Mars, it would also exist the possibility that only living beings with a complex genetic code had survived through a transfer and the others had remained on Mars.

Thanks for interesting thoughts. When reading it I get the feeling that the chances for "random" creation of complex life via Mars or directly seems almost infinitely small. To me it seems much more plausible that it was designed and created rather than a stroke of luck. Again, thanks for your thoughts.

Blew in from Europa

Maybe Earth? Who knows? Lots of good sci-fi has been written about it. I recommend J.P. Hogan’s “Inherit the Stars”, which starts with evidence of human spaceflight predating known history and goes on interesting directions.

I heard somewhere that life started on Mars, but it was all male. Can't seem to find the reference.

Since the formation of both Earth and Mars (approximately the same time) the Sun's output actually increased by ~33%.

so aliens did build the pyramids!

Sholva!

Probably, we tried Earth first, realized there were huge freaking dinosaurs on it, decided to wait it out a bit, watched that comet hit, was like, "yay! now we can go!"

What is your actual mechanism for life getting to Earth from Mars?

We already know the meteorites from Mars probably do make their way to Earth on occasion. [1] From there, imagining some primitive life managing to hitch a ride is easy. Even quite advanced life, like tardigrades, have demonstrably survived days of exposure to outer space, and successfully procreated afterwards. [2]

[1] - https://www.space.com/mars-meteorites-on-earth-mystery

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#Survival_after_expo...

> Martian meteorites experience shock pressures of less than 30 GPa on ejection from the Red Planet

Is that enough energy to boil the living things that might be in the rock?

Early solar system had plenty of impact events happening. Mars has less gravity than Earth, so it's easier to eject material from there. Picture a comet or asteroid hitting early mars. Most ejecta falls back to Mars, but still tens of thousands of rock fragments are ejected into space, in random directions. Some fraction of them are likely to reach Earth a few years later, potentially carrying any microbial stowaways present in Mars by then.

I guess we can somehow bind an asteroid, alongside a spaceship crashing in.

I'd go one step further and say that life began in the protoplanetary disk, explains how quickly life established itself on Earth.

> as the Sun cooled

Huh?

The Sun has consistently gotten hotter with age.

Thank you for the factual correction. It’s the geothermal (aerothermal?) heat that has decreased by more than the sun’s increasing luminosity, resulting in net temperature loss.

That's wrong too. While geothermal heat is going down, it's doing it very slowly and has very little impact on surface temperature. Earth was on average significantly colder in the past, to the point of there being several "snowball earth" episodes when the entire surface froze over. That's no longer possible, strictly because the Sun is warmer now.

Mars was somewhat warmer before, but that was not because of geothermal, but because it used to have a thicker atmosphere, and that retained heat better.

I was talking about Mars, not Earth. Mars is a lot smaller and cools faster.

What? I thought the geologic record showed that it's been hot most of the time, punctuated by a few ice ages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#...

Evidence of a Snowball Earth phase is not definitive, but that graph doesn't go back far enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huronian_glaciation

Indeed. Something we have in common.

Normally I wouldn't complain about downvotes, but telling me I've got uglier is a bit cruel. I'll get over it...

Is that the paradise? And Adam's apple might not be an apple, but some important electronic devices that Adam accidentally broke?

OK I know it sounds crazy...but it's fun to link legends with science.

Tree of knowledge - thats obviously a syntax tree. Garden of Eden was a simulation. Getting into computing could crash it.

OK, so they messed with the tree and caused a segfault...

Sounds like Assassin's Creed lore

Could lead to an interesting plot.

For a time the "Adam and Eve" twist ending was actually overused in many science fiction stories so much so that it is now pejoratively discussed in books on writing [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_God_story

[dead]

The idea of which makes it even more bizarre that we're trying to leave a literally perfect planet for us for a dead one.

Just to point out: the planet isn't perfect for us. We evolved to fit it, not the other way around.

Your point still stands.

"We" is very loose here. Some (allegedly) humans are trying to leave and propagandizing for funding.

I, for one, am not planning to leave earth anytime soon, thanks.

> n 1976, while Van Flandern was employed by the USNO, he began to promote the belief that major planets sometimes explode.[30] Van Flandern also speculated that the origin of the human species may well have been on the planet Mars, which he believed was once a moon of a now-exploded "Planet V".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Flandern#Exploding_pla...

I genuinely believe this, despite the lack of evidence (largely because it is a fun belief if sobering to hold). You can push the concept way further still, for example we had a technocratic elite last time as well, and they sent us peasants to earth first to colonize it. Genetics wasn't as well developed last time and for some fluke inbreeding wasn't known about, and so, the technocratic elite ended up inbred AF as they orbited earth. They continue to come down and abduct humans from time to time to gather genetic material to bolster their own failing gene pools while also measuring terrestrial qualities to check if it is time to land and lay claim to the peasantry once more, except this time there is a new landed elite that they'll have to fight it out with in one way or another.

That would be pretty fascinating.. technologies long lost, and now we look at eroded past of where civilizations once flourished

My favorite theory is that Mars is what Earth will eventually resemble.

Who do you mean by "we"? Humans? Living beings?

Sometimes I wonder if Sci-fi has done more harm than good. It provides conclusions that people so badly want to prove true that they will look for any evidence, however meager, to bolster their arguments. Maybe there was life on Mars, but the main motivation to believe that right now is that many people have read about it in fantasy books. Much more devastatingly, Sci-fi has driven what technology people develop, and often it has led to technology that has made the world worse.

Meanwhile, those stories about martians are all metaphors. But people can't distinguish the symbol from the symbolized.

> "...It provides conclusions that people so badly want to prove true that they will look for any evidence, however meager, to bolster their arguments."

You argue from the position that Martians 'must not be real'.

Why is your conclusion any better than those who argue that Martians could be real?

Science works upon evidence. If so:

a) there is some evidence to support the existence of prior life on Mars;

b) it is not the scientific case that life on Mars is impossible/implausible

So why do you so strongly hold on to your own dogma, and chastise the conclusions of others as mere 'fantasy' and 'sci-fi'? You are no smarter than everyone else, by merely being contrarian.

you are shifting the burden of proof and failing to make a good argument here.

Your statement make no sense.

I cite how science permits plausibility upon evidence. This is in contrast to OP's wishful dogma, where anything not presently known must be fantasy/sci-based and implausible - which is not how science works.

I didn't say Martians can't be real. I said the evidence that I've encountered (obviously limited by the fact that I'm not a subject matter expert) is insufficient to overcome the threshold of doubt. I then theorized (uncharitably, I'll admit) that many people are predisposed to believe in martians because they've read too much science fiction stories which themselves are actually just metaphors for conditions of life here on Earth. I then made fun of these people, lightly I think.

I don't blame scifi, after all it is just fiction. However, I think the blame could go to poor education and being able to know the difference.

Yeah fair point. It's not as if Ray Bradbury was the most subtle writer. You have to try to miss the point.

Then again, I get it. If somebody offered to build me a Gundam I wouldn't think "Oh no, a symbol for the dehumanization of soldiers on the modern battlefield" I'd think "Is the beam saber included?"

But at the same time, there's so much real science that has thoroughly been inspired by scifi. Sometimes, you just need to get the imagination juices flowing. "That thingymabob from sciFiTvShow would be really cool to have IRL. What would it take to do that...hold my beer" type thinking has probably given us more than we think. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing the concept too much?

The voice feature of ChatGPT on my phone is basically the Star Trek ship computer.

The weather radar app replicates a feature of the Star Trek tricorder that I saw in an episode of TNG.

Household robots like in The Jetsons are coming soon, a couple decades at most from today.

Etc…

Do you really need sci fi in either direction to come up with those ideas? I don't read or consume sci fi, but considering the tech available, these just seem like natural things you would try to do.

> considering the tech available,

Wow, you're doing some heavy caveating with that comment.

Sure, someone today can say that a handheld device to show you the weather in any part of the world seems like a "duh" thing now, but in the 60s when Star Trek came to TV with a tricoder or really a handheld anything was pushing credibility. Computers at the time took up rooms in buildings. Of course zillenials never knowing the world before handheld mobile devices can't imagine a time when it took imagination to think of the things they have today.

But how did Star Trek creators come up with this?

And how did people come up with things before the sci fi was available like it is now.

I just really think influence of sci fi is really overestimated here.

In fact people bruteforcing ideas for sci fi before the tech was available proves that you can think of those ideas even if you don't have the tech available. And if you do, it is much easier to come up with all of it. The tech came naturally in order as different types of tech became available irrespective of sci fi.

I really think we're talking circles, as you've now just stated what we've said in the first place. SciFi authors thought of something that would be cool to have. Now, we have the tech that makes those scifi things real things. The people making the real things admit they were inspired by the scifi thing rather than it being an original idea to them.

What's your point?

Some of them admit of that and arguably the products would have happened even without sci fi. In some cases these are just marketing stories. I don't ever consume sci fi and I have been able to come up with ideas that someone might have seen in sci fi.

yes yes. you're brilliant. what's these supposed ideas that nobody else has come up with? it ain't braggin' if you can do it. otherwise, you're just some rando on the internet crying about how smart you are.

> what's these supposed ideas that nobody else has come up with

No, I'm pretty sure a lot of people have came up with the ideas that I have, and irrespective of whether they watched sci-fi or not, as I did not.

I'm not even saying I'm smart or anything. I'm just saying people are capable of coming up with ideas without having anything to do with sci fi.

Not so much real science. Mostly real technology. Those are very different things.

> Maybe there was life on Mars, but the main motivation to believe that right now is that many people have read about it in fantasy books.

Life effectively began on Earth around 400 million years after it formed, and that's about the time that Mars' core cooled off and atmosphere got blown away. It seems that there was just enough time for life to start on Mars before it got snuffed out by the planetary geology of Mars and loss of its magnetosphere. If we ever find life on Mars, it's most certainly likely to be single-celled organisms.

If we randomly sample individuals on earth, we're also likely to be single-celled organisms.

Can you substantiate the claim that scifi is the biggest contributor to people thinking mars might have had life? Seems like a bold claim.

Mars is the 2nd most habitable planet in the solar system and people have wondered if there was life out there for a lot longer than scifi has existed.

This article has plenty of such examples. First one I see it Democritus around 400 bc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life

An oxidizing atmosphere (as Earth and Mars are currently) would actually make it much harder for life to emerge in the first place. Oxidation makes it very hard for complex molecules to remain stable enough for life to emerge in the first place. Before photosynthesis, Earth had a reducing environment. The advent of oxygen is often termed the "Oxygen Catastrophe."

Young terrestrial planets should tend towards a reducing atmosphere, due to all the rocks and such oxidizing. It took ages for life on Earth to produce sufficient oxygen to switch to an oxidizing atmosphere. We have evidence that Mars did start reducing and switch at some point. That Mars became oxidizing is certainly curious, considering the reason that happened on Earth.

When you read unrealistic sci-fi about Mars as planet with vibrant, if aging, life (and Venus as a jungle planet); remember that the conditions on Mars surface were still largely unknown until the tail end of the Space Race. It was still believable that Mars had life up until the 1960s.

Imagine the frustration of our martian ancestors upon learning the richest man on earth is trying to go back to they place they originally launched the seeds from.

*One of the richest men. Bernard Arnault seems to claim top spot currently and the definition of richest man is also very vague in general.

Imagine their endless frustration as we sailed from place to place felling all the forests to build more ships to sail further afield and fell more forests.

I dislike complaining about titles, but I really wish articles, especially a national laboratory, would be more honest about titles. This makes it sound like this is the new "smoking gun" that Mars was so-called Earth-like early on. However, it was my understanding that this was already known. The largest known waterfall was already previously known to be on Mars at one point, and it was already known that Mars had oceans and rivers. Again to my knowledge, I thought it was already basically understood that Mars was a little mini-Earth the first 400 million or so years of its life until its core cooled off.

Actually, the article text is just playing it cool. Evidence of an oxidizing atmosphere is a whole other level of Earth-like than just having liquid water. Our oxygen atmosphere is created by life. So if these rocks were in fact formed by atmospheric oxygen, that's huge. I'm not sure it's a smoking gun, but it's at least a big bang and you can reasonably look for a gun nearby.

Just a curious question, is Earth's core cooling off like Mars?

I sure hope not. I would assume it's a rather dynamic situation of various periods of different relative behavior. We're certainly at its mercy though. My understanding about Mars is that it is just a much smaller planet than Earth, and it's core composition was slightly different (?), and so the core couldn't keep up and just slowly stopped "slushing around" and cooled off. That's my very loose understanding of the situation without digging into references. A quick search also seems to imply that it was the collision of Earth and another planetoid (not sure of the right name), the collision that created our rather relatively large and close Moon, injected a huge amount of heat and energy in Earth, basically re-smelting it. Plus the Moon constantly tugs and pulls on the Earth, which also probably adds to the core dynamics.

So many fortunate series of events that lead to the opportunity for life. Some survivorship bias I guess.

Yes, it is. There was a pop-sci book that came out twenty years ago, The Life and Death of Planet Earth, which contains some speculation about the consequences of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Death_of_Planet_E.... They give a low-end estimate of 500-800 million years before plate tectonics stop. Net effect would be the planet becomes uninhabitable by modern day plants and animals well before the sun goes red giant and kills off everything else.

This is scary on two fronts. One, whatever happened to Mars could happen to Earth, and two, it puts the Great Filter probably in our future. If our solar system had two hospitable planets then there should be plenty of Earth like planets around in our galaxy. In which case we end up with the Fermi Paradox. If life is so abundant in the Universe how come we haven’t been in contact with aliens?

I don't understand Fermi Paradox. Why couldn't the chance of life be extremely miniscule, e.g. given all billions of stars and planets, why couldn't there have been even 10% or 0.0001% odds of it happening at all one any given stars or planets? E.g. maybe even it happening on one was such a lucky occurrence?

Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds were just 1 out of 1,000,000.

How can people confidently claim that there must be some other civilizations, we wouldn't know the odds in the first place unless we know the exact mechanisms involved.

To me it seems like the probability could have been anything. It could have required any amount of certain chemical reactions to happen in certain order where the probability can vary wildly depending on the amount and likelihood of those reactions. E.g. it could be 0.01 to the power of 1,000,000 or as well as to the power of 10e64 and so on.

> To me it seems like the probability could have been anything.

The point is that we do know some things about the universe and, given what we do know, we think the probability is high. So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what.

The thing that makes the Fermi Paradox so interesting is that every resolution is either interesting or implies something interesting.

> So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what.

Isnt the answer dead simple though? Space is mostly empty. Everything is very far away and getting even further as the universe expands. If there were bits of life scattered around the universe I wouldnt expect contact between them.

The paradox seems to rely on the assumption that if aliens existed they would have colonized the entire universe by now but that seems like a huge leap when we look at ourselves.

Universe is almost 14B years old. Life on earth is almost 4b years old. There have been several mass extinction events which almost completely whiped out life. There are planets in our system that may have had life but would have died off a very long time ago. Its kind of remarkable that we are here and how much progress we’ve made. We are certainly fitter than average (survivorship bias proves that). Yet we are nowhere even remotely close of expanding out into the solar system and beyond. And how could we, if virtually all of that space is void of resources we need to survive? Why is it inevitable that some alien would have solved that?

Exactly. One of the base assumptions of the Fermi paradox is that travel between solar systems is practical, which is far from proven at this point. If we are bound by the rocket equation, that is to say if Newton's First Law holds, then the answer to the Fermi paradox is simple. Travel between solar systems is less practical than just colonizing your own solar system, even through extreme measures like swarms of orbital colonies.

When you think about it, an interstellar starship that must expend mass to change velocity is going to have to make a severe tradeoff between mass and travel time. In practical terms you have to first build a colony that can sustain itself indefinitely in your own solar system before you build one that can also accelerate/decelerate to a million kph and doesn't have the advantage of being near a free source of energy or any sources of new materials.

How do we know the probability of chained events required to start life in any given planet with potentially suitable environment?

How do we know that the probability isn't something like 0.01 to the power of some very large number, far higher than amount of total planets etc?

If we don't know the exact mechanism for all we know the odds could be infinitely low, even so low that even after billions of big bangs only 1 would have had life occurring anywhere at all and lower than that. Because maybe the first life form literally had to appear spontaneously from bruteforce chemical reactions with such low odds of ocurring.

What you're describing is one possible resolution and part of what's interesting. A very big open question is "which, if any, of the known factors are wildly rarer than we think?". Another possible resolution is that most of our estimates are actually ok and there's some other variable that's going to whack us on the head at some point.

I just don't get how anyone can go past the idea that maybe it required freak N amount of specific chemical reactions to happen in a row for the first lifeform and without knowing N the odds could just simply be anything. It seems as if people seem to assume that odds of first life form occuring are high and basically just a matter of time, which doesn't make sense to me.

People go past that idea by noticing that it happened on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could have happened. If we just got incredibly lucky, you'd think the planet would have sat around a while before the big stroke of luck, but it didn't. This is fairly suggestive that abiogenesis is not that unlikely.

You can't make any such conclusion from a single event.

If life is so rare, then having two planets in the same system with life, even at different epochs, seems absurd. That’s why I said it’s scary. It means that life can easily get a kickstart but for some reason it doesn’t make it all the way to interstellar civilizations. And that reason could very well be ahead of us and could eliminate humanity. That’s the hypothesis of “The Great Filter”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Life started on Earth really fast after it was physically possible for it to exist on the surface. So either Earth was astronomically lucky, or forming life was easy (on the scale of a couple hundred million anyway), or Earth got seeded really quickly by the next passing rock. The first is unlikely, almost by definition, and the other two both imply life is common.

That’s easy. Earthling tech is just too behind the curve and society is stuck in a state where we are considered primitive.

We could locate technosignatures though. Even if they don't wish to contact us we could tell if the galaxy was teeming with intelligent life.

The Fermi paradox calculations consider that life started on an earth like planet. But have we confirmed that life can appear on an earth like planet?

But if life cannot appear on an earth like planet, and they're "abundant" enough that two planets in the "goldilocks zone" within the same solar system can develop into "earth like" planets, that might indeed mean that we're alone, but at the same time also hint at there's a whole galaxy out there with "earth like" planets just waiting for us to colonize them.

I’m sure that any transition from Earth-like to the present state was so slow as to be unnoticeable even over centuries —- but it’s mind-blowing to me to imagine what it would be like to be, say, a nineteenth century civilization realizing you are in a race with the dying of your planet to get the heck off it.

Of course it had an Earth-like environment. Hasn't anyone ever read Edgar Rice Burroughs?

That was the first thing I thought of:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carter_of_Mars

It was fun reading those books when I was a teen

It really was Earth all along...

I can just imagine Elorp Munk building a space company on Mars a billion years ago to colonize the frozen and inhospitable Earth. Bringing over some germs and then failing to establish a colony… that could make for some great sci-fi.

I wonder if there'd be any good way to confirm or rule out an ancient Martian civilization. Would Martian surface structures be able to last a few billion years? Or would Martian processes be able to make all of them disappear? And how about underground structures?

I read somewhere that for geologic-scale signatures you need something that is:

   - Chemically inert
   - Recognizably artificial w/o context
   - Physically hardy
   - Planet-scale mass-produced

What if humanity oscillates between the two planets, and Elon and Elorp rise by design on each one.

To me, based on how quickly life formed on earth. It's highly likely that simple life once existed within the ancient oceans of Mars. Though, after billions of years there would be no evidence left.

Why don’t we just drill into mars and look for fossils? Easy peasy.

I don't remember where I read it, but somebody wrote that a geologist with a hammer could do more science in an afternoon than all our mars probes have done combined. Its hard to do science with a rc car, even if said car is cutting edge.

That’s true. Look at how many time SG-1 got into an issue even with the MALP. That’s with a much quicker wireless connection too.

Sounds like a great opportunity to rewatch one of my all time favorite episodes, "Revisions" (s07e05)

Humans can also take on new research objectives on the fly while rovers/probes can only ever do what they were designed to. The difference in flexibility, capability, and speed are vast.

What if we send a humanoid drone next?

Give it a sufficiently advanced AI, and that might work.

Current AI isn’t ready for that yet, though. What’s available to us couldn’t even be effectively used for research on Earth’s out-of-reach places, much less on Mars. In some years, however… That would be curious.

Is it possible to fly on such a thin atmosphere? Doubt it.

For half the history of life on Earth there were no multicellular animals at all[1]. Given how quickly life on Earth arrived I wouldn't be surprised if there were bacteria on Mars. But given how long it took Earth life to develop Eukaryotic cells I'd be surprised if Mars ever developed something as sophisticated as an amoeba. Still, Bacteria do leave fossils like stromatolites and some scientists even think some Mars rock parts look sort of like bacteria fossils[2]. But those are more ambiguous than little skeletons or shells.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001#:~:text=In%2....

That’s the part that still boggles my mind. How could there not be some kinda micro bacteria on all these planets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobacterium

Why don't we just teach kids music by having them buy a cheap $3 plastic recorder and simply glue a mic to it that connects to a 13-minute-and-48-second delay line which feeds into to an expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones that they wear during all practice sessions?

Easy peasy. :)

This sounds like what Charles Hinton did with jungle gyms for children. They were originally made to teach children "monkey instinct" to be able to navigate better through 3-dimensional space, hopefully increasing their capacity to visualize and understand 4-dimensional space. It didn't work, but it's very interesting!

https://nowiknow.com/mathletes/

If it’s the only option at the moment, sure let’s do it.

Beethoven’s ear trumpet.

If you took at fairly smart person, give them a set of Earth maps, and had them pick one spot where they could fake landing a rover, and let them travel within a few hundred meters of that spot and drill, like, 100 spots, I wonder what the odds of them finding a fossil?

land on a travertine deposit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travertine

Mars is big, fossils are small.

There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops with them.

Layered sedimentary rocks like the ones pictured in https://www.kqed.org/science/24828/nasas-curiosity-rover-fin... are probably good candiates.

The trouble is that while common, we still had to explore our whole planet pretty thoroughly to find them.

We just don't enough machines exploring Mars to do it right now.

That's fair. I'd expect knowing where we're likely to find them on Earth does at least help inform our few Mars landers' choice of landing sites, though.

Would orbiting satellites with lidar sensors be able to find suitable candidate sites for digging?

Given how long it took for Earth to develop multicellular life, Mars was probably pretty dead before it could take off(although it's very likely microbes still exist on Mars). But who knows, maybe Earth was late to the multicellular party, but I doubt it. If Mars did somehow evolve to multicellular life before Earth it's very likely that the multicellular would have been seeded to Earth via asteroids with something akin to a martian tardigrade

OR could 20m deep drilled core samples recovery remnants of RNA based live??

We need a hero.

Isn't that what Perseverance does?

The darker-toned regions in the image on the linked article really look like they're still wet; like a frozen image of the very last puddles on the Mars surface. Beautiful.

Why can't we bring a scanning electron microscope onto one of these rovers?

There are companies making desktop ones now.

The lack of a microscope on these missions has always been puzzling to me. Seems like an absolute no brainer especially since they can now be very small.

If there was past life microfossils could be quite visible in ancient sediment.

There have been microscopes but without a human to mount a sample they are more like macro lenses

yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points

It seems very low likelihood that a life-bearing chunk of Mars arrived and seeded life here.

What are the chances that some type of single-cell critter(s) from Mars were robust enough to:

1) Survive the trip here with the extreme cold of space, AND

2) Survive the searing heat of entering earth's atmosphere, AND

3) Survive conditions on earth, when they were adapted to the martian environment

And that's all premised on a meteor strike on Mars ejecting something with enough velocity to not only escape Martian gravity, but then miraculously happen to score a direct hit on earth (a miniscule angular target to hit).

This combination of low probabilities seems to result in an explanation of lower probability than the alternative (life originating on earth) that it's attempting to explain, and of course life originating on an earth-like Mars in same time frame it would have needed to develop here (or maybe also did develop here) doesn't add much more than historical interest.

Curious why there is much less interest in the Pleiades, which is made of all of our same material and is very likely a "fork" of earth formed after the original mass that later became earth and moon colliding with another body in early history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis

Perhaps, but given how sterile the moon appears to be, it's not obvious why the Pleidas would be any different, even assuming they were created by the same potentially life-seeding impact.

I can see the purely historical interest in knowing how the earth and moon were formed, where our water came from, where terrestial life originated, etc, but it seems (maybe I'm wrong?) that a large part of the interest in extra-terrestial origin of life consideration is from people who don't want to believe that life is all-but-inevitable in the right conditions and therefore presumably did originate here (and very quickly after earth formed - within a few 100M years). However, if creation of life is an extremely rare event, then the likelihood of it having spread from such a rare source to any other compatible planet seems vanishingly small!

Going up a few basis points would be like increasing the odds 1,000,000x.

I'm not opposed to the idea that life began on Mars, and, I don't know, through some mass ejection a chunk of lifelike stuff landed on earth and seeded it. But it seems like a much harder path to take than to just form life on Earth from the start.

Even more interesting would be the discovery that life developed on Mars and on earth. And whether that happened around the same time or at different times.

Asteroids as originators of life, that impacting both, would be the more likely “root cause” of having life on both planets

Well, that was H. Beam Piper's premise in his "Terro Human Future" and "Paratime" stories --- see the wonderful novella "Omnilingual" and see the story "Genesis":

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18105

Anyone remember the title of the short where they explore an ancient martian city and find a periodic table that serves as a Rosetta stone?

That's "Omnilingual"

See the nicely updated version at:

http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html

Oops, sorry for the spoiler

Or, why aren't Martians from Earth.

As much as I like the idea conceptually for movies. That life on Earth came from Mars still doesn't explain how life started on Mars. It just moves the location, the mechanism is still tbd.

Life arose on Earth really fast after the surface stopped being magma. Since Mars cooled down faster the idea is that it could have spent 100 million of year developing bacteria which were then seeded the Earth as soon as there was liquid water there.

While in general the argument may hold that life evolved too fast, your numbers are off. 100 million years is just about the minimum estimate for the emergence of life on Earth. If Mars has a longer timeline it should be closer to 1 billion years between solidification and emergence of life.

You're right that my numbers are off. I'd bee thinking of the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment 3.8e9 years go, but there's some suggestive evidence there was liquid was on Earth's surface 4.4e9 years ago. And the earliest bacterial fossils are from 3.5e9 years ago, though goodnesss knows how long it took bacteria to make colonies that ended up making fossils to survive to the present day.

> Or, why aren't Martians from Earth.

Mars's gravity is much lower, so it's much easier for an impact to accelerate rocks to escape velocity.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

If we can demonstrate that life moved from Mars to Earth then the most likely explanation for life on Mars is that it also got there from somewhere else.

All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

Yeah I never liked the panspermia as a solution to how life started so quickly on Earth because it just kicks the can down the road. But hey it has been speculated that DNA may be almost 10 billion years old https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html. But this is just a thought experiment, I am unsure if we know how long it takes for DNA to double, nor do we know if the rate would be constant over time. For example if proof reading mechanisms evolved later thus slowing down the rate of change. But it's fun to think about. Too bad Google search is so useless I used to be able to go down these Rabbit holes finding all sorts of information but now it's almost impossible, Google just gives superficial AI answers these days

Recall that no one could reconcile billion year ages for the earth with it not having cooled far more - until the discovery of radioactivity.

> yay, likelihood that we are martians just went up a few basis points

I bet there's some non-life explanation, probably having to do with weird chemistry that happens on Mars over long periods, but is not so significant on Earth.

The article says the Earth-chemistry that creates these minerals involves the oxygen in the atmosphere, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that Mars's atmosphere was ever oxygenated. It took billions of years for the Earth's atmosphere to become oxygenated, and it sounds like Mars lost most of its atmosphere fairly quickly.

Someone else brought up that superoxygenator salts form in the upper layers of the soil due to the high UV radiation on the surface. It's possible the oxidation here is due to those superoxygenators but the original manganese is due to the ancient lake. So basically manganese is embedded in the rock while there's a lake, then the lake dries up as the atmosphere disappears. And finally the UV gets strong enough to create oxidizers in the soil which react with the manganese.

Link not working for anyone else?

Alternative source: https://phys.org/news/2024-05-earth-environment-ancient-mars...

*Barsoom

Link 404's out now..

Getting a 404 now, wtf?

So we messed up Mars, almost done with Earth, where do we go next?

"Messed up Mars" = Rendered into a dry wasteland where maybe there might be fossils of microscopic life

"Messed up Earth" = Making it very uncomfortable for Humans, causing large losses of life in poorer parts of the world, causing mass extinctions, but otherwise life will go on

Comparing the two is peak climate alarmism

To the Sun. Just have to make sure we go at night, when it's off.

To infinity and beyond.

Saturn. Best place for heat and raw materials.

We?

You know, us lifeforms.

I think we can't be certain of the ages of the planets in our solar system. It's based on different things but there's recent uncertainty about the age of the universe, possibly by a factor of two. It's possible the planets in our system are older than we think. Is it also possible they're younger? I'm not an expert on it.

> there’s recent uncertainty about the age of the universe, possibly by a factor of two

Do you have a reference for this? Interesting if potentially true.

Sure, it's from last year. Surprised you missed it, but no worries! :)

- https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-pre...

- https://scitechdaily.com/cosmic-paradigm-shift-new-research-...

- https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/could-age-universe-be-twice...

- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230711133118.h...

- https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/age-of-universe-researc...

The science is not settled. But that's the point, science never is. Uncertainty for sure haha! :)

I think the main point is the older it is, the less certain we can be especially with our current limitations. ha :)

The ages of the planets are figured out by entirely unrelated mechanisms to the age of the universe. One guy putting forward an alternative to LCDM doesn't itself put any doubt on the planets' ages, probably even if he was right.

Well, that's a good point to know. Thank you. It's interesting how they're unrelated, and very interesting how uncertain all of this is!

I find that fascinating: as in imagine what you can do with that gap. All the civilizations that could have existed? Mind bendingly cool! Hahaha! :)

The current state of humanity doesn’t deserve another chance on another “Earth-like environment”.

Let’s prove we can take care of this planet first before we think of finding a “new Earth”