Starship Asterisk*

G'day lads,

NASA states that water on Mars has been confirmed by Phoenix' TEGA experiment. That means an end to all speculations and educated guesses about the nature of the Martian ice: CO_2_ or H_2_0.

Hello Henk21cm,

After reading your post to my spouse she said this:

Yea, Martians!!!

G'day from the land of ozzzzzzzz


Water water everywhere and yet not a drop to drink, not yet.

Its amazing how they assumed that Mars was covered by water.

If it was, where did it all go.

Aliens must have shifted home to Earth.

Maybe the next stop is Venus.

Early in it's life, Mars had water and a much thicker atmosphere. This is a likely scenereo for what happened to Mars' water:
Over a period of about 1.5 billion years, the martian atmosphere was slowly stripped away and lost to space but was replaced by the waters' gradual evaporation in an effort to replace its density. As the atmospheric density decreased, the boiling point of water also decreased causing a quicker evaporative process. Eventually the atmosphere reached a point where stable warm temperatures could not be sustained and the surface temperature reached a point where the remaining water froze. Now the tenuous remaining atmosphere became a haven for fierce wind storms (global sand storms) which shifted sands and soil to cover the remaining ice. A couple billion years worth of storms later later and those sand grains were smashed and pulverized into the sticky dust we see today (likely held together by Ionic charge much like the dust sticking to the anodes in an ionic air purifier) Just an hypothesis though.

the question is, was 1.5B years enough to generate any life, and did any of this theoretical life survived climate change.

G'day from the land of ozzzz


MakC is right is 1.5 Gyrs enough to form life.

Earth is about 5 Gyrs and the first evidence for life came about 3 Gyrs.

My problem is how did water form on Mars to begin with?

If its Mass is too small to hold onto it now, why should it be different than?

A bird in the hand is worth 10 in the bush.
Thats what we say down under.

The Cyanobacteria Fossil Record is the oldest known fossils found to date (that I am aware of) These bacterium were forming Stromatolite mounds dating back to when the earth was only about 700m yrs old and had formed over the course of only 300m yrs
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/cyanofr.html


http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/far ... tml#origin
According to fossil records the earth was 2.5-2.7b yrs old when multicellular life formed