Water on mars...........

Question

scientist have officially found water on mars. Does that mean we could live there? or ther could allready be life on mars?

Answer 1

Interesting i heard that earlier today and hopefully it will sustain microbe life when humans visit there one day and i sure hope that one days humans will make a colony and some day colonized mars.

http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/vi...

Answer 2

Water is officially found there. They actually think it might be common. But its locked up in ice, life could not drink it, per se. Scientists think that life is not very likely there, but maybe in the distant past it could have existed. That is why the search for fossils continues. Scientists think that if life indeed continues to live there, then it might exist in the form of  anaerobic bacteria (bacteria that does not need oxygen).

Answer 3

Probably not, and who knows?

They didn't find LAKES of water, the found ICE that was buried under inches of dut.  As soon as the uncovered it, it started to "sublimate" (change from a solid to a gas without becoming liquid) and float of into space, because Mars has only a very very thin atmosphere that is not capable of keeping retaining liquid or gaseous water.

Could we live there? Sure. We can live on the moon.  But we'd still have to bring our own water and air.

Could there already be life on Mars?  The haven't found any yet.  The presence of water is one positive indicator, but the enviroment is still too harsh for most living things that we know.  There MIGHT be some microbes, but they're going to be very hard to find.

Answer 4

If there are deposits of ice that could be mined easily, the possibility of colonizing Mars changes from impossible to just nearly impossible.  At least with our current level of technology.  The equation might change if we were to develop a space elevator, which would allow the cheap transport of materials into space.  Currently sending material to Mars using rockets is absurdly expensive.  

Other inventions could also change the equation:  autonomous robots with a high level AI, high level nanotechnology, and Von Neumann self replicating machinery.  Such technology may not even be possible.  Artificial intelligence has been attempted for decades, but it has been a nonstarter despite approaching the problem from both the top -down and the bottom-up approaches.  

Life on mars is highly unlikely.  Not impossible.  Life could have developed far in the past, migrated to hot spots in the crust which had a supply of water, and could have survived for billions of years.  The Earths crust is littered with such Bacteria, happily flourishing in the rocks beneath our feet.  

Answer 5

Sooooooo excited about it!

Answer 6

As I understand it from the reports, what has now been confirmed is that the ice that had already been found on Mars, has been analysed and confirmed as water ice (i.e. H2O), instead of the other possible alternative, frozen carbon dioxide (CO2).

Whilst encouraging, this is still short of the goal of finding liquid water on another planet.  That is the 'Holy Grail' because life as we understand it (to paraphrase Mr Spock) needs water to act as a solvent for various biological processes.  The search for life and the search for liquid water are pretty much one and the same.

In all likelihood the conditions on Mars led to any surface water that was present escaping to space in a process known as sublimination.

Life is unlikely to be found there either today, or in the future.  However we may yet find evidence that life was once present many millions (or billions) of years ago in the past.

Answer 7

We can't live there (unaided) as there's a very thin atmosphere (so no oxygen to breath). The lack of atmosphere also means that liquid water can't exist on the surface of Mars (it sublimes straight from ice to steam).

It does mean that it would be easier to set up a colony on Mars though as we wouldn't need to transport water from Earth.

Dragon Warrior - fear not, there is gravity on Mars. It's a little but less than Earth but men have walked on the moon which has much less gravity.

Answer 8

Thats a hard one, water is one thing that helps us, but what about the gravity, I am not sure and oxgen!