WATER SURPRISE: Liquid found on Mars, says NASA NASA has had the space community on tenterhooks for the last week, and on Monday made its big reveal – there is liquid water on Mars. "Liquid water has been found on Mars," said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters at a press conference on Monday. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, analyzed …
"We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a process that forms them is the source of the hydration," said Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology, lead author of a report.
Aha! Dry Canals! Can Tars Tarkas be far behind?
"...the Curiosity rover was sterilized of Earth life as much as possible, but it might be determined that the decontamination process wasn't enough, and that this may skew the results."
How will they determine the decontam wasn't sufficient? When a hardy Earth bacterium gets to that wet soil and mutates into "The Mould that Ate Mars"? It would serve us right for skewing around...
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Or perhaps several other microorganisms. If the wikipedia article on perchlorate is correct (in the very short "Biology" section), over 40 microorganisms have been identified that can grow via perchlorate reduction. As that process usually produces both water and free oxygen, could this be one of the tools to terraform Mars? Assuming we can warm the soil enough for the microorganisms to function, of course!
Nobody will mind if I bring a parakeet into the UK, they can't survive outdoors can they?
This Japanese Knotweed looks kinda cute. Think I'll smuggle a cutting in my baggage see if it will grow in the garden. what harm can it do?
etc.
Well.... anything brought from Earth that's still viable and able to jump-and-thrive into something that hostile to most of life here, especially after surviving cleanroom treatment, launch, a rather lengthy bit of space travel and irradiation, atmospheric entry and a lengthy stay on the martian surface....
It would pretty much deserve living there on Mars and inherit the planet before we figure out how to live there, if ever.
Unlikely as it is already, as pointed out above it then has to compete with the highly specialised life that may possibly exist in that environment already, with precious little chance of beating those specialists at their own game.
The scenario is conceivable, but it's so far down the probability curve it's cuddling up to the event horizon of "ludicrous".
There could be a weird Wellsian backflip that occurs there, where a relatively benign bacterium from Earth carried by one of our own probes, learns new tricks from some nasty corrosive environment, flickknife wielding Martian bacteria and turns into the thing which prevents human colonization of Mars, much as the 'common cold' did for the Martians in War of the Worlds.
"When a hardy Earth bacterium gets to that wet soil
I cannot think of anything on Earth that is hardy enough to survive in perchlorate at -70.
In fact, any(micro)organism capable of living in this will have to have a metabolism different to anything we know of.
Someone pointed to Dechlorosoma as an example of something that can eat this kind of substrate. Sure it can. Not at -70 and not in the concentrations capable of changing the water boiling and melting point.
Pure water can exist below zero, usually as ice, and I am reasonably sure it exists above 10 degrees centigrade as well, though this depends on ambient air pressure - the lower the air pressure the lower the temperature at which water will boil, hence the problems getting a decent cup of tea in Tibet.
Putting perchlorate in a Diesel engine would certainly reduce emissions. Not all salts are equal.
You could power an engine with perchlorate and sugar, but I doubt a VW car unit could be easily converted. It would be a little like the Lawrence Livermore pellet fusion experiments but only needing one laser and no neutron absorber
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