Liquid water spied deep below polar ice cap on Mars
July 25, 2018 7:28 AM   Subscribe

 
If you're anything like me, you immediately thought of Hank Green and how happy he will be about this. Went to check out his twitter and...

@hankgreen:
This is for real and I learned about it early because I am a "Science Communicator" and we will have multiple SciShows out about this shortly!!!
So that's awesome, we will have some SciShows to given even more context to the finding of the Briny Lake!
posted by lazaruslong at 7:36 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.
posted by Damienmce at 7:47 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Not everyone on the MARSIS team is convinced. “I would say the interpretation is plausible, but it’s not quite a slam dunk yet,” says Jeffrey Plaut, the other MARSIS PI

Science is hard.

Science is based on facts, or is it all hypothesis all the way down...

(JPL cage fight in the offing)
posted by sammyo at 8:03 AM on July 25, 2018


Maybe
posted by SkinnerSan at 8:06 AM on July 25, 2018


This is super awesome news, and I hope it's confirmed!

Note that "water" will probably mean "really salty brine".
posted by sgranade at 8:14 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


We found water on Mars.

We found the higgs boson.

We found Osama Bin Laden.

I still can't find my keys. I mean I had to unlock the place to get in and I know they're here just... where?

Congrats!
posted by adept256 at 8:16 AM on July 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


The keys will be in the last place you look. (rimshot)
posted by sammyo at 8:21 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Huzzah! Let us destroy the icecaps in celebration!
posted by pompomtom at 8:22 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


*cranks up the David Bowie*
posted by SansPoint at 8:29 AM on July 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Brine-Eau Mars
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:35 AM on July 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


*Begins designing labels for 'PURE MARTIAN WATER', to be marketed to the health conscious wealthy. *
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:39 AM on July 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


It's under 1.5km of ice, under pressure and very briny and cold. Is there anything on Earth that lives in those conditions?
posted by adept256 at 8:47 AM on July 25, 2018


Sea Monkeys?
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:54 AM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Pleeeeease can there be archaebacteria, aliens would really make this year way better.
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 8:56 AM on July 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


High pressure brine means you can make pickles in minutes!
posted by moonmilk at 9:02 AM on July 25, 2018 [21 favorites]


Assuming they find more lakes like this, what would the timeline realistically be for probing them? 20 years? I mean, I know that depends on funding as much as anything else.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:08 AM on July 25, 2018


Drilling a mile deep on this planet is a fairly major expedition, but I guess there will be second day delivery for free if a cog breaks, so doable.
posted by sammyo at 9:11 AM on July 25, 2018


Well maybe second month near perihelion.
posted by sammyo at 9:12 AM on July 25, 2018


Will said drilling be performed by a team of hastily-trained but photogenic roughnecks?
posted by Navelgazer at 9:17 AM on July 25, 2018 [7 favorites]




This is an attitude I've never really understood, by the way:

High levels of salt and temperatures dozens of degrees below zero do not bode well for any microbes trying to live there, Stillman says. “If martian life is like Earth life, this is too cold and too salty.”

Isn't that a pretty goddamn massive "if"?
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:28 AM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think what showbiz_liz is trying to say is "Life, uh, finds a way."
posted by nubs at 9:35 AM on July 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


*Begins designing labels for 'PURE MARTIAN WATER', to be marketed to the health conscious wealthy. *

This is funny, but I fully expect Elon Musk to tweet something similar—only in earnest—and garner 100K likes from his fanboys.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:46 AM on July 25, 2018


Water on Mars? Not 2059 yet, so we're safe for now.
posted by trillian at 10:00 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


my favorite thing watching a vid about this (on cnn I think?) was the guy they interviewed was like 'if there's really liquid water on mars that's great 'cuz that means we can live there more easily and we can go way sooner :)' and I was like can we please leave mars alone, we aren't even done fucking up this planet yet, i'm more interested in the bugs that might be up there
posted by nogoodverybad at 10:19 AM on July 25, 2018


Glitch: When we're done here we can go swimming!
posted by Splunge at 10:45 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


To borrow a joke from Twitter, we need to siphon some off and mix it with the liquid from the black sarcophagus. Maybe it will be enough to shunt us out of this darkest timeline.
posted by fight or flight at 10:46 AM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Emily Lakdawalla headline: Liquid Water on Mars! Really for Real This Time (Probably)
posted by Chrysostom at 10:48 AM on July 25, 2018




Seriously though if we're gonna start awakening Krakens it's better we do a practice run next door, you know?
posted by Navelgazer at 11:36 AM on July 25, 2018


Splendid! All we need now is a breathable atmosphere, survivable temperatures, and a magnetosphere to ward off the worst of solar and cosmic hard radiation, and Mars becomes sort-of-nearly as habitable as Antarctica or the Sahel! And people are clamoring to live in those places, right? Right?
posted by Mr. Excellent at 11:59 AM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Speaking of David Bowie and Life on Mars, this cover by Ecco on The Voice : la plus belle voix is really, really good.
posted by maxwelton at 12:51 PM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's under 1.5km of ice, under pressure and very briny and cold. Is there anything on Earth that lives in those conditions?

Lake Vostok is pretty similar and they think it probably has life
posted by smoke at 5:33 PM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's under 1.5km of ice, under pressure and very briny and cold. Is there anything on Earth that lives in those conditions?

That's not the issue is it? The question is, is there anything on Mars that lives under those conditions? We shall see. Eventually. I certainly hope.

Of course there is the problem of a first landing with humans. That will have a base amount of things to carry. Food, water and fuel. I'm pretty sure none of the weight used on that first flight will have derricks and drilling equipment that will drill that deep.

As well, since mars has a minimal atmosphere, we must be careful that we don't infect the planet with our bugs.

Bottom line. Anything that we use to drill must be more sterile than anything we have here. A single Earth organism in the drill will discount any other theory. No?

Like drilling Europa and finding E. Coli.
posted by Splunge at 6:10 PM on July 25, 2018


Is there anything on Earth that lives in those conditions?

That's not the issue is it?


The thing is, exobiology/astrobiology currently works by analogy, first principles, and remote sensing. Because we haven't yet found any other life outside of Earth, we can't exactly examine it directly, right?

Isn't that a pretty goddamn massive "if"?

Sure, and it's not the only line of research being conducted. We can ponder intelligent shades of the color blue, or argue about whether the reds spot on Jupiter is alive, or make up stories about biochemistries that are not known to exist, but maybe could.

But that's not seen as terribly relevant to guiding our search for life in the universe.

At present, the safer money (and real grant money) is on working out how stuff that's roughly Earth-like could live elsewhere in the universe, and historically extremophiles (like the cryophiles linked by showbiz_liz above) have played large part in the development of that theory.

One thing to consider though, is that the vast majority of extremophiles known on Earth are heavily derived from non-exteremophile stock. So arctic midges had temperate midge ancestors, and probably likewise for the snow algae (and also e.g. for most deep sea thermophiles). This is not to say that life couldn't develop in such an icy brine, but we should be careful about how much we infer from forms that colonized extreme habitats long after they had evolved relative complexity.

Anyway, when you can't look everywhere on Mars for life because it's too expensive, the professionals at present mostly agree that it's smart to look first in the few places that might sort of maybe be conducive to the only type of life we know of, rather than looking in places that seem fairly impossible for life to flourish. We'll check those too, whenever we get the time, or a good reason, or the money, but they just aren't at the top of the list.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:27 PM on July 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Anyway, color me excited. Panspermia is no longer a fringe theory, and Abiogenesis increasingly seems like it could happen lots of places. The list of plausible places to find life just in our solar system is growing fast. Remember when we couldn't see any other planets outside the solar system, but we figured they must be there? That was in 1991, and now we know of almost 4k exoplanets!

I think the most amazing thing about the first exolife we find will be that it's not that strange ;-)
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:36 PM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I always figured a great selling point for extraterrestrial bottled water is that you can say it's never been peed by anything. Unless Martian life has to turn out to exist and go and ruin that marketing strategy.

...but maybe Martians don't pee? An exciting possibility.
posted by XMLicious at 12:14 AM on July 26, 2018


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