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[Chaoswizkid]

Boston Dynamics runs under DARPA/DoD. I'm thinking that a lot of robotics R&D companies got scared by the government-funding fiascos lately (As well as military spending cuts), so maybe that created a prime opportunity for companies with strong financial backing to pick them up, and Google's been looking at the robotics sector of it (or more, I'm not terribly informed on what Google has been acquiring).

[Osmosis Jones]

Flowing water on Mars?

If true, huge news; there could potentially be non-terran life!

[10ebbor10]

We spotted those things several times already. No real way to confirm until we send a probe in that direction.

[Reelya]

Flowing water on Mars?

If true, huge news; there could potentially be non-terran life!

Posted this in the Mars thread, also relevant here:

Lichen exposed to harsh Mars-like conditions in a laboratory have been found to survive, preferring to cling to cracks in rocks and in gaps in the simulated Martian soil. The lichen collected from Antarctica were placed inside the German Aerospace Center’s Mars Simulation Laboratory for 34 days.

There they were subjected to the same atmospheric, temperature, radiation and pressure conditions they would experience if they were on the Martian surface.

Now, the Antarctic lichen can already survive - barely - in Martian conditions, but of course they're nowhere near genetically optimized for such conditions. What that implies is that even a reasonably short number of generations would see the lichens become significantly better at surviving or flourishing in Martian conditions.

That's good news either for finding life, or kickstarting terraforming.

[Sheb]

It'd need to be able to reproduce itself under martian conditions first though.

[Lich180]

Not getting my hopes up about life outside of earth. Conditions aren't right, the molecules needed aren't present, and we don't even know exactly how life started on Earth in the first place. Sure we know we need certain amino acids, and certain elements / molecules / interactions, but honestly, we have NO clue how a soup of molecules suddenly banded together in just the right way to make a cell membrane and replicatable proto-DNA or RNA.

I mean, basically life started when a certain amount of molecules and atoms grouped up due to their physical and chemical properties, and began a weird little reaction that resulted in us sitting here, typing into a computer or phone, and discussing how life began. Probably missing a big bit of the picture here, but if we knew more about how life started in the first place, and could (maybe) replicate or simulate it reasonably, we might have a better idea of where to look besides "water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, oxygen".

[Sheb]

Except life can probably evolve in a number of conditions with the basic chemicals present.

I'd actually bet Mars got microbes under the crust. Maybe distant parents from ourselves too.

[Reelya]

Not getting my hopes up about life outside of earth. Conditions aren't right, the molecules needed aren't present, and we don't even know exactly how life started on Earth in the first place. Sure we know we need certain amino acids, and certain elements / molecules / interactions, but honestly, we have NO clue how a soup of molecules suddenly banded together in just the right way to make a cell membrane and replicatable proto-DNA or RNA.

I wouldn't say "no" clue. Abiogenesis experimenters has been pretty successful coming up with a number of highly plausible proto cell structures that spontaneously generate themselves from the types of chemicals seen in experiments like the 1950's Urey-Miller experiment.

In another experiment using a similar method to set suitable conditions for life to form, Fox collected volcanic material from a cinder cone in Hawaii. He discovered that the temperature was over 100 °C (212 °F) just 4 inches (100 mm) beneath the surface of the cinder cone, and suggested that this might have been the environment in which life was created—molecules could have formed and then been washed through the loose volcanic ash and into the sea. He placed lumps of lava over amino acids derived from methane, ammonia and water, sterilized all materials, and baked the lava over the amino acids for a few hours in a glass oven. A brown, sticky substance formed over the surface and when the lava was drenched in sterilized water a thick, brown liquid leached out. It turned out that the amino acids had combined to form proteinoids, and the proteinoids had combined to form small, cell-like spheres. Fox called these "microspheres", a name that subsequently was displaced by the more informative term protobionts. His protobionts were not cells, although they formed clumps and chains reminiscent of cyanobacteria. They contained no functional nucleic acids, but split asexually and formed within double membranes that had some attributes suggestive of cell membranes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microspheres#Biological_protocells

Microspheres, like cells, can grow and contain a double membrane which undergoes diffusion of materials and osmosis.

So, these "proto-cells" actually do exhibit some of the characteristics and processes that we associate with living cells. One theory is that some structure like this (and there are other candidates which form under different conditions, e.g. those in an underwater volcano vent) formed, and at first whether a particular "cell" was stable was pretty much up to chance occurence of what proteins it contained. Since these "cells" reproduce, it's pretty easy to see that this could have been the spark of the first competition, at first just having (by chance) proteins that increase growth rate, cell stability etc would have been advantageous. The first cell that had an active enzyme which converted raw amino acids into something useful would have had an instant and huge advantage over the other protocells. Once you had an extremely simple replicator (e.g. a simple enzyme which catalyzes more of itself), the process would have bootstrapped a heap of that material quite quickly. These protocells have been shown to concentrate nucleic acids as well as protein material and other organics out of a solution.

[Descan]

Go big or go home:

Mole people under the surface of the Earth Mars!

[Lich180]

Ah awesome! I apparently don't read enough of the right things, I've heard of those experiments but never had a decent summary of the results. Still a pretty big crapshoot to get the right things though.

[Descan]

You know, I REALLY hope we get some sort of mass immortality.

Nevermind the "you don't need to die if you don't want to" deal, but so that things that won't affect us for hundreds of years are more "Oh shit, I'm going to be AROUND in hundreds of years!" instead of "Eh, that's the next generations problem".

Because who is going to invest in terraforming Mars if you won't see returns for a millenia? Only idealists and people who will see it.

See also: Climate change

Yeah, that's right. I'm using environmentalism as an argument FOR immortality, not against! (See: Overpopulation)

[Another]

...

I mean, basically life started when a certain amount of molecules and atoms grouped up due to their physical and chemical properties, and began a weird little reaction that resulted in us sitting here, typing into a computer or phone, and discussing how life began. Probably missing a big bit of the picture here, but if we knew more about how life started in the first place, and could (maybe) replicate or simulate it reasonably, we might have a better idea of where to look besides "water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, oxygen".

Reelya had already posted an excellent overview and I want jut to nitpick.

When life formed the conditions were "water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane". There was no free oxygen and presence of such strong oxidizing factor took radical evolution steps (long after initial anaerobic life boom) to adapt to.

In certain sense Earth atmosphere and oceans are more toxic to all life that had not specifically adapted to deal with it than Mars's.

[Helgoland]

Yup, oxygen's actually pretty hardcore. We just tend to not notice.

[Frumple]

Ah awesome! I apparently don't read enough of the right things, I've heard of those experiments but never had a decent summary of the results. Still a pretty big crapshoot to get the right things though.

Billions of years, millions upon millions (upon millions (upon millions(etc.))) of individual dice rolls. If it's happened once, the crapshoot is seriously in the favor of it happening more times. Space is just big, is all, and our ability to find things still relatively nascent in regards to sifting through it.

[Sirus]

Ah awesome! I apparently don't read enough of the right things, I've heard of those experiments but never had a decent summary of the results. Still a pretty big crapshoot to get the right things though.

Billions of years, millions upon millions (upon millions (upon millions(etc.))) of individual dice rolls. If it's happened once, the crapshoot is seriously in the favor of it happening more times. Space is just big, is all, and our ability to find things still relatively nascent in regards to sifting through it.

Don't forget the time periods involved. It took, what, 1.5 billion years before even the simplest life began to form on Earth? Considering that those protocells previously mentioned formed after only a few hours (in a lab setting yes, but still), there's clearly plenty of opportunities for beneficial adaptations to occur.

Space X Time = Pretty good odds of life being out there, actually.