tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post8799992640895097330..comments2024-02-29T03:57:00.088-05:00Comments on The Mermaid's Tale: The Big " 'Scuse me!" on MarsAnne Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09212151396672651221noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-84364439817852164272015-01-04T10:11:33.360-05:002015-01-04T10:11:33.360-05:00Reply to Jim Goetz
Nice to hear from you! I don&#...Reply to Jim Goetz<br />Nice to hear from you! I don't know enough chemistry to be a judge of this kind of thing. But there are plausibility issues that should be addressed, as we tried to discuss in our post, if anyone wants to assert that Mars has, or had, 'life'. If the assertion is plausible, relative to purely non-biological methane generation, then many questions require answers.<br />Ken Weisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02049713123559138421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-81158605910715866592015-01-04T00:30:32.758-05:002015-01-04T00:30:32.758-05:00Hi Ken, This is interesting. I did some googling a...Hi Ken, This is interesting. I did some googling and found a proposed abiogenic model of Martian flatulence: "Have olivine, will gas: Serpentinization and the abiogenic production of methane on Mars" by Christopher Oze and Mukul Sharma.<br />Geophysical Research Letters<br />Volume 32, Issue 10, May 2005<br />http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL022691/pdf<br /><br />I lack the chemistry background to evaluate the plausibility of this model, but I suppose you can understand the article better than I can.<br /><br />Cheers and Happy New Year :-)James Goetzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02412501436355228925noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-12220035901146455492014-12-29T15:28:17.950-05:002014-12-29T15:28:17.950-05:00Here is a comment replying to a Tweeter responding...Here is a comment replying to a Tweeter responding to this post, and who referred to a new 2d law-related theory of life (link:http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/)<br /><br />I've seen many such theories by physicists providing equations to explain life. I haven't seen the original idea and probably am not qualified to question its mathematical nature. But while the idea may be right it may yet not be apt for any specific form of 'life', much less the details and timing. So I see no relevance to our current post. The plausibility or I'd say massive implausibility of the Mars microbe speculation led to the post.<br /><br />We acknowledged various common-source, common-origins options, as being at least more plausible than the huge parallelisms in space and time that some of the apparent claims are suggesting; though we tried to explain why they, too, seem exceedingly implausible. The simplest explanations of some sort of instrumentation error or abiotic origin of methane, have the plausibility edge, I think, and the burden of proof is great to show that a life-based explanation, of the forms being bruited about in the media, are worth considering til the other scenarios are definitively ruled out. The incentive, for many reasons material and otherwise, for a Hollywood scenario, is great, but the greater the claim the greater must be the evidentiary support.<br /><br />That life as an energy-capture chemical reaction system is likely or even inevitable (given enough time with the appropriate conditions) may be correct, but that is nearly irrelevant to the parallelisms entailed in Mars storiesKen Weisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02049713123559138421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-40256178292606699762014-12-29T13:26:37.446-05:002014-12-29T13:26:37.446-05:00Answers would be interesting, if one knew how reli...Answers would be interesting, if one knew how reliable they were. An alternative is to put oneself in cold storage (the equivalent of the microbes' intestinal compartmentalization) and come back in hundreds of millions of years to see what happened here, or even on Mars.Ken Weisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02049713123559138421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-52018700642831634802014-12-29T13:25:31.601-05:002014-12-29T13:25:31.601-05:00I believe that methane has been reported before on...I believe that methane has been reported before on Mars but the findings found to be artifactual. This time, they believe it's real. Anne Buchananhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09212151396672651221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-91730851825024535842014-12-29T12:07:14.325-05:002014-12-29T12:07:14.325-05:00It should be pointed out that methane degrades rap...It should be pointed out that methane degrades rapidly when exposed to UV radiation, so methane can persist indefinitely underground in the appropriate chemical environment, and it then degrades rapidly when released into the atmosphere.<br /><br />With that said, it was also implied in the press that the methane disappeared unusually rapidly, so I have been wondering if it is possible that the detection itself is not real, something that seems to have also been glossed over in the press. This is obviously not my field, so I would be interested in other opinions on that.<br /><br />In spite of all that, this is a fascinating thing to ponder. I hope we get some answers in my lifetime.Michael Finfer, MDnoreply@blogger.com