Life on Mars?

Water has a number of relatively unique properties that make it great for life. For instance it dissolves a wide variety of organic and inorganic substances. It's a liquid at wide range of temperatures. Because it's a polar molecule it takes a lot of heat to turn it into steam. A chemist could probably point out a few others.

They disproved it with the orbiters some time ago. If you look at the formations from another angle, they don't look like anything but rocks. It's just a trick of the light - and a trick of your brain - that made them look like anything in the first place.The reason you probably didn't hear about it is because disproving myths rarely gets into the papers. Most people would rather ignore the refutation rather than face up to a disproved conspiracy. Just look at the "fake moon landing" people.

Because if they were really faces, or really pyramids, they'd look the same no matter what the light was like, or what angle you viewed them from. That's not a different method, though. That's the same method of "looking at it from a different angle", and they already did that. As I don't work at NASA, I can't give you the exact criteria. Mostly I suspect it has to do with the capabilities of the lander. Based on what they built the lander to do, I imagine they select a site with the potential to answer the most questions about the geologic history of Mars.

So, if creationists had launched Mars landers, they'd be desperately searching the Martian surface for dust?Seriously, though, I don't think anybody seriously thinks that the purpose of the landers was a search for life. The presence of water on Mars has ramifications for Martian geology - areology? - as well. I imagine it's these areological concerns that motivated the mission, not a search for life.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 03-09-2004]

Because the phrase "life on Mars" sells newspapers.As far as I know, the tools on the lander are pretty much geological in nature, for testing the composition of rocks, etc. Do you know if they have any tools to test for the presence of life or it's remnants?

Look at the size of the lander compared to the size of the rocket that it took to get it there.Now imagine the size of the rocket it would take to get that rocket to Mars.Now, admittedly Mars has only 1/3 the gravity of Earth, but you still need a fairly large rocket to get it back, so the rocket to get it there is simply too large to be practical. It's just cheaper to send whatever instruments you want to use on the rocks rather than try to bring the rocks back.

We are. We just have less skin pigment and hair designed for a colder climate. You have some funny ideas.The humans that stayed were black people. The humans that left were black people. They got less black after they left, by adaptation to the area that they moved to. If the proof is gone then why do you think that happened?

The farther north you are, the less sunlight you get. Excess skin pigment prevents the manufacture of certain vitamins that require sunlight to form. They were asians first. When they came to America they became Native Americans. You apparently don't understand yet that it's the environment that's responsible for the adaptations you're referring to as "race". In the absence of malaria, having the sickle-cell gene is maladaptive. So the gene was lost in caucasians, assuming we ever had it - maybe the gene came after the people that became caucasians left Africa. No, it doesn't. It's an ongoing process that constantly shapes allele frequencies in a population. We are. We just have lighter skin and finer hair. Are you sure you're not just ignoring the answers, like you just did with me? There's no such thing. This is based on what, your advanced degree in biology? Contemporary chimpanzees and gorillas are considerably more evolved then they were 75k years ago. They're as evolved as everything else.You seem to have this idea that there's a ladder of "evolvedness" with us at the top. That's simplistic thinking, and it's just plain wrong. Modern primates are as evolved as anything else, including us.

Cmon, dude. You can think better than that, can't you?The inuit aren't black for the same reason that it's cold in the Arctic circle all year-round - the light they get is so weak and indirect that dark skin would prevent the accumulation of sunlight vitamins. That's the point - the dark pigments absorb harmful rays before they penetrate and damage deeper layers of skin and tissue. Why do you think you get tan from being outside? That doesn't make any sense at all. What you would expect is that people in the northern climes would have more sub-skin fat, and that's exactly what you find - which explains the soft features of the Inuit peoples. There are no such footprints. There might be some formations that look like footprints if you squint, but they're not really human footprints. You're either lying to me, or you've been lied to - there are no authentic examples of human and dinosaur footprints together. So show me the peer-reviewed source that documented them. But you haven't shown any evidence. You've just made claims. That doesn't carry much weight around here. And you know this because you were there? So why not apply your education? Instead of making rookie mistakes about light levels in the Arctic? It's a possibility, but there's no evidence to support such a theory. How did we get here? What made us forget how to make rockets? Where's all the ancient technology? You don't think a hyper-advanced race would have built stuff to last?