B-movie sci-fi fans prepare to be disappointed: the surface of Mars is officially an unlikely place to find life after a 600 million year drought.
David Bowie's planet looks like it has been completely arid for over 600 million years, according to researchers at Imperial College London, which has made it far too hostile for life to survive on the surface. A team of researchers has been pouring over data from NASA's 2008 Phoenix trip to Mars, where Phoenix landed and searched for any signs that the planet was habitable. It was also used to analyse ice and soil it could collect.
Unfortunately for sci-fi buffs, the results of the soil analysis point to Mars having been arid for hundreds of millions of years. That is despite the ice on the planet. Prior research showed that Mars could have had a warmer and wetter climate in its history but that would have been over 3 billion years ago.
Of course, Phoenix was only able to trawl a portion of the planet, but satellite images, along with previous studies, do suggest that the same soil can be found across the whole planet - meaning the team's findings could be applied to all of Mars.
Dr Pike, lead author on the study, said: "We found that even though there is an abundance of ice, Mars has been experiencing a super-drought that may well have lasted hundreds of millions of years."
However, Pike did say the team thinks Mars is very different now than in its earlier history. Future NASA and ESA missions, he said, will dig deeper to explore the possibility of life underground.
Unless you can receive, decode, and process the signals from the Phoenix lander with your own antennas and equipment, the general public will never really know if there are "other" forms of life on the surface. NASA has it's secrets.
The reason for the existence of life anywhere within the physical universe is to enable the flow of truth, which when realised, sustains that universe. The plot thickens because relative truth is not the same as absolute truth - especially when the difference between the relative and the absolute is also unknown. As such, the first duty of any entity out seeking for the answer to self is to uncover if absoluteness exists. As posed by the perennial question about The Chicken and The Egg, when one is The Egg, reality is relative because without reality, relativity has no clue as to how and why. As such, the quest for The Egg is to find The Chicken.
When The Living becomes The Living-Dead through [them dwelling within] their thoughts of their Past or their Future, not only is The Present something relative between The Stupid and The Dumb, Reality/The Present, is then deemed irrelevant or as The Stupid-Dumb are mesmerised into calling it, “Democracy”, “Socialism” and the myriad of religiosities used to justiy Stupidity-Dumbness. Especially when one could look into “Outer Space” and only sees only “Aliens”, fabulous mineral wealth [which normally translates to Easy-Com, Easy-Go, oka Sun, Sea, & Succexx], or the hope of being awarded some Explosive Prize, the realms of Fame, Fortune & Immortality, oka the proceeds/byproducts of Stupidity-cum-Dumbness.
Those of Might are so fashioned because they have yet to be conscious, let alone be aware, of 2 miracles governing most, the first of which is that all are going to physically depart one fine day but few [are made to] remember the certainty unlike their need for “security” oka Fame, Fortune & Immortality, which is a 25/8 event. The second miracle is that Divinity is everywhere one cares to invoke one’s Depth/Sensibility but few are able to witness the reality other than what “naturalists” or “scientists” are demanding which is that their physical form must interject upon their documentary at every opportunity. When a human has yet to realised not only his true infrastructure but the true reason for his existence, he will step onto the Duelling-Duality/Religiosity known as “Godding” whereaby he’ll either become a saviour or a worshipper. In order to maintain its victim’s sanity through the denial of Extremity/Width, Worship is latently Saviourship [and vice-versa] with the trade-off being that one is locked into the cycle of Pros/Worship vs Cons/Saviourship. Cycles like, “Life On Mars” or “Being a Politician”, oka being a Beggar-cum-Thief through mesmerising The Electorate. As the latter case has consistently proven, when one is unaware of one’s absolute infrastructure, being The Egg is a foregone conclusion. Forever and ever, Amen.
I think the reason NASA pushes this angle is that it is the one major thing that they they think can capture people's imagination with. If they start to go on the news with an expected amazing discovery about the chemical composition of the Martian sand, the collective public eye will glaze over.
The point is, NASA has to have the public on side when they go to the government: "Please sir, I want some more". Considering the economic lurch the US is in, asking for money is getting harder and harder. So, they wheeled out cardboard cut-outs of green Morlocks on Mars. Come, take a step down Sideshow Alley!
Yawn.