
There’s Something Funny in the Air on Mars - CapitalistCartr
http://cosmos.nautil.us/short/67/theres-something-funny-in-the-air-on-mars
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king_magic
Was anyone else able to detect any semblance of a date that this article was
posted?

Personally, I think there is something intellectually dishonest about not
including a publish date in a piece for anything remotely scientific. Context
deeply matters.

edit: looks like it's Nov 2016, but you need to go to the parent page to see
that.

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CoryG89
I would take it a step further. I want a date on any kind of article,
scientific or not. Bonus points for having separate published and last
modified dates.

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teej
Someone, I think it was Copyblogger and others, convinced people that to
create "evergreen content" you should take dates off articles and blog posts.
The web has been worse off for this advice.

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abandonliberty
Even while you're hunting for that date you're improving their metrics :(

Having a date on the article is not an advantage here.

Unfortunately I don't see this going away anytime soon. Something like a
browser plugin that notified you of article date could be helpful, but would
face challenges in mass adoption.

Have you noticed the general reduction in usefulness/efficiency of web pages?
I sure have. Pages turn a 100 word answer into a 10,000 word essay with 5
videos.

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raldi
Mods, can we work "methane" into the headline?

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bobsoap
> In 2003 Earth-based astronomers caught glimpses of methane in the Martian
> atmosphere.

Intrigued to hear about those astronomer bases not on Earth, in 2016.

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Mtinie
Space-based platforms like the Hubble, Cassini, or Chandra.

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bobsoap
Orbital platforms that are still operated by Earth-based astronomers, no? I
don't intend to argue semantics, just think it's a poor (and somewhat funny)
choice of words.

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Mtinie
Perhaps, but that's how the platform deployment is described.

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dsfyu404ed
I was expecting a bunch of puns about nitrous oxide but all I got was a shitty
article about methane. I must spend too much time on Reddit.

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pbhjpbhj
That was my first thought too - nitrous oxide on Mars. Peculiar/strange might
have been better adjectives? "Funny" probably is better for SEO (like no dates
on articles).

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nthcolumn
There is no air on Mars.

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blauditore
Methane is a very simple molecule. From what I understand it's quite likely to
form if there's C, H and some heat/pressure. Since H and energy have been
abundant during formation of planet's, the interesting part is that there's C
on mars.

But calling it an "intriguing" discovery and talking about water and "the base
for life" based on that seems like a stretch to me...

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Sharlin
The article explains _right in the second paragraph_ why detecting methane is
so intriguing.

 _If you dropped a molecule of methane into the atmosphere of Mars, it would
survive about 300 years—that’s how long, on average, it would take for solar
ultraviolet radiation and other Martian gases to destroy the molecule. By
rights, the Martian atmosphere should have been scrubbed of its methane eons
ago._

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blauditore
Yeah, I had read that.

It could just leak out of subterrane entrapments, as they mention later in the
article:

> _They must have been of Martian origin—perhaps a burp from a relatively
> small and localized subsurface source to the north of the landing site. The
> Martian winds would blow that methane away over several months, explaining
> why the signal went away when it did._

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NotSammyHagar
But then keep that line of thought going. Mars has the pieces it needs to form
dna like molecules, at least in some protected environments, like in the salty
almost frozen water slightly under the surface, so there's a very likely
possibility of life being related to or similar in process to our life on
earth.

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blauditore
I see what you mean; we know the ingredients (necessary elements and energy)
for earth-like life are there.

However, we don't know the probability of all the steps leading to life
actually taking place in the given time frame. The only reference value we
have is earth, so it's just one data point and hardly possible to generalize.
And mathematical estimations are difficult due to way too many factors to be
considered (I've never seen one actually).

At the least we can say that formation of complex structures like DNA is far
more complicated and thus less likely to form than methane, by orders of
magnitude. So one could argue that it is generally far more likely for methane
to be encountered than any (earth-like) life form.

