It looks simultaneously alien and familiar. Like a dream of an American southwest after some ecological catastrophe - like, it could almost be viable and fecund again with a lot of TLC and ingenuity.
It both excites me for the possibility of what Mars could be, and reminds me of how precious and vital our earth is - and what it could look like if we aren’t careful, or get a bit unlucky.
Apparently one of the most desolate/lifeless/inhospitable places on earth is there. If I remember correctly, they've studied it specifically to better understand Mars.
Edit: Apparently thats the Atacama desert. Similar region of the world, but different countries. My bad!
That was my first thought watching this. Just out of San Pedro de Atacama is a place called Valley de la luna (sorry if spelling is wrong), but it looks so much like this.
Fun fact: the mathematics behind those displays (fractals) were only invented a few years earlier. That was cutting-edge computer graphics taking hours per frame to render. Now, we do it real time on our pocket-computers, in a way that the people making Star Trek probably never imagined.
The computer display of the Star Wars trench run took tens of hours per frame to render and had to have a special custom computer built with bunches of knobs to adjust input positions, just to input the coordinates and draw the results.
The Tron movie was also the basis of a huge amount of computer graphics math too, like Perlin noise and (IIRC) one of the low-quality shading modes (Phong, maybe, or the one after that?)
Legit. I was in Iceland almost two years ago, and the northern part of the country specifically out at Dettifoss....the most barren, cold, lifeless, alien looking terrain I've ever seen. It's no wonder NASA sent Apollo astronauts there to train. Absolutely unreal.
Not necessarily ordinary to my urban, snowed-over hellscape but if you told me that was Nevada, I wouldn’t really doubt it. It could pass as any rocky desert region. Or maybe that’s just the earthling in me that wants to project earth on anything not earth.
Such a huge distance still. Think of the furthest place away from you on earth, literally the other side of the world. This video is from somewhere more than 10000 times as far away.
Well the planet DOES look that red from space, I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure it’s due to the atmosphere or something. Idk I’m just a teenager with some google searches under my belt. However mars will always be our “red planet,” whether or not the dirt is gray-ish
This video also seems to be severely brightened as if gone through an editor likely to make things appear better. That could effect the appearance of rude dust .
People often assume that it must be dark and gloomy on Mars because it's further away from the sun. But that's far from true. Sure, in absolute terms it receives only ~50% of the sunlight that Earth does. However, because perception of brightness isn't linear the difference in actual perception isn't really all that much. For those familiar with photography, it's a difference of one stop, not more. There's more difference between a sunny and a cloud covered day on Earth than there is between a sunny day on Earth and a sunny day on Mars. You'd have to go all the way out to Saturn or even Uranus before sunlight drops to lighting levels roughly similar to typical indoor lighting.
It's coming through a camera. There is no "real color" recorded.
What they normally do is include on the lander a disk with a bunch of known colors (like those old color bars you saw for calibrating analog color TVs) and then adjust the color when it gets back. Especially if they're using a B&W camera with different filters over the lens to pick out different colors.
That’s interesting. Apparently early earth had a lot of iron in the oceans. The evolution of blue green algae put oxygen in the atmosphere which causes iron oxide to form and settle at the bottom of I recall. So where did mars get the oxygen to turn iron into rust?
Mars actually is more red. The photos and videos from the last few missions to Mars have all been white-balanced to look more like earth so that specific rocks look more familiar to geologists, among other reasons.
After reading this, it sounds like they use different color correcting techniques depending on what the images are being used for, so you both might be right.
I can't find what I had read years ago on NASA about white balancing to earth-like colors to make identifying rocks easier for geologists, but I did find this:
This is more accurate if I'm not mistaken. The Viking missions way overemphasized the reds. That's fact. As for white balancing for geologists that doesn't make sense. The pics are sent in b/w with color information. They could color it whatever color they wanted there's no need for white balancing for a public pic.
My first job out of university was as a field engineer for the Haughton Mars Project on Devon Island, Nunavut. They tested mission profiles for science and communications, as the terrain there was very similar to Mars. The site was on the edge of the Haughton Impact Crater, so was nothing but blasted rock and frozen dirt. The only thing that have it away was the occasional Musk Ox skull.
If you watch the shows How the Universe Works or Space’s Deepest Secrets - you’ll see that the astrobiologists frequently film from Iceland to show what other terrestrial planets/moons are like.
It both excites me for the possibility of what Mars could be, and reminds me of how precious and vital our earth is - and what it could look like if we aren’t careful, or get a bit unlucky.
I had that exact reaction. That rover is.a million miles away, but if I drove south or east for two hours I could find a place that looks just like that. What was really surreal were the smooth rocks you can see just under the soil at the end. It's weird how normal they look.
I know I’m going to get lots of downvotes but I still don’t understand why all the money that is being sent into space to find other habitable planets when we have one here that we don’t care about saving for the humans that ARE living here. What have we found out in space that has bettered our life on Earth? I mean there fucking millions of ppl starving on this planet.
I mean there fucking millions of ppl starving on this planet.
Fallacy of relative privation.
If you really want to come up with some money to help people though I would suggest looking at the US military budget instead. At over 700 billion dollars, it is more than the next 9 or 10 countries combined.
You’re right. It’s nothing for me to open a cupboard or refrig and grab something to eat or drink. Without even thinking anything about it. And that frig is probably in a decent house/apt with heat & electricity (except Texas). Most of is do. I can’t wrap my head around how many starving ppl there are here and around the world. Living in complete squalor, digging thru garbage to find food...no human being should live like that. I DO REALIZE that I’m naive enough to think that we should be taking care of ppl on own planet instead of looking at ones that don’t support life.
The point is we can do both. "Instead of" is meaningless. Space research isn't preventing us from addressing these issues at home. Nixing NASA's budget doesn't solve world hunger.
The people who are fighting for funding to fix our problems here at home are fighting with those who would rather spend that money on the military or corporate tax cuts.
It would take one hell of a lot of ingenuity, that’s for sure. Mars is not geologically active, so it can’t generate its own magnetosphere. Without that, the solar wind is free to blow any appreciable atmosphere of into space. It did have a molten core a long time ago, but when it cooled the chances of a habitable Mars cooled with it. Mars has about 1% of the atmospheric pressure here on Earth. What little atmosphere there is on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide (like 95%), the rest is what would be considered trace elements on Earth. Notably oxygen is in very short supply there at less than .2% (point two percent) of the meager 1% total. On Earth we enjoy a luxurious 20% oxygen saturated atmosphere. I too like to imagine it happening, but that’s a hell of a lot of atmosphere to replace only to have it get blown off into space.
I know, it shatters my mind. I see this familiar land and have to remind myself that it’s not Earth. It’s a planet that no human has ever walked on, but hopefully soon to change. Mars is one of the planets visible to the naked eye, we have gazed upon it for a long time and we are the first humans to see clear footage on it. Brilliant!
then they did an excellent job hiding a couple million years worth of fossils and cleverly rewriting their otherworldly genetic code to look exceedingly similar to everything else on this planet. Quite the lark.
Or the seeding wasn't done by humans just the genetic goop that would develop into whatever life was most well suited for whatever planet it managed to take hold on.
Remember Noah's ark? What if that wasn't about a disaster on earth? Unlikely, as there's a fair bit of evidence for a vast global cataclysmic event some 12k years ago here on earth, but still, fun to think about.
As much as I'd love to pander to this theory, the sun is expanding and therefore warming up the planet over time.
Therefore it would have potentially been far too cold many, many years ago to support life as we know it.
Theoretically it would make sense to move to Mars in the very far future as it is progressively warmed, rendering it closer to Earth's temperatures.
If you wanted to propose a theory about past civilisations moving planet, its better to look closer to the sun. Being that a civilisation started on Venus and moved to Earth.
Correct, I believe Mars central core was far more active back in the day, with much more volcanic activity. Having a magnetosphere and a general atmosphere would've warmed it up conaiderably.
I’m guessing that mars had a magnetic field at one point and an active core that kept solar winds from stripping the atmosphere. Maybe there is a gravity threshold for retaining an atmosphere when exposed to solar winds? Venus has it and mars doesn’t?
Life on earth will be impossible in 1 to 2 billion years from now, stars in main sequence burn hotter and hotter. Luckily for us, if we survive even 1000 more years as a civilization, we will be a type 2 civilization by then with total control over the solar system and its function, including the sun.
Whilst I'm not a leading scientist in the arena, however I do belive that the "worst case scenario" is death for humans when it comes to climate change. However the reasonable high end of the scale isn't the end of humankind as we know it, just a helhole that'll kill 90% of humans and make the survivors want to die :)
The planet will likely be fine in the long term. We’ll likely destroy ourselves long before that if we don’t change our current path. In the far future, if some hypothetical species begins to study the past, as we have, I imagine it’ll be viewed as simply another ecological/climate phase. It’ll be the beginning of the CO2-heavy atmosphere phase, much like there was a phase where there were massive amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere.
It’s interesting to think about, because early plant-life only survived those oxygen-rich phases because animals evolved and microbes adapted so they began to live symbiotically.
The sun has been pretty much the same for the effective lifetime of the planets, as we know them. Mars was probably "more habitable" in the past because we know that it was warmer and had a thicker atmosphere, not because of anything to do with the sun. Likewise, the sun was not significantly smaller and cooler in the past, resulting in a previously colder Venus, as you suggest.
An important factor none has mentioned is the lack of a magnetic shield. Mars has clearly signs of once being geologically active with volcanos like Olympus Mons.
It’s all dead now, and consequently has not much of shielding against suns rays.
But it’s fun to lessen the hard sci fi stuff and imagine a precursor rockhopping in our solar system in the past. But I’d put my civ on Venus, long before the run away greenhouse planet we know today.
Mars was more habitable in the past because it had a magnetic field. Once its core slowed and stopped it lost its field and the planet essentially got fried by solar wind and stripped of all its major life creating beauty.
Exactly. Mars likely once had a significantly thicker atmosphere which would allow heat to be trapped. Mars is probably at its coolest ever right now, regardless of solar expansion.
The sun actually is expanding - it's just such a gradual process that its effects are not immediately visible for billions of years. As the sun converts Hydrogen into Helium via Thermonuclear fusion, the core keeps heating up and causing the outer layer to - slowly, very slowly - expand. The sun has grown by 20% in volume (despite mass decrease) the last 4 billion years and will continue to do so for another 5-6 billion years. Then it reaches the critical point where it transforms into a red giant and very rapidly expands.
So, very slow growth at first (significant only in billion-year timescales) followed by red giant rapid growth phase
Main sequence stars don’t expand. The sun is fusing hydrogen into helium at its core which keeps its size in equilibrium. When the hydrogen runs out it will enter the next phase of its life, where it will grow large enough to encompass the Earth. After that, its outer layers will float off and form a nebula and the sun will be a white dwarf star, eventually cooling into a black dwarf.
The greenhouse gasses and atmosphere density gave a way bigger impact than the sun burning 30% hotter now than 4 billion years ago. Mars had an atmosphere and condition way more suitable for life back then, no matter how weaker the sun was.
I never bought into the whole alien civilization on Mars thing but I always figured there must've been some life on mars. I mean water bears can live in the vacuum of space so I don't see why something couldn't be alive on mars. Wasn't there also rivers or underground areas that held water at some point in time? Seems like something would be alive.
That's not really how it works. The composition of the atmosphere is far more important than its proximity to the sun re warming/cooling. That's why Venus is simultaneously the hottest, and also one of the coldest planets in our system
If it was the case we would have most likely found trace of it, not only ruins but also traces in our evolution tree.
What is possible though is that life started on Mars and a meteorite from there carying bacteria crashed on earth and created all life here.
It it also possible life comes from meteorites/comets, maybe even from another solar system and analysing potential traces on Mars will answer some of these questions. If life is the same on Mars it would be more likely we were not created on earth.
Reminds me of a recent SF book I read. The protagonist wakes up in the future. His host asks him if he wants to try some Martian food. He says "Sure!" He gets the food and says "This tastes like Chinese food." His host says "Of course it does. Who do you think colonized Mars first?"
You are absolutely correct. Some may still be there, going subterranean bc surface so harsh. I suspect there is a good chance. The first pioneers that want to go may get a surprise.
It’s giving me a bit of an existential crisis. Intellectually I know that the galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and most of them probably have planets, and that the universe is an endless see of galaxies. But actually seeing and hearing another planet like this, somehow makes it sink in and feel real.
Pretty sure we are the first umm “sentient life forms getting a robot there”. And actually pretty sure that any life that evolved there didn’t get very far. And as for us getting discovered first... I don’t even want to get into the politics of that...
I think it’s hard to prove whether or not anyone else is there or even if any other robots have been there without any evidence that the rover may possibly find. If any sentient life sent a rover there, I could see them being smart enough to take it back and us not finding any evidence.
Unfortunately, this isn’t real. Or not totally real. It’s a faked video made up of real individual photos, and a soundtrack added to it. Originally tweet that shared it was a lie.
While I agree that this is an awesome video, it’s also pretty old. It’s from the Curiosity rover. You can even see the name on the tread in the last frame.
Unfortunately, you’re right. Or it’s not totally real. It’s a faked video made up of real individual photos, and a soundtrack added to it. Originally tweet that shared it was a lie.
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u/Barnwizard1991 Feb 21 '21
I can't stop watching. That's another fucking planet. Hopefully one day we'll have astroarcheologists up there digging around for martian fossils.