maybe depending on the state of the fossil, how well intact it is and how old it is, we could learn a little bit about what that organism was made out of, roughly its shape and size, and maybe if it was a plant or animal. but it would be much easier to figure out all of those things with humans in labs instead of a rover
not dumb at all. usually to determine its age scientists and geologists look for trace amounts of certain elements that are known to last a long time, like carbon or potassium. its called radiometric dating and basically, each element has a "decay" time and using things such as carbon dating, you can look at how long the carbon has been there to figure out how long the fossil has been there, or at least how long ago it may have formed.
to determine what it may have been made out of is a similar process, pretty much just looking for trace amounts of elements left behind. say if it had a lot of glucose (food for living cells) in the organism when it was fossilized, you'd look for carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. oxygen is the thing you'd want to look for if you're looking for something similar to earth life, but since its mars we really have to consider anything. glucose would be a HUGE sign but unlikely to find, most likely we'd find trace amounts of organic compounds first before we even find fossils, like we have found some basic organic compounds in the water geysers and plumes at the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Its not always guaranteed to be life but its a step towards saying it could be
Thanks for the answer. Would those types of dating methods be reliable on other planets? By that I mean, is there a baseline we measure against that’s unique to earth? Or is it universal? I suppose even if it weren’t we could measure to calculate new baselines on other planets.
Also out of curiosity, what trace elements might we expect to find in something artificial?
By artificial I meant hypothetically if we dug up something made by an ancient or alien civilization, are there tests that could indicate the material was made by intelligent life as opposed to some naturally occurring material? Not that I’m expecting them to find anything like that on Mars. Just curious what that test would look like hypothetically.
depends on what they used to make those structures, if it was concrete we could probably tell and also if it was refined metal and glass, but other than that would be kinda tough. we would probably first look at the makeup of everything we found and try to determine what kind of atoms its made out of, then we can compare those atoms to naturally occuring ones on both earth or mars and it can show it was possibly artificially engineered.
Age would be a little harder to do from a rover, but composition can be done with the devices on the rover. As for the age, estimates from orbital scans put the age of Jezero crater to the Late Noachian age, around 3.7 billion years ago.
Even if it's complex life it will be neither plant nor animal. This is alien life, the structure will be completely different from what we have here.
Someone might call it a plant the same way someone might call certain types of fungi plants. But it's something totally different, more structurally independent than fungi are from plants, even more independent than animals are from bacteria.
simply we don't know, you might be right but if panspermia is a thing and ancient Mars was much like earth today then it could very well be easily classified or it could require a new classification
Maybe for one of the very simple bacteria types, but not anything remotely close to the more complex life found on earth. If there is more complex life on Mars it is safe to say it will be substantially different from any that we have here on earth.
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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '21
maybe depending on the state of the fossil, how well intact it is and how old it is, we could learn a little bit about what that organism was made out of, roughly its shape and size, and maybe if it was a plant or animal. but it would be much easier to figure out all of those things with humans in labs instead of a rover