The Mars lander might have uncovered ice

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WhatThe wrote:

Millions of taxpayers dollars spent just to locate a stinkin' ice cube!

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American Atheist wrote:

Don't be fooled, this is all a consipracy, remember when Bush had his colon checked? This is the microscopic cam up his butt. So any pictures are of his crevis!

HealingTime wrote:

Cool ... however I read an article somewhere that the salinity of any water on Mars would be too high to support life, way beyond the levels in the Dead Sea, and so the osmotic potential would suck all water out of living organisms.

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HealingTime wrote:

Cool ... however I read an article somewhere that the salinity of any water on Mars would be too high to support life, way beyond the levels in the Dead Sea, and so the osmotic potential would suck all water out of living organisms.

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Coolmind wrote:

And bush thinks it's a good idea to blow $100 billion sending a person to mars to actually SEE the ice... I say we spend a couple million sending bush's ashes to mars... like next week.

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Sh1tbird wrote:

<quoted text>
It hasn't been proven that ALL the water on Mars was like this.....

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HealingTime wrote:

Cool ... however I read an article somewhere that the salinity of any water on Mars would be too high to support life, way beyond the levels in the Dead Sea, and so the osmotic potential would suck all water out of living organisms.

HealingTime wrote:

<quoted text>
The article was in the Economist, this is the last part of it .....
<<Mars's geology (if that is not an oxymoron) has been studied spectroscopically by several satellites, and has also been prodded and probed at a local level by ground-based rovers. The upshot is that the layered rocks do, indeed, seem to have formed underwater. They appear to be sandstones, but with a lot of minerals such as magnesium, calcium and iron sulphates that form when brine evaporates. It is these minerals that concern Dr Tosca.
His calculations suggest that the waters they formed from would have been highly acidic. That is bad enough for those who imagine them brim-full of bacteria. But they would also have been highly osmotic. The dissolved chemicals within them would have served to lock up the water so that it could not take part in biochemical reactions.
The degree to which water is locked up by such solutes is measured by a number called the “water activity” of a solution. Pure water has an activity of 1.0. Seawater's activity is 0.98. The water of primeval Mars, Dr Tosca calculates, was probably between 0.78 and 0.86, and may sometimes have been as low as 0.5. That is far lower than is tolerable by any living thing known on Earth, even from places like the Dead Sea.
This result will probably not dampen the ardour of exobiologists. Living organisms, they will argue, are amazingly adaptable, so why should they not be born in conditions even more extreme than those found on Earth? Like a phoenix, perhaps. But then the phoenix is mythological. >>