Water on Mars?

Rev 22 Feb 08

Who can fail to have noticed in their glowing accounts of the search for signs of past water on Mars, that NASA never mentions the other side of the story?  Every press release begins or ends with the hope that the Rovers will find signs of abundant liquid water in Mar's dusty past.   In many cases it's not even a hope, it's just a question of when they will find this evidence.  And who can blame them?  Look at the Martian satellite photos of arroyos, river delta flows etched in the sand, and all the analogues to heavy--even torrential--water flow in the past. 

Then you learn that if caused by liquid water, these flows must have occurred millions of years ago, and it hits you: How can these ancient flows look so recent and unweathered, and why aren't more of them pocked with  millions of years' worth of meteorites? 

My suspicion is that they ARE recent; that there may never have been any significant liquid water on Mars and that the arroyos, and river deltas are nothing more than the flow of very fine, crystalline Martian sand. 

If dry ice (frozen CO2) is held underground by the pressure of dirt above it, and the temperature rises in the summer enough to melt it, the result will be an explosive release of the gas/liquid that will flow downhill like a raging torrent of water, carrying huge blocks of rock and debris with it, and carving out flow channels exactly like a water flood.  Once released and flowed-out, the CO2 will evaporate. There are suspicious outflows (deltas) where one would expect signs of pooling of the great flow, but there is no evidence of standing water at all.  The sedimentation being used as an excuse for water-layering can as well have been caused by airborn layering due to the annual planet-wide dust storms. 

Think of other rushing water-type flows, e.g., snow on the steep slopes of mountains, which forms branching streaks in the snow cover that looks very much like it was caused by water.  (Paint it brown and you would swear it was erosion by water). 

[March 08-- See this site for new evidence that the flows on Mars are likely rubble rather than water: http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2640&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 ]

The elephant in The elephant in the room: Mars Rover photo (8/17/04) showing liquid-like sand flow that is--astoundingly--not commented on. Being on the surface, it must be as recent as any erosion, and can only have occurred in the complete absence of surface water.  How?  How does Martian sand flow like muddy water?  NASA is mute.

What the religion of the fine folk at NASA won’t allow them to say is that while Mars probably does have water locked-up in its poles as ice, and perhaps traces amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere, the atmospheric pressure may never have been high enough to permit water to exist as a liquid for more than the most transitory periods of time. This would be a disaster to the NASA acolytes, and its future missions. 

The NASA religion is that  life is ubiquitous in the universe–evidence of which is that even our next door neighbor (i.e., Mars) had it.  Therefore, let’s go out and find it. They don’t tout the Drake Equation, but it runs as a basso continuo in their thinking.  That’s why you’ve never heard them even utter the opposite possibility–that Mars never made it, life-wise, and has always been a barren desert. 

Now, a note on definitions:   It is possible--even likely--that microbial life is to be found all over the universe, spread by comets to any surface they hit. The SETI folks (and there is a religion if ever there was one) deliberately confuse the term “life,” meaning microbial life when they are trying to garner the highest score for its possible diffusion in the universe, and then segue effortlessly to sentient life when they discuss how many communicating civilizations there must be.  Go to the Drake equation sites and see how they stack the deck in their favor when they pretend to let you select the limited low values of the Drake factors for them to calculate out. 

But why this religious self-censorship–by scientists, no less?  Because, as I have preached tirelessly, intelligence and logic is no match against emotional fervor .  If you deeply believe something–like that Mallory did make to the summit of Mt. Everest in 1924–then thinking about negative alternatives not only make no sense to you, it is heretically wrong.. 

Likewise, NASA folk really want there to have been life on Mars.  If it turns out that, other than a few bacteria deposited on Mars by comets, but never took hold, then the Drake Equation suffers a heavy blow, and SETI is next to doomed. (Not that such an inconvenient factoid would stop those True Believers.)

There should be at NASA a group of in-house heretics , especially set up to press the Mars- Never-Made-It argument, so that the scientists won’t just keep looking, piling up one excuse after another about why they haven't found water yet: that they just aren’t in the right spot, that the evidence is too deeply buried, that we need better instruments, that a manned mission would solve it. (Or, as they are now saying, we have found such evidence.) The apostates would actively try to show not why water isn’t being found, and how the evidential water flows might have been formed by the natural, dry processes extent on Mars. 

What a shame if it’s true.  I signed up to take the first Pan Am passenger flight to Mars in 1956.  And nothing would please me more than to sight the first BEM (Bug-eyed Monster).  But I’m beginning to think it didn’t happen.  Life on Mars and the Mallory summit: Glorious adventures gone wrong. 

ADDEDUM-16 Oct 04: Since this essay was posted about six months ago, the tenor of the NASA communiques have changed.  Now they seem very careful to include in nearly every instance where they mention water as a source of layering, that the layering could also have been caused by wind-born sedimentation. This hasn't reduced the cheer-leading for water, but it is a first step in reclaiming some of their abandonned objectivity.  Bravo!

Addendum 22 Feb 08: HA! At last NASA admits that previous life on Mars is becoming a diminishingly small likelihood:

"Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life."

Conditions may have been more hospitable earlier, with water less briny, but later conditions at Meridiani and elsewhere on the surface of Mars appear to have been less hospitable, Knoll said. "Life at the Martian surface would have been very challenging for the last 4 billion years. The best hopes for a story of life on Mars are at environments we haven't studied yet -- older ones, subsurface ones," he said."
 

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Well, well, well. FINALLY an admission that all is not rosy in the Life On Mars department.  Here is a NASA/JPL press release:

February 15, 2008 

Like salt used as a preservative, high concentrations of dissolved minerals in the wet, early-Mars environment known from discoveries by NASA's Opportunity rover may have thwarted any microbes from developing or surviving.

"Not all water is fit to drink," said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team who is a biologist at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
…
Experiments with simulated Martian conditions and computer modeling are helping researchers refine earlier assessments of whether the long-ago conditions in the Meridiani area studied by Opportunity would have been hospitable to microbes. Chances look slimmer. "At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic," Knoll said. "Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life."

Conditions may have been more hospitable earlier, with water less briny, but later conditions at Meridiani and elsewhere on the surface of Mars appear to have been less hospitable, Knoll said. "Life at the Martian surface would have been very challenging for the last 4 billion years. The best hopes for a story of life on Mars are at environments we haven't studied yet -- older ones, subsurface ones," he said.

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

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For a counter-viewpoint, see: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/mars_surfacewater_000821.html

Wow--I've been beaten to the punch with this prescient article, written 3 years ago! http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-00k1.html   

Also (by the same author):  http://users.bigpond.net.au/Nick/Mars/NH0.htm

White Mars: The story of the Red Planet Without Water

A Dry Rusty Dead World?

by Dr Nick Hoffman
Melbourne - Oct. 19, 2000

Water and Life
On Earth, life requires water, therefore our search for life beyond the Earth is a search for water. For this reason we target Europa, a moon of Jupiter that may have a liquid ocean beneath a thick icy crust, and also Mars where huge erosional channels suggest the flow of fluids across the surface in the geological past. Many scientists believe that rivers and lakes existed in the past on Mars, and perhaps even oceans. However, this search on Mars may be ill-founded. Despite intense research, the evidence for water on Mars is scarce. Now a new theory suggests that the single strongest line of evidence for water on Mars - the "outburst flood channels" may have been formed not by liquid water but by cold dry eruptions of gas, dust and rock, fuelled by exploding liquid CO2.

And then there's this exciting addition to Hoffman's theory: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-00i1.html

Has Mars Always Been A Dry World ?
by Peter Ravenscroft
Samford - August 16, 2000 - There may have been far less water on Mars in the past than most observers have assumed to date. The supposed ancient river channels may have been formed by katabatic winds carrying sand and dust over aeons, enhanced by flows of even purer carbon dioxide gas released when the dry ice permafrost warms up each year or occasionally when meteorites strike. If so, liquid water may never have been present on Mars, and the planet may always have been lifeless.

[Long, detailed, highly technical article describing this theory. Required reading for us space nuts.]

Here is the latest NASA prayer for water.  To their credit, they still maintain--if ever more weakly--the possibility that they might be wrong.

Mars Was Once a Watery Place [Bold emphasis added.]

On March 2, after Opportunity had unfolded its solar panels, snapped its wheels and scientific instruments into place, and rolled off its landing platform to explore the local martian real estate, scientists announced that Eagle Crater, where the rover landed, was once a water-soaked place.

This finding meant that, in fairly short order, researchers from NASA and participating universities, who are trained to be skeptical of scientific conclusions without a great deal of corroborating evidence, had now agreed that Mars was once much wetter than the barren landscape encountered by the earlier Viking and Pathfinder missions.

It also meant they had achieved their goal. The primary reason for sending rovers to Mars, the reason why NASA was funding the mission, was to look for signs of past liquid water. If evidence of water were found, the next questions scientists would seek to answer would be what the environment was like when water was present and whether past environments were favorable for life. Even without knowing what that life might look like, researchers surmised that water would have to be present. From the tiniest bacterium to the largest tree, life as we know it requires liquid water.

06 Sep 04.

Note 8 Nov 04:   Finally, NASA admits the possiblity of non-water sedimentation and transport. (Or is it the almost concealed escape hatch if the worst turns out to be true?)

"Our leading hypothesis is that these rocks originated as volcanic ash that fell from the air or moved in ground-hugging ash flows, and that minerals in them were altered by water," said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the mission.

"This is still a working hypothesis, not a firm conclusion, but all the instruments have contributed clues that fit," he said. "However, it is important to point out that we have just begun to characterize the textures, mineralogy and chemistry of these layered rocks. Other hypotheses for their origin focus on the role of transport and deposition by water. In fact, it may turn out that volcanism, water and wind have produced the rocks that Spirit is examining. We are just beginning to put together the big picture."

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