Water. On. Mars. Seriously., Holy ****ing **** there's water

Didn't think that.

I really hope you're joking.

Anyway, the problem isn't so much that Mars doesn't get enough sunlight, it's that the atmosphere is so thin that it doesn't retain much heat.

-Impossible. I forgot that some protazoa don't need oxygen but sunlight, bacteria, sugar, etc. However that protazoa would be impossible, if not extremely difficult to maintain in mars. For example, Mars gets no sunlight, if a bacteria or sugar eating protazoa survives and begins to thrive on mars, the amount of bacteria would eventually decline, leaving no food at all for the protazoa. You can't just leave astronauts in mars to support them, they will run out of food. Building supportive International space stations in mars is barely anything of a possible dream today, and tommorow.

The possibility of deterioration would be extremely high. Failure is imminent.

Even if all these problems are somehow fixed, evolving these bacteria would take billions and billions of years even if they expand, because evolution is simply a matter of luck, luck and more luck. Even after, All you would get in a billion years from these bacterias is speciation, which means you'll just see a bunch of different bacteria.
- The water will eventually freeze, making it inhospitable.
- You're nuts.
- Most bacteria take hundreds of billions of years to get used to be blown away and moved into a new enviroment. And again, evolution is only luck based.
- Read above. You would have to throw trillions of organisms in the barren environment and wait to see which ones survives, and that would be quite low to happen.
-etc.

The best way to create a life adaptable to mars is to create it in a lab here on earth, because all the resources the creators could need are here.

Whoa, that's very amazing

Oh dear, nitpicking.

Wrong, Mars gets plenty. Even Pluto receives some light from the sun, just as Earth receives light from every star we can see. If you can see where the light is coming from then OF COURSE you're getting light from there. Mars is only a short distance from our sun so will get a lot of light, certainly enough for photosynthesis in bacteria and plantlife.

Evolution only takes a long time in larger animals because they are more complex, and even then Evolution into a different species takes millions not billions of years. In fact you can see evolution of insects with short lives (e.g. flies) in the lab over months, not years. Evolution operates on Generations not Time and bacteria create a new generation every 20 minutes or so, hence evolution by survival of the fittest will be quick, producing suited bacteria probably within a week or a month. Evolution is also not just blind luck, it has the constraints of the environment to work within so only a finite amount of possibilities can exist. Bacteria would be more than able to survive and thrive on mars if not for the massive cosmic radiation the surface receives. This is because Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, it has a solid iron core rather than a semi-liquid iron core like earth has. Still, this radiation may not be enough to see off the hardiest microbes.

Not to a bacteria. Bacteria can survive unhindered at spectacular extremes of pressure, temperature and radiation. Whats more they can survive in that state for centuries. Any human settlement will of course have means to melt more water.

Easy. Breathe out once or twice, heck just walking around in your spacesuit is releasing inconceivably large amounts of life into the area around you.

Probably more later, sorry.

This post has been edited by Dink on Dec 8 2006, 06:58 PM

Anyways, mars should be a tourist attraction by 2020 if new discoveries are being made. Za zing!

Only thing I'd expect to see on mars with that little amount of water is trace amounts of micro orginisms. -_-

oh and seeing as mars is a huge ball of rust powder, you sure as hell wouldn't want to be breathing the atmosphere even if it WAS able to support life

Well, I figured if there was ever water or something on another planet, N.A.S.A. would try to extract it.
Unless they build a station (I THINK I heard something about one in planning, or whatever)
Or if by some wtf reason, mars abandoned state means its about to start life soon (not in our lifetime but, you get my point ... right?)
but at the rate we're screwing up out planet I wouldn't be surprised if we had to move soon, or we started extracting supplies from other planets.

Thousands now is it? I thought it was like...millions


We should genetically modify some moss and shoot it in a rocket to Mars.

This post has been edited by Hippoman on Dec 9 2006, 06:46 AM

Terraforming mars is very possible, but it'd be a very long and expensive process, I think as soon as the technology is available they should begin asap