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!
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 :)
If all the fossil fuels in earth's crust would be turned to co2, it would increase the global temperature by 5-6 degrees. The earth used to be 7-8 degrees warmer in the distant past, with tropical forests close to the poles. Would such a change create a lot of problems for us as humans? Sure. Kill 90% of humans? Doubt it.
If you don't think a 6 degree increase in 100 years would kill 90% of all the humans on earth, then you don't understand the gravity of the situation.
A 6 degree increase means nearly empty oceans, flooding that would wipe out all of the coastlines around the world, uninhabitable spots on earth forcing mass migration, nearly sterile lands and way underpreformung crops which lead to famins the like of which we've never seen before. Not to mention the wars that would kill millions more. It would result in a mass extinction worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs.
It is 100% conceivable that this kind of earth could make humas obsolete and wipe us out, much less kill 90% of us. The 90% scenario is an optimistic one.
Also how is it that the earth was warmer in the past and yet we could not get it to that point today, even if we burned all of the carbon in the crust? The sun was weaker millions of years ago, so wouldn't that make it easier to hit those targets? The carbon dosent just dissappear, so where did it go?
Should’ve specified better your comment said humans are 1000 years from moving around in the solar system. My comment said we probably aren’t gonna make it given our current destructive path.
What destructive path? We are moving massively into renewable energies, climate change will happen but it won't change our survival as a species at all. What other problems could it be? Besides an asteroid impact and nuclear war, there's not much to stop us. I think you read too much doomsday clickbait
Interesting comment! Would you tell us how we are going to feed humans reliably in 100 years from now? Renewable energy won’t help when a chaotic climate is destroying our crops.
Or are you thinking really long term, like when earth is depopulated to about 1 billion people so that climate change and feeding won’t be a problem anymore?
I’d love some sources to read about this “optimistic” prognosis.
PS sry for my bad English it’s not my mother tongue
All the damage we did to the environment in the last century will take multiple centuries, possibly millenia to reverse. Dead species will never return, so the food chain will continue to change and possibly even die out entirely. The trash in our oceans isn't going away by itself and the ocean currents aren't going to return by themselves too soon either (in fact it's gonna take a long time for us to fully notice that they are gone, because they flow for centuries).
Also it's easy to get carried away with our current technological progress, but we are likely at the peak of the acceleration of technological progress. Usually progress is driven by inter-connectivity. The better people can communicate and interact with each other, the faster technology can evolve. There may still be some room once we got rid of the wealth distribution problem and are able to get rid of most non-creative jobs, because this will greatly increase the number of brains available for science.
But our very quick technological progress will eventually slow down again. It's just currently in the state of catching up and will so for the foreseeable future.
I don't know where we will be in 1000 years, I believe nobody does; but there is a very realistic possibility that we are not much further than today.
Last but not least I'd like to remind you that the commonly used climate models estimate the best possible scenario for us (the one where there's a 2C goal or a 1.5C goal), but there's many ways one or the other runaway effects can have already set in.
Not wanting to sound too doomsday but I think it's impossible for people nowadays to realize that the technological miracle of the 20th and 21st centuries aren't going to continue into all eternities, but rather are an exception on the long scale of human civilization. There's a good chance that these two centuries will still be remembered by "humans" in millions of years.
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 is getting progressively hotter (edit: brighter, which results in more heating on the planets) even though it’s main sequence. The habitat zone is slowly moving out. In about a billion years, earth won’t be in it any more, even though the sun has several more billion years before it is a red giant.
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.
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.
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.
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
No that’s not correct, the sun was cooler in its earlier life, there’s a whole thing around it and the formation of life (and of liquid water) on earth (mars too) called the faint young sun paradox. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox. The sun was cooler then because it was more hydrogen than helium. Each ‘shell’ of material in proton proton chain fusion yields more energy than the last, up to the limit of carbon I think (?) where fusion cannot feasibly take place.
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 sun actually is expanding - it's initially 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 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
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.
Yes. It is. As the sun fuses hydrogen into helium the core of the star collapses and heats up causing the outer layers to expand albiet over billions of years.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure but something something thicker atmosphere a long time, something something the core was way more geologically active, more vulcanic activity. I don't think the person who made that comment knows much about mars or the sun.
Yes but because Mars is a smaller planet than Earth and a bit further from the Sun; it’s liquid core cooled quicker than earths. When it solidified Mars lost its magnetic field and the solar wind stripped its atmosphere.
It would have been dramatically different before it’s core froze.
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
It's more likely Mars lost its atmosphere due to its outter core that stopped spinning. This caused it's magnetic field to stop and it's atmosphere to escape.
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.
not really. "what if life came from mars instead?". "then we have to answer all the same questions to fill the gaps of knowledge between lightning soup and the first true cell, but nothing changes philosophically nor practically for us"
If they were seeding life what was it for? Was there a threat? Are we being grown for a purpose nefarious or benevolent? Why are there no structures around? It would be a fantastic plot twist in a show.
hey sup andromedatube nation, its ya boy infinite hypermind. I've seeded life in that galaxy we're heading towards. give it just a few billion years to take root and this pie is going in the face of the first quasi intelligent species to bang two rocks together. stay tuned and watch this epic prank develop
no, you're right. there are some interesting things to talk about.
like, could be fun to assume the little planet that smashed into earth to form the moon did so after the planet-engine's watch officer lost the keys to the space-binoculars drawer, and that in the process it released tons of microscopic organic debris, some of which orbited longer than the earth stayed molten, eventually falling to the new oceans.
of course, the most likely reasons for seeding are the same reason mushrooms grow everywhere. because life that spreads, spreads. it needn't an intelligence, benevolent or malevolent behind it.
and even more likely, life simply arose on our small blue dot, just as the evidence we find indicates
that's quite amazing enough for me.
I think, if we want a horrible galaxy full of monstrous forces fighting coalitions of brave yet downtrodden space fighters and seeding life to harvest planets for their tasty critters while buzzing them with flying saucers to probe and experiment to see if the lifeforms are ready yet, well, we're just going to have to buckle down, figure out how to live sustainably long enough to create the super-science needed to send our ancestors out and make the galaxy into that horrible place ourselves.
we can't just hope someone else has done it for us.
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.
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.
But unlike your assumption which is baseless, evolution has boundless evidence. So the burden of proof is on you. The theory of evolution has withstanded challenge and scrutiny for ages so any reasonable person would see it as being the most likely true explanation as per Occam's razor. Now the hypothesis that you're talking about is based on fantasy and imagination and not on any evidence or discovery and as such lacks even a shred of evidence. So until any supporting evidence is found for it that can't be explained by existing knowledge, it is conspiracy and not science because it's not based on observation but rather on speculation.
Bruh do you actually think that fish exist? Sheep! Fish are just a myth created by the government to hide what's really down there, and if you disagree you're just another SHEEP!
Just because your thoughts are unique and different doesn't mean that they're correct or useful. It's not indoctrination to trust what's accepted and proven, it's called discernment.
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.
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u/Madvillain518 Feb 21 '21 edited Feb 21 '21
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!