Study: Infant Mars Suited for Life

Ancient clays bearing telltale signs of standing water indicate the most likely time for life to have developed on Mars was about four billion years ago, before a cataclysmic global change left the planet cold, dry and plagued with acid water, researchers said Thursday.

Fair enough. But the big news in this story, at least to me, is the notion that Mars lost its atmosphere via some catastrophe, rather than simply losing it as a result of some combination of weaker gravity and lots of radiation due to no magnetic field. Or have I been way off on that this whole time?

Between four billion and 3.5 billion years ago, Mars underwent a dramatic change. The shift may have been triggered by massive volcanic eruptions that spewed sulfur into the atmosphere, which then rained down on the planet's surface.

I was watching Frontline's episode about Tiananmen Square, and it was fascinating, even if it served to further convince me that the future of all humanity is a screaming Orwellian nightmare.

But at the end, we hear from a number of journalists about the enduring legacy of this particular image (which I am totally going to display inline because I somehow doubt CNN is going to care about the traffic my blog generates):


An awesome and scary and uplifting picture. But just ten or twenty minutes earlier in the program was a segment where they handed out copies of that picture to several Beijing University students, and none of them had ever seen it before, nor could they connect it to the events of 1989.

I am, or at least usually think of myself as, a pretty hardcore techno-optimist. But it seems clear that every technology that empowers the people can empower the state just as much, if not more. The question is, how can that disparity in power be overcome, when and if overcoming it is necessary?

"history shows our progress is slow / when we win we win in inches"