The Life Giving Nuclear Reactor within Earth protects us with the magnetic field it energizes. The idea is that, otherwise, the atmosphere would be torn away, as it was in Mars. Or, if not the atmosphere, at least the hydrogen (and thus the water), as happened for Venus.
At least, such was my philosophy of the rocky planets’ atmosphere (exposed in prior essays). “Philosophy” can be educated guesses based on lots of physics and mathematics, intuitively understood. Philosophy can stand just at the edge of science. But then it’s good to have a scientific confirmation. Here it is. NASA’s MAVEN (= Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) in orbit for years, has measured that Mars loses around 100 grams of atmosphere per second, due to impact from the Solar Wind (protons going at 400 kilometers per second).
That’s not good. Still, back of the envelope computations show Mars should still have a thick atmosphere. Instead, its density is only 1% of Earth, and few of Earth’s most primitive lifeforms are hardy enough to survive in Mars CO2 atmosphere (even neglecting UV and low temperatures).
Once the atmosphere was going, the water followed, and so did the considerable greenhouse water vapor brought. Water vapor (H2O) is more greenhousy than CO2, meaning the relationship CO2-H2O is nonlinear: higher CO2 on Earth means higher H2O, hence even higher greenhouse than the simple rise of CO2 would naively bring).
Earth Has A Powerful Nuclear Powered Magnetic Shield. Mars’ Shield Was Too Weak. The Solar Wind Tore the Martian Atmosphere Away MCE By MCE.
So, if 100 grams per second was not enough to strip the atmosphere why did it escape Mars as much as it did?
The Sun is an hectic thermonuclear engine shaken by internal explosions. Occasionally a Mass Coronal Ejection (MCE) occurs. Then an alarming eruption of inordinate magnitude, violently flings material off the sun, in a particular eruption. The last one to hit the Earth was in the Nineteenth Century, and it caused severe disruption to the then nascent electrodynamic industry. More severe ones went here and there in the meantime (sparing Earth for now).
However, one hit Mars, and MAVEN was there to measure what happened. What happened? The MCE driven Solar Wind smacked into Mars with great force, and robbed the planet of five kilograms of atmosphere per second.
So what philosophy to extract from this?
- Thank our nuclear reactor at the core, which maintains an iron ocean, hundreds of kilometers deep, below our feet.
- Life is fragile: it can get started easily, but can get killed easily.
- With at least two planets where life started, in the Solar System, life, basic life, probably started all over the galaxy.
- Earth’s life has a very high probability to be of Martian origin.
Why the last point? Because Mars cooled down at least four time faster than Earth. The very latest news show that life started on Earth within 500 million years of our planet’s formation. At that point, Earth became cool enough to sustain life (in spite of the formation of the Moon, which, whether from an impact or from my own nuclear eruption theory, was characterized by great heat, and worldwide fusion of the crust). By then Mars had been cool enough for four hundred million years, at least, to allow life (I get that working backwards from the geological date of life start on Earth, and the factor 4, from the surface ratios).
How did life bearing material go from Mars to Earth? Martian meteorites are found on Earth: an object crashes on Mars and debris flung into space (Mars has lower gravity than Earth). Some documented trips took no more than 15 million years, and temperatures within would have preserved life. More than four billion years ago, the bombardment was extremely intense, and Martian meteorites may have penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere continually. And it would just take one meteorite.
A baby was dying in London, from leukemia. All usual treatments were tried, and failed. The doctors proposed to try an approach so far only experimented only on mice. Collaborating quickly with the French company, CELLECTIS Paris, designer cells made to attack specifically Layla’s cancer were engineered. The treatment was an astounding success, so far. To make war against all diseases is not just fair, it is the war which has to be waged, paying our respects to Mars. In particular, I am certain that, when the choice is between death and trying a treatment which seems to have worked on mice, one should chose the latter. If nothing else, it brings hope, and the certainty one is contributing to:
- Fighting back (the most human thing to do, facing evil).
- Science
- Treatment to all of humanity (other babies, etc.), another most human behavior to engage in: giving one’s life for others.
So kudos to the doctors in London (and the British government for allowing experimentation, plus the two parents for having encouraged it).
Our species celebrates Mars as a god, because war is one of our oldest instincts. Anglo-Saxon media generally scrupulously avoided to mention that this was FRENCH technology (from a French start-up, of all things!). Not mentioning France is part of the war of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy against France. We are all Martians, in more ways than one. And yes, we need to cultivate the better angels of that Martian side of us.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: cancer, genetic engineering, Leukemia, Life, Magnetic Shield, Mars, Maven, Solar Wind
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
November 8, 2015 at 12:21 am |
Very interesting essay, Patrice, and i’m sorry it took a while for me to find time to read it.
LikeLike
November 8, 2015 at 1:50 am |
Mars waits for no one. Thanks, Paul.
LikeLike
November 14, 2015 at 10:43 pm |
Hello Patrice, I am afraid I disagree that life started on two planets. Assuming Mars is the second one, I feel that it is odds on it never made it, because the evolution of life from an abiotic mix requires a very large number of steps, and from the chemist’s point of view, most of them have number of byproducts, so quite an effort is required to sort out what you want and deal with the trash. Further, you need a number of different things in the same place, and while it is arguable that all this is inevitable if you have enough water lying on the surface for enough time, I doubt Mars qualified for that. As far as I am concerned, the first key step has to be the formation of RNA that can form a helix, as that permits reproduction and as an aside, guarantees homochirality, but unfortunately ribose is one of the hardest sugars to make. Worse, in my opinion, to make the phosphate esters, you also need porphyrins in the same place, which effectively means you need something that will act as a lipophilic cell wall first, and that has to come geochemically, so that means the water has to cover fumaroles, where geochemical processing has taken place. Most of the longish-lived Martian fluid systems lie in craters or run off the southern highlands, and that loses the fumarole requirement.
Notwithstanding that, I think the remains of the Martian fluid systems (which in my opinion were more likely to be ammoniacal water than water) may contain interesting remains of the chemicals available for biogenesis. But my guess is they did not last long enough.
LikeLike
July 20, 2017 at 11:35 am |
[Sent to :
Hi Ian.
Indeed Aristotle was good at promoting some methods and then violating them 100%. Witness his ignorance of air resistance: Buridan, with basically the same tech, 1750 years later, was able to realize that bodies, left to themselves keep on going if no force is applied. Aristotle had posed as a great experimentalist… But didn’t bother to talk to experts in arrow trajectories and artillery!
How do you get giant, very deep, deeper than Earth Grand Canyon, canyons with only a few hundreds thousands years of flow? At substantially less gravity? It would seem to me one needs hundreds of MILLIONS of years of erosion…
Another point is that the atmosphere is lost to the Sun’s Coronal Mass Ejections. So even if there was 100 millibars, it would be mostly gone now.
Still another point is that Mars’ axis of rotation wobbles big time: Mars has super summers, when the axis is rotated 40 degrees on the ecliptic. Then the poles melt.
Otherwise your theory sounds great.
You disagreed with my idea that Earth life got jump started on Mars, because you see conditions there as initially completely different than on Earth. I know basically no chemistry (relative to you), and I was “reasoning” from Mars being in the habitable zone 4.3 billion years ago (not clear as Sun was weaker). The river canyon formation you say was much posterior to that.
From my point of view, in the initial life formation on Mars, conditions would have had to be as Earth got a few hundreds million years later, after it cooled enough… Then Mars would have gone towards the state you depict, after some meteorites had carried hyper primitive Mars life to Earth…
LikeLike