Mars And The Living Desert Problem
I keep thinking back on the Mars mission special I watched a week ago. A space probe professor type made a remark that, to the great disappointment of all the space probe professors, Mars looked like the Sonoran desert or something. Well, not actually. the 1953 Disney film The Living Desert simply contradicts that characterization. The Sonoran desert doesn't look much like Mars at all. What appears to be the conventional wisdom promoted in the current media discussion of life on Mars is that, given liquid water and t amount of time, life will appear in some microbial form and evolve from there. The quantity given for t is at most a billion years, because that's the time span Mars is supposed to have had liquid water. Where they got that isn't explained, but let's grant it. I went to Wikipedia's timeline of life on Earth. I recognize that all these estimates, a billion years for water on Mars, 4.4 billion years ago for the first liquid water on Earth and so f...