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Old 22-November-2008, 02:46 PM
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mugaliens mugaliens is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eburacum45 View Post
...only if life on Mars persisted, and seeded the Earth repeatedly and over a long period, might this possibility be radically different to abiogenesis on Earth.
This is the general idea, and the reason I put it in ATM was a "what if" along the lines of Martians seeding the Earth intentionally, over millennia (or it's million, if not billion-year equivalents - i.e. very long-lived species).

Quote:
The chance of humanoids evolving separately on Mars is miniscule, by the way, and Mars became uninhabitable long before the Dinosaurs, so the martia-forming thing doesn't work, unfortunately..
Not separately. Rather, all life, including humanoid, evolving on Mars, then seeding Earth, while also Martia-forming it by diverting asteroids to change it's climate.

The seeding may have been done via two methods - unintentional, via meteoric ejecta carrying microbes to Earth, and intentional, via the introduction of ever more advanced forms of life to Earth so as to ultimately support the level of life that had risen on Mars.

It's conceivable that 500 million years ago even the driest climate on Earth was like the Congo is today, and Martians needed something a bit drier, at least close to, if not equivalent to James Bond's version of a martini. And with their rarified atmosphere, Earth's 25 psi climate simply wouldn't do, so they slammed a few asteroids into the planet, and after a few hundred years for each, reassessed the conditions, repeating as necessary.

Once some desertification (aridation) had been achieved, along with rarification of the atmosphere, migrations began.

This scenario actually supports what we see in the geological record as apparent explosions of various species, where long, boring records of steady-state existence is punctuated by radical changes, including the emergence of entirely new and radically different species.

And just as it appears the widespread folklore of a great flood may very well have actually happened, so might the many-cultured references to various god's have risen from proto-primates. It may be that various primates were sent here much earlier, both to establish themselves, as well as test cases, to ensure the long-term viability/stability of later humanoid migrations. Or it's possible they were radically different, totally unable to survive on Earth, and thus designed primates in their image, primates that could survive on Earth. It could be that their various attempts at different designs descended to modern apes, including orangs, chimps, apes, neanderthals, cro-magnons, and sapiens.
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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.