A flood of new research on Martian geological history... (That was a water-on-Mars joke.)

I found it sort of interesting that two of the new research papers whose publication I happened to catch over the last few days were studies on Martian geology and reminders that the Red Planet once had conditions that may well have enabled Barsoomian warfare.  That's probably overstating it a little bit, but I do marvel sometimes at how, when I was a kid, I was under the impression that the idea of life on Mars was an outdated and overly fanciful notion, and the longer I've lived, the more we've seen real evidence that liquid water (indicating conditions suitable for life) existed on the surface of Mars in the past and...who knows...maybe it's still there somewhere (probably a stretch, but see the thesis of this sentence).

The first paper came out on Monday in the highly regarded PNAS and covered radar imaging from China's Zhurong Rover, which indicated a history of plenty of surface water and lots of space for living things to grow.  You can read about it at Penn State's website here; here's the quote of the article, from the university's Benjamin Cardenas: "We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas.  We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand -- a proper, vacation-style beach."

Then on Tuesday, Nature Communications published a paper that gives a nontraditional view of why the planet is red, and which indicates that its current chemical structure reinforces a history of "ancient cold and wet conditions on Mars."  You can read more about that at the Discover Magazine website here; the image below is yoinked from that article.

Again, not my image; it came from here

These papers remind me how much fun is still left in speculating on the life history of one of our closest cosmic neighbors.  Mars has played into so many works that influenced my views of science fiction and of the world in general; it's easy to dismiss "Mars stories" as old-fashioned, but sometimes old-fashioned stories still have a lot of life left in them...

In continuing with that little reminder, don't forget this table from OD&D book 3, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures:

Space Fantasy News: Ocean worlds in the headlines

Some of this "news" is more than a week old now, but I thought it was cool to see a little "ocean world" theme in my internet wanderings over the past several days.  First, on February 27, the University of Cambridge announced that a group of astronomers there had assessed planet K2-18b, just 124 light years away and between the size of Earth and Neptune, to be potentially habitable.  This report from ScienceAlert plays up the possibility of a very watery surface: "It opens up a whole new ballgame of sloshy alien planets."

Obviously, that makes me think of...

From starwars.com.

It is pretty interesting to see the researchers make statements like: "Our results demonstrate that the potential for habitable conditions is not necessarily restricted to Earth-like rocky exoplanets."  If you're so inclined, you can find the original paper here.

Of course, we live on a pretty watery world ourselves...and a paper has just come out supporting the idea that at one point, our homeworld may have been completely (or almost completely) covered by ocean.  Once again, ScienceAlert has a nice article focusing on that aspect of the work.

If you'd like to see more about ocean worlds, NASA has a nice page about them.  (Did you know that most of our ocean water may have come from asteroids?  I didn't...)

Space Fantasy News: Insects on Mars?

In a story that has understandably been making its rounds on the web, an American entomology professor recently presented a poster showing his take on evidence for historical, and extant, life on Mars resembling our planet's insects and reptiles.  Dr. William Romoser, a Professor Emeritus at Ohio University with 45 years of service to the school, showed his work at a meeting of the Entomological Society of America in St. Louis.

One of Dr. Romoser's figures.

On the one hand, I do think stuff like this has the potential to put wind in the sails of crackpot theorists who would love to distract us from...y'know, true stuff.  (There's definitely been some concern over the implications of such claims for the future of our search for extraterrestrial life.)

On the other hand, though, it's 2019, and we have a scientist talking about stuff that's pretty much straight out of old school planetary romance tales, and that's kind of awesome.  It's awesome because ideas like this gave us the character of John Carter and all of the fiction he would go on to inspire.  It's also awesome because I think we need a world where established scientists are willing to bring up ideas that will be widely viewed as nonsense.  Every once in a while, such a wild idea will help us see an old problem in a new way.

So...maybe the greatest takeaway from all of this is that once you're a Professor Emeritus, you don't have to give a eff anymore.

(You can search some relevant words and find a number of reports on this around the net, or just click here and see Dr. Romoser's abstract and poster.)