‘HOT MARS THEORY’ suggests Red Planet never had chance for life. RUINING EVERYTHING.

Rad Bradbury says fuck you!, Hot Mars Theory. Such a theory that is putting forth that our glorious Red Brother never had the chance for life. Pshaw. Plant some trees, exert some cosmic will, and wish for the best.

io9:

As NASA’s Curiosity rover scours the Martian surface in search of signs that Mars was once capable of fostering complex life, a team of researchers from the University of Poitiers, France, and Caltech have issued apaper that casts serious doubt on the notion that the planet was once habitable.

The new theory, which was published inNature Geoscience, indicates that clay found on the Martian surface was formed in water-rich magma — water that would be way too hot to support life.

To make their case, a research team led by Alain Meunier studied clay minerals and rocks collected from an old A-bomb test site in French Polynesia. The geologists discovered that the clay minerals bore a remarkable resemblance to the ones observed on Mars. But unlike the South Pacific clays, which were products of weathering by liquid water, the ones on Mars were formed directly from water-rich molten rock as they cooled.

Reporting for the BBC, Jonathan Amos explains further:

It is interesting because it strikes at the heart of the notion that the Red Planet was awash with water, perhaps at its surface, more than 3.75 billion years ago – an idea that has been put forward to explain the great abundance of some clay deposits observed from orbit by satellites.

However, the process of clay production at Mururoa, if replicated and widespread on early Mars, would remove the need for such large volumes of water, and with it possibly a more benign environment for life to establish itself on the planet.

“Mars was not as warm and wet in its earliest time as some have suggested. I do not believe in an early ocean on Mars,” Prof Meunier told BBC News.

But [The Mururoa process] explains only the earliest generation of clays on Mars, in the early Noachian period. In later periods, liquid water has existed on Mars’ surface; that is undoubtedly the case.”