The portal’s mouth — a furrowed pit about half a mile wide — spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, exposing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz and shimmering constellations of gold.
At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells.
This deluge is partly a consequence of geographic serendipity: Intense equatorial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean and bordering mountains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense.
Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffusing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which protected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
Conceived by the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock in the 1960s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the animate and inanimate elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”
The tunnels and chambers were decorated with strange and beautiful formations: massive chandeliers of frostlike gypsum, lemon-yellow sulfur pods, pearly balloons of hydromagnesite, transparent selenite spears and calcite lily pads hovering over turquoise pools.
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The article has lots of reasons why maybe not. Not using Martian material is one of them.
But moss typically doesn't need soil. The first mosses evolved on earth before soil was a thing. Mosses don't have roots that extract nutrients/water from soil. Instead, they have rhizoids that just kinda anchor them in place, but don't transport nutrients/water
While Matt Damon relied on potatoes cultivated in crew biowaste to survive in the hit film The Martian, researchers say it is a humble desert moss that might prove pivotal to establishing life on Mars.
“The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonisation using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions,” the team write.
Dr Agata Zupanska, of the SETI Institute, agreed, noting moss could help enrich and transform the rocky material found on the surface of Mars to enable other plants grow.
Writing in the journal The Innovation, researchers in China describe how the desert moss not only survived but rapidly recovered from almost complete dehydration.
“Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonisation and growth in outer space,” the researchers write.
Dr Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University, also raised concerns, including that temperatures on the red planet rarely get above freezing, making outdoor plant growth impossible, while the new study did not use Mars-like soil.
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I think you can do math about the rate at which you discover new species when pulling out random samples of fish in comparison to the amount of fish species you already found: if you have very few of the species discovered a random sample of fish would yield almost only new species. If you have a high amount discovered you'd get almost no new fish in your sample. Idk the formulas used tho sorry. I saw a video of this with moths species at some point, i think by Matt Parker. There was also recently a numberphile video about catching Pokémon that can probably extrapolated into making a formula for that stuff.
Ah if there’s a stand up maths video on it I will watch it PRONTO! Thank you very much. My question was more a joke about how they somehow have a maximum in their quote “as many as”, when I would think it would be a minimum.
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