TIL: Life Could Exist on Mars Thanks to Methane | Today I Learned

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] Anywhere on Earth that we find liquid water and other sources of nutrients and energy, we find [Music] life. So, we're studying bubbles of methane that are coming out of the Earth's crust in the deep sea. This is a very interesting source of energy for microbes at the bottom of the [Music] ocean. On the sea floor, you see some bubbling coming up, so that's the methane gas.

You see microbes that are living right at the edge of what is energetically possible, and these are the ones eating [Music] methane. On Mars, we found methane. About 2 or 3 billion years ago, there was liquid water over parts of the planet. We know that if there were also methane around, the microbes we're seeing at the sea floor here on Earth could have survived on Mars.

Even finding microbes would be an enormous discovery. Any type of life outside of Earth would really fundamentally change our sense of what's possible in the universe and what it means to be living here on [Music] Earth. If you were to use energy as quickly as a hummingbird, you'd have to eat a fridge full of food or about 300 hamburgers every day in order to survive.

The First Meeting of EDUtubers! ft. CGPGrey, Vsauce, Smarter Every Day, Numberphile +more

Crowd-funding: Tips

View All

Capital vs. consumer goods and economic growth | Microeconomics | Khan Academy

We’ve learned a little bit already about how a production possibilities curve can be used to illustrate the concept of economic growth. Let’s review the definition of economic growth. Then we’re going to go into some more depth about the trade-offs that s…

10 Brutal Truths That Trigger People's Ego

You know, the universe seems kind of small compared to some people’s egos. We all know the type. The challenge is speaking to them in a manner that doesn’t trigger any childish behaviors. So, if you want to avoid that at any cost, you’d better pay attenti…

Representing solids, liquids, and gases using particulate models | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

What we have depicted here in these four images are matter in different states, and we’re using what’s known as a particulate model. These are two-dimensional particulate models, which are simple ways of imagining what is going on at a molecular scale ins…

The First Militaristic Drug Cartel | Narco Wars

My name is Arturo Fontes. I was an FBI agent for approximately 28 years. People laugh at me because I left sunny San Diego with beaches and everything, and a nice big house to be in a small town, in Laredo. They call it “the armpit” of Texas. [honking] It…

Classical Japan during the Heian Period | World History | Khan Academy

What we’re going to do in this video is talk about roughly a thousand years of Japanese history that take us from what’s known as The Classical period of Japan through the Japanese medieval period all the way to the early modern period. The key defining …

What Makes You a Degenerate? | Stoic Philosophy

Here is your great soul – the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself. Imagine a society w…

TIL: Life Could Exist on Mars Thanks to Methane | Today I Learned

More Articles