User:Robertinventor/draft for water on mars post

Proposed changes in the Habitability assessment section

To remove dormancy statement and add statement about possibility of present day life

Proposal is to remove: "Even at a depth of 2 meters beneath the surface, any microbes would likely be dormant", as this is out of date.

and to add "Some scientists such as Nilton Renno think that there is an excellent chance of discovering present day life in surface or near surface micro habitats that may form briefly for a few hours per day or year".

This is a similar statement to the one in Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Alternatively, it could be argued that the best strategy is to look for present-day life in niches, such as warm volcanic regions or the intermittent flows of what may be briny water, in the hope that life, if it ever started on Mars, would survive where conditions were hospitable."

Nilton Renno is an excellent cite here as he lead the team that discovered a new potential habitat on salt / ice boundaries last year. He is also expert on surface conditions on Mars including cosmic radiation measurements - amongst other things, he is responsible for managing the REMS weather station on Curiosity.

For this and other citations and material to support the suggested new sentence, see User:Robertinventor/OR_In_Water_on_Mars_Habitability_Assessment.

To restore section covering research into possible present day life on Mars and their biochemical pathways

Additionally I propose that we restore this article's section from 2011 Possibility of Mars having enough water to support life, and update it with more recent research on the topics.

The material was deleted from this article by BI originally as a personal decision, with no RfC or other consensus based decision making process, indeed in face of protest. The section was written by many editors - I contributed just a couple of sentences to it myself.

There are many papers published on this subject every year, covering topics such as potential habitats for this life, and possible biochemical pathways that could be utilized by present day surface life on Mars (see for instance Redox Potentials for Martian Life). There was a major three days long conference on it in 2013 The Present-Day Habitability of Mars 2013. Robert Walker (talk) 11:32, 13 January 2015 (UTC)