Underground Martian Microbes FTW!

Water carved channels on Mars. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Today at 2PM, NASA scientists will discuss the presence of methane in Mars’s atmosphere. Methane could be produced in a couple of ways on Mars: through geologic activity, or by LIVING ORGANISMS!!!! I kind of hope it’s living organisms. Just want to put that in writing, in case the obnoxious use of all caps and extraneous punctuation didn’t make that clear.  How could methane mean life? Well, a type of single-celled organism known as a methanogen produces methane as a part of of its metabolic process.  It is possible that this type of single-celled organism is alive and well on Mars, living in ice under the planet’s crust. We’ll hear more on the matter today from NASA.

Life. So close to our own planet. If it really exists, life on another planet has the potential to change everything about the way we view the universe and ourselves.  If life has gone undedetected for so long on our neighboring planet, what other wonders await, right in our own solar system? How does God fit into this new equation? What ethical dilemmas will we face as we continue to explore? Premature questions at the moment. But in a year…who knows?

Go Humans! The LHC is coming online!

And I feel like it’s the second coming. Why? Because I like to know how stuff works. And this pretty much applies to everything. A combustion engine makes my car go. Sure. But how? What’s a gear for? How does a plant live off sunlight and water? How does my food get turned into poop? How does my computer get online without being plugged into anything? I know a lot of people just don’t care to know, but I do. I can’t help it. I want to know how stuff works. All stuff.

An engineer checks out one of the collider magnets. (Image copyright CERN)

Which brings us to THE UNIVERSE. Now, human beings have come a really long way in figuring out what makes the Universe tick. But we still have significant gaps in our knowledge. For example, we still haven’t quite figured out how to make Einstein’s General Relativity agree with quantum mechanics. String Theory has become to the fore as a possibility, but many of our theories have exceeded our technical ablitity to test them. Thats where the Large Hadron Collider comes in. First, what the heck is a “hadron?” Simply put, its a group of quarks held together by the strong nuclear force. Protons and neutrons are both hadrons. So the Large Hardon Collider (among other things) will collide streams of these particles to simulate the energy levels present when the universe was very young. Which could finally answer some questions for us.

For example, scientists might finally be able to find evidence of the extra spatial dimensions suggested by String Theory. Scientists might be able to observe a Higgs Boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics but never observed. Scientists even have the opportunity to create a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which is postulated to have existed when the universe was 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. At temperatures that high, its possible that quarks would be freed of the strong nuclear force and scientists would be able to see how matter forms as the plasma cools.

Anyway, I’m no physicist. I just dabble. But I’m stoked that one of humanity’s greatest feats of engineering is being switched on tonight. Sometimes its easy to look at humanity and become depressed by our shortcomings. But on days like today, when human innovation and curiosity are about to pay off in ways that could reveal the very nature of the reality we inhabit, I say “Go Humans!”