CapitalistImperialistPig

Or, at least, less than 100. We know that, says Mike Brown, because the level of methane on Mars is less than 1 part per billion - about the amount that would be produced by 100 cows, burping. It's not exactly a shock that Mars is not prime cattle country, but the aforementioned result is also a major blow to one of Mike's favorite theories: that some kind of life on Mars was all but certain since life from Earth was very likely transported to Mars in the Early days by meteorites blown off the Earth in major collision, to land there when the planet was more hospitable. Even today, it seems likely that Mars has locales where methanogens would survive and reproduce. Of course the reverse voyage scenario is also possible. In which case it would be a bit tragic that the planet that (perhaps) gave us birth, no longer supports life.

Water is pretty essential to life, so we probably need to find some wherever we go. First the Good News: Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar—one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos—the researchers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have found a mass of water vapour that’s at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world’s oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun. Aside from the fact that it's pretty far away (and twelve billion years ago], there is another reason you shouldn't expect to find any of it in Perrier bottles soon. ...In this particular quasar, the water vapour is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years (a light-year is about six trillion miles), and its presence indicates that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards. Although the gas is a chilly –53 degrees Celsius (–63...