Blue, Not Red: Did Ancient Mars Look Like This?

Call me cynical, but this is pretty much a case of "Look, ma! We got some fancy 3D graphics now!". But it's not particularly interesting or novel from a technical viewpoint - even bad Hollywood movies have more professional graphics than this.

I mean, all he did was slap some Blue Marble textures onto a Martian height field globe. Wo-hoo, score one for physical simulation, and all that. As someone else has said, score one for the realisation that the planet would have been blue, if there had been large amounts of surface water. Wo-hoo!:-)

Now if he had done some actual simulation on where large bodies of surface water have likely existed: seas are sort of obvious, but what about rivers and lakes - these are extremely important for life, due to being sources of fresh water, as opposed to the inevitable salt water in the oceans. That, coupled with a simulation how life could have spread. Parameterised by how advanced the lifeforms are - move a slider from "basically just slime in the ocean" to "higher plants", and watch the green spread into those regions that could sustain it... that would be news. But this? They cover texture mapping and in-painting in computer graphics 101 these days.

That having said, the images *are* pretty, so it's not all bad.:-) Just not that much of news for nerds.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/hNfcuxNrOIM/story01.htm

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