Mars hooray, Mercury meh?

I'm amused at the lack of attention that the discovery of water on Mercury is getting. Oh, and did I mention there's also evidence of organic compounds?

Let me put this in perspective. There was an excited rumor about ten days ago when John Grotzinger said, in a rather off-handed manner, that there had been a history-making discovery on Mars. Everyone, myself included, was in a tizzy to know what it was. Had they found life? Had they found organic compounds? Whoopee! But then NASA tamped down the rumor. Nothing to see here; move along.

And then, hardly a week later, we discovered organic compounds and water on Mercury...and no one cares.

Duh. This is the same discovery we were holding our breath and hoping to see on Mars. And if organic compounds had been found, the teevee would have lit up and the pundits would have roared, "This must mean there is or was life on Mars, and therefore life is everywhere! Hooray!!!"

We found what we were looking for, but on another planet. But since it's not the correct planet, hardly anyone cares. People, there might be life on Mercury! Wake up and enjoy the news.

Tiny things we can't see

On Jerry Coyne's blog today, I found this:

In the early 1670s, pioneer microscopist Antoni Leeuwenhoek peered into the tiny glass ball of his single-lens microscope and looked at a capillary tube that contained water and crushed pepper-corns. Leeuwenhoek was trying to discover why pepper was hot, and although he never found the answer to that question, he made a momentous discovery: microbes. To his amazement, the water was full of bazillions of tiny organisms, and there seemed to be no end to them...

I have an older brother who's a doctor. I remember the day he came home from medical school after looking at water for the first time under an electron microscope. He said, "I am never going to drink water again!"

Water is plentiful in the universe

From a story at physorg today:

Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. 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 have found a mass of water vapor 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.

You know what this means, don't you? Life is everywhere! Read the story. This water existed when the universe was just an infant, so water has been around almost forever. Amazing news.