that is not what this statistical analysis recovered

the paleo-balkan branch is thought to be one of the oldest and most archaic branches of indo-european

I cannot include every Indo-European language, there are 445

Unfortunately a language with 50,000 speakers is not going to make the cut.

I primarily based this project on the most recent phylogenetic statistical analysis from Chang et al. 2015 (University of California, Berkeley) which charts the divergence of the Indo-European language family

Link to .pdf file of the paper (you can find their tree on Figure 2)

Link to the wikipedia article about the Indo-European language family

I expanded Chang et al.'s tree by including extinct languages, and by charting the geographic spread of languages (encoded in the colour of each branch). Many areas are simplified for the sake of making it readable. Uncertainty is indicated by dotted lines and question marks.

My entirely arbitrary rule of thumb for including a language or not was if it had ~2 million native speakers, or I sometimes included obscure/minor languages if they had an interesting history that caught my attention (e.g Ossettian). Pls don't @ me complaining about the lack of Faroese!

Languages that belong to different language families are obviously not included. These include: Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, the Dravidian language family of south India, and the Semitic language group of Africa and the Middle East

I am not a paleolinguist, so there are likely errors and oversights. I just wanted to learn about a fascinating topic and produce something along the way to inspire others to do their own research. You are free to download/print do whatever you want with this poster! If you want the raw .svg file, just DM me.

I wouldn't even know who that is, i'm new to the mission

If you're really interested then my recommendation is you check out the hiring pages of the institutions that built each spacecraft instrument. this is a list of all the instruments and the labs that built and run them. Remember Curiosity is just one mission, NASA runs another more sophisticated rover Perseverance and also like a dozen other missions across the solar system, each of which has their own instruments and their own institutions.

They're tilted because Curiosity is actually sitting on a pretty steep incline right now, it's climbing up a mountain after all, so the horizon is slanted/sloped.

They're cut and stitched together because the camera's field of view is not wide enough to capture the scene in one photo, instead it creates *mosaics* of photos produced by stitching together dozens of photos taken seconds apart. This is necessary to get such amazingly high resolution panoramas. There IS a wide angle camera with a big enough FOV to capture it all on one go, but the result is quite unspectacular!

So something like a fish is definitely out the question, because the period when Mars was habitable was only like 500-1000 million years after the solar system formed. Complex life like simple animals (jellyfish,sponges) didn't evolve until 3700 million years into Earth's history and fish didn't evolve until 4100 million years into Earth's history. Mars never had the time to evolve something so complex as a fish.

So instead of fish we're looking for much simpler microbial life. An individual fossil microbe is far too small for the rover to spot. Fortunately though, even simple microbes can group into larger colonies leaving behind rock structures called stromatolites which are really distinctive and are known from rocks of similar age on Earth. So that's the kind of thing we're hoping the rover just stumbles on.

It's worth adding though that Curiosity has been exploring lake-bottom sediments for 10 years now and nothing remotely like a stromatolite has yet been found. Perhaps that's telling us something. Maybe there were microbes but they didn't form into colonies for some reason, maybe the water conditions were wrong. Maybe there was life on Mars but it never reached this lake. Or maybe there was no life at all. OOOOor maybe there are stromatolites in Gale Crater and we just landed in the wrong place ;)

Thank you, you're very kind! 🤘🏿

Thank you!

28 km and about 500m upwards in elevation

Thank you I hope so to! Perseverance is currently exploring a delta, where an ancient river once emptied into an ancient lake, and looking for signs of life. It's taking rock samples that will be returned to Earth which will allow the first definitive analysis for evidence of life on Mars.

Yesss we do, there are three geological periods, how we subdivide time is something I am very interested in. However Mars chronology is in its infancy. Just like how Earth once started out with just four time periods (Cenozoic, Mesozoic, Palaeozoic and Precambrian) that were then subdivided greatly as we learnt more and more, I expect that 40 years from now the number of Mars geological periods will have doubled or more.

Excellent question! This is one of the biggest debates in Mars science - we really don't know to be honest! All we know is that the atmosphere must have been far thicker than today and must have contained a lot of greenhouse gases to explain how a planet much further than the sun was able to sustain liquid water on its surface without it freezing.

Candidates include: CO2 NH3 CH4 SO2 H2O

TBH I wouldn't know because i'm not involved with the engineering side of the mission at all (i'm on the science side). But probably yes. The place to check is the JPL website, and if that fails then you could ask the lead engineers of the mission.

Yes! There are loads and loads of places where sedimentary layers are well exposed, probably more exposures than Earth given that most sedimentary rocks on Earth are buried by soil/vegetation/water.

Valles Marineris is the biggest example, it's a canyon 3 times deeper than the Grand Canyon and is so long it would stretch across the whole of America.

This page has dozens of pictures of cliff faces with layered rock in Valles Marineris

Here's one cool example. Maybe there are fossils there! We'd need to send a new rover or helicopter to find out :)

Technically the rovers are only supposed to last for about a martian year (3 Earth yrs) but in actuality the engineers design the components to last much longer. Why? Well NASA virtually always gives funding to extend the lifetime of the mission. Opportunity, for example, was supposed to last 90 days but ended up surviving 14 years until a dust storm killed it off.

Curiosity and Perseverance's lifetime is limited by its power source, which is fueled by the decay of radioactive elements. This is only going to last 10-15 years before the rover runs out of power - for reference Curiosity is 10 years old and Perseverance is 1 year old. Once they run out of power, their instruments become irreperably damaged by the cold winter temperature.

So people definitely won't make it in time to save Curiosity, but perhaps we could greet Perseverance :)

Good question! We believe at one point the sand dunes we're starting to see actually eventually completely buried the crater - which is several kilometres deep and 150km wide so quite a huge volume of sand! However, almost all of that sand has now been completely scoured away by wind over the past 3 billion years, exposing the ancient lake sediments underneath for us to study. The exact center of the crater is actually the least eroded, that's why the central peak mountain, Aeolis Mons (aeolis is latin for wind!) is so much taller than the crater floor, it's 5.5km high. It's this mountain that the rover is climbing up. In fact it's so tall its a bit of a puzzle, we're not sure why the sand formations didn't erode here.

The new pillars of creation photo is indeed incredible! Spent a bit of time earlier today just zooming in the full resolution (140 MB!) image and taking a look around :)

Here's one

Another (This time Perseverance)

This Perseverance one isn't true colour but is just so cinematic I couldnt resist adding it

True colour images are rare because they require deliberate & timely alteration to 'correct' for how our inferior eyes would perceieve colour.

I did my undergraduate degree in Geology and my PhD subject is Planetary Science. I am studying Mars, although not using rover data. My research considers Mars globally and is trying to better understand just how long Mars was habitable for and what the ancient environment was like. The time period I study (the Noachian) actually predates the crater lakes being studied by Curiosity and Perseverance by about 100-200 million years.

They are sedimentary, yes. In a lake bed setting, imagine clay particles settling out of suspension and forming a thin layer of mud ontop of the original rock. Now imagine that the lake persists for a million years, that deposit of mud on the lake floor has now grown hundreds of metres thick.

Billions of years later, the rover visits the site. The lake water is long dried up and that mud has turned into stone, which has been heavily eroded. The rover landed at the lowest point in the crater, where you can see where that very first layer of mud sitting ontop of the original rock. Therefore, we first encountered mud formed at the very beginning of the lake's history. In the years since, the rover has driven steadily uphill, climbing through sequentially higher mud layers and so 'further in time'. So, as the rover ascends upwards, we see progressively younger layers. We are now at the time when the lake dried up.

If you want to see more Mars, all the time, these two pages show each rover's latest images in near-real time

Curiosity latest, unprocessed images

Perseverance latest, unprocessed images

Since neither rover has a microscope or state-of-the-art mass spectrometer (due to budget and mass constraint limitations), we're therefore going to have to wait until we can study Mars rocks in a lab on Earth to really answer these questions - unless Perseverance just stumbles across a stromatolite lol.

Fortunately, NASA's already set that plan in motion. The rocks that Perseverance is coring will be brought back to Earth by a series of robotic missions, they'll return to Earth in the early 2030s. They will be the most scientifically valuable materials in history! Only then will we be able to definitively answer - yes or no- whether the area Perseverance is exploring had alien life.

Scientists will be wary of announcing the discovery of alien life unless the evidence is direct and unequivocal. However, given how hostile Mars' present surface is, it's very unlikely we'll find living microbes on the surface. Instead, we're really looking for fossilised microbes inside rocks, because Mars was a much more habitable planet in the ancient past (4.5-3.5 billion years ago).

Definitive proof of alien life on Mars would therefore have to meet multiple of these expected criteria:

• Biogenic sedimentary structures like stromatolites. This is what everyone is hoping we find because these features are very large and obvious. We find them in Earth rocks of similar age.
• Chirality. Organic (carbon-based) molecules often have two 'mirror versions' of each other, a "left handed" version and a "right handed" version. Without the action of life, these molecules are usually in equal abundance, but biological processes tend to generate molecules that are very skewed towards one and not the other. IIRC, on Earth molecules overwhelmingly tend to be left-handed, and this is a big giveaway that Earth has life
• Microscopic things with cell-like morphology and cell-like sizes (micrometres)
• Evidence of various cell morphs, representing multiple species or life stages
• Evidence of cell clustering, indicating of cell division, or colonies of cells which organise into shapes like spirals or tubes
• Presence of biomolecules such as certain lipids which are only produced by biology
• Isotope fractionation. As a byproduct of biological processes that are universal to all Earth organisms, the abundance of certain isotopes such as those of Carbon is skewed in a way that is very distinctive of life