All...very cool info! Gonna dust off my copies of Total Recall and Red Planet.

Ive a question though....
Lets suppose whatever was living on Mars could deal with whatever atmsopheric and climate conditions existed.....and lets just focus on a salty body of water...as they imagine. Since the gravity on Mars is about 1/3 that of earth.....if one of the martians "fell" into the ocean...why wouldnt the resulting "splash" have sent gallons of water huring into space? or is all motion relative...force=MassxDensity

Holy aquatic lifeforms batman, F=ma is a red herring!

Actually, it isn't a red herring at all, but you needn't consider gravity except to calculate Ve, the escape velocity. Then you need only know:

- the elasticity (or not) of the collision
- the momentum of objects (mass*velocity) at impact

At which point you can solve for the momentum transfers. I'm going to ignore the quantum and string levels not only because they're very difficult to explain but also because they're not necessary to model the impact, and the momentum calculations for WATER will keep the dual G5 that Foo Fighter wishes he had busy for quite some time without that level of detail.

Whether you then calculate the new momentum of every involved atom or use a more coarsely-grained model is up to you, but in some form you will now be the proud owner of a sheet of paper or spreadsheet or massive set of computer data containing momentums (i.e., masses and velocities) which you can then compare against Ve (the escape velocity---gravity finally matters again) to determine whether or not you've doomed some hapless molecules to spend a good amount of time a few tens of Kelvins above absolute zero. :

So, If you want to be show me up, you can also:

- account for wind and air resistance on the ejecta.
- account for the chaotic motions of vaporized (steam) molecules or plasma if the collision is high enough in energy
- demonstrate just how sick you are and give us equations to model the thing at the quantum or string levels (or both)
- keep me surrounded by supercomputers and pay my salary for about a decade, and i'll write the damn simulation at any level of detail you want

I've already said too much... and yes, this IS rocket science...

if you can't brook the entropy increase, perhaps you should refrain from entering the culinary laboratory.