Yet Another Are We Martians?

Quite a lot of people have been submitting the Wired article about the "discovery" of two strains of bacteria that could be extra-terrestrial in origin. Carrying along with that beat, the Boston Globe has a report about where life on Earth came from, and whether it was Martian in origin. *Rant* The Wired article in particular makes me cross. Two strains in question, to my knowledge, have been known by biologists for at least a couple decades. The fact that they /might/ be able to survive extra-terrestrial conditions doesn't mean they are extra-terrestrial. In fact, the environments where bactera like this are often found, like deep sea vents, are in many ways just as "bad" as extra-terrestrial travel. Perhaps it's a pot-kettle situation with me, but bad science coverage irritates me greatly. */Rant*

Comments

For what it's worth...

[cswiii]

CNN has an article, too.

Re:For what it's worth...

[treat]

More interesting than CNN having an article, is that they had the gall to give it the headline "Are we martians? Maybe, study says". Reading the article reveals that "They concluded it is theoretically possible." Now, "maybe" is a vague word, but I think it implies a vastly higher probability than "theoretically possible" does. To say nothing of the fact that the average person will not realize that the headline is in reference to microbes.

Of course, each additional click on a story is another ad impression. That's their standard procedure, to make as sensationalistic a headlie as possible.

It's not "bad science"... :)

[jd]

...It's good marketing. :)

Seriously, just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions. (If you were to cryogenically preserve a human, and lob them out into interstellar space, they'd be just fine. Until they hit something, that is, at which point they'd fragment over the landscape and make a bit of a mess for the locals to clean up.)

There is one other point to consider. Just as it's dangerous to mix matter and anti-matter, it's dangerous to mix reality with journalism. Both have to be kept seperate, at all costs, by powerful magnetic fields.

another example of improper extrapolation.

[Klaymor]

I think what we are talking about here is yet another example of circular reasoning. There are bacteria that could survive the trip so they must have made the trip. There is a serious logical disconnect there that is not easily rectified.

This type of sensationalism is the worst kind IMHO because it give the complete wrong impression of legitamate research. By setting up J.Q. Public to make the wrong assumptions you are in effect creating a truth.

Oh puh-leese!

[Tau Zero]

In the Wired article you'll find this gem:

The problem is to determine whether any of these bodies did in fact carry life, and then to find out where life began if it did not originate on Earth.

This gives the impression that the author thinks the original rocks from Mars, some billions of years old, are still sitting around somewhere waiting to be examined. HELLO! They've long since weathered into clay, been pressed into shale, and been hung as blackboards and roof tiles - in the Cretaceous! And a time or two since then.

There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits.
--

The Article Everyone Missed

[Sargent1]

It's a shame no one else has noticed the second article Wired posted a little while later...

They Published from Outer Space
AP

3:15 a.m. 13.Jan.2000 PST
The same astronomers who reported on Wednesday they had found a tough but peaceful pair of bacteria that might have been able to survive the arduous trip from Mars, back when the Red Planet could have supported life, have also discovered that a paper copy of Wired magazine is also capable of surviving the trip. From this they theorize that Wired is from Mars, or possibly Uranus.

Sargent

The impact

[delevant]

I recently saw a TV science show talking about how the moon came into existance -- the show took the angle that a "moon-creating impact" must have occurred at some point in the distant past.

Basically, the idea was that the Earth got hit by another planet, at a fairly oblique angle. The show argued that this would explain why the Earth has an iron core (we got most of the iron from the other planet, in addition to the one we had already), and so on.

Since the impact was so cataclysmic, everything on the pre-impact Earth (Earth Mk I) got annihilated, and everything on the impacting planet gets killed too (since both planets get liquified).

My question is this: if we assume that the moon-creating impact happened, then WHEN did it happen, and how does that affect the possibility of life arriving on Earth from elsewhere in the solar system?

I mean, if everything on Earth (even bacteria) got killed only a couple billion years ago, it makes it somewhat unlikely that anything could have arrived from Mars post-impact, given the purported rates of Mars Rock Impacts mentioned in the article . . .

I dunno; it struck me as interesting.

Not just Mars

[drfireman]

Okay, so these two mild-mannered bacteria have what it takes to survive a trip from Mars. The real question is what else they could have survived. Without extrapolating too much, we can also guess that they have what it takes to survive trips from all kinds of other places! Populated planets on other solar systems! The future! Alternate dimensions! Middle Earth! If I don't see an item on CNN by this evening with a title something like "Slashdot reports bacteria from the future" I'm going to be very disappointed.

Why is the real story being supressed?

[GMontag]

The real story is that the last 2 *publicised* missions to Mars were shot down, along with dozens of secret missions from several terrestrial nations that have missile technology.

Just because we were able to land a few objects into Martian wilderness without incident means nothing, they got their defenses up and now we can not visit until an interplanitary war is fought and won!

Is everybody forgetting that all of those aircraft shot down in the Nantuckett Triangle happened when the flight plans were filed in time for the Martians to target the triangle and fire an intense energy weapon to destroy the aircraft?

These events are not the work of bacteria!

Wishful thinking

[nlvp]

There are so many stories like this. I can't help thinking that people are really desperate for something like this to be true. The Commercial Writer/Journalist types just can't seem to leave the subject alone, the fiction writers who touch upon the subject get cult followings with fans who reach levels of delusion where they begin to believe it to be true, and all of a sudden, if you don't believe in the "conspiracy", you're obviously either on their side or mind-numbingly stupid.

I read a good book on the subject which I think should be recommended reading to all conspiracy/"aliens on earth"/"unproven scientific hypothesis" buffs out there : Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark". Although there's plenty in there to disagree with, he makes some excellent logical points of how incredible science already is without having to invent hypotheses based upon almost negligable circumstancial evidence, with no scientific rigor, and convincing ourselves it's true.

In this case, we go from "bacteria can survive acceleration and radiation" to "therefore life may have originated on Mars", (Ok, and the circumstances make it possible). The ability to survive such extreme conditions is probably why it survived on Earth in the first place. They choose to focus on the most fantastic possibilities, how are we to maintain our scientific objectivity when those who are our "proxies" and report the science to us focus on the aspects of the discoveries that are the closest to our fantasies and fail to report any other possible explantions for their discoveries before they have even begun the task of elimination.

Ok, perhaps I'm being a bit extreme here, but I just think we should rule out the probable and the likely before we start believing in the highly improbable, even if the fantasy stories sell so well.

No, it makes sense :)

[/]

CNN is owned by TimeWarner.

TimeWarner is merging with AOL.

AOL is populated by martians. Surely we won't admit they're regular Merkins like the rest of us, right? Ok, maybe they're merkins, but surely not Americans? C'mon people, back me up on this....

I'm guessing they're trying to get some nostalgia clicks from martian AOLers pining for the motherland.

Panspermia, denial of evolution

[crush]

I appreciate your sarcasm! But there is even more at stake here than just flakey reporting and cluelessness

This is part of a reaction against the idea that life could have evolved here. It a displacing of the location of the improbable event in order to attempt to make it more palatable. It's the same sort of argument that Bertrand Russell attacked when he queried the "First Cause" arguments for God. If there is an improbable event and we keep on putting off it's cause, further and further back down a chain of events then that leads to infinite regress - we may as well bite the bullet and accept that it may have happened here on earth. To be fair, many of the early life theorists seem to feel that extra-terran origin would buy extra time for life to evolve, but I think that many in the evolution community would feel that there was enough time for it to happen on earth. The idea of life originating off earth and drifting around in space waiting to seed earth came, I think originally from Arrhenius in the 1920's and then was taken up by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who called it Panspermia.

just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions

Sure, given the right conditions! But the fact remains that the right conditions for most organic life are not likely to be there! The problem for most of these things is ionizing radiation, which is why they are proposing that it would be carried within a meteorite. Once one makes that suppostion then the maximum radius that the life could have come from is limited by the maximum speed of travel of matter. Hence one is restricted to "potentially life bearing" planets near us. A more recent development of this idea has been that DNA or RNA coated in dust would be light enough to be blown on the solar wind over great distances. The dust would protect the particles. A paper in Science seemed to prove that this would mean that the particles would be able to disperse from a much greater radius to earth. I'll check the reference on that now if anyone is interested.

You say that this is not bad science [...] just good marketing , well I feel that there is a problem with that: it makes the public at first excited and gullible and then disillusioned and skeptical of all science. They are muddying the waters, not clarifying them. That's bad science. I don't blame them for wanting fame, funding but I think that it is short-sighted. Probably they are already being flamed by their more sober colleagues!

Where's JonKatz? Here's What He Would Write:

[StoryMan]

Hey, where's JonKatz when we really need his careful media analysis?

"Not since biblical times has such an important and critical media announcment come down the pike. We are martians. Yes, that's right. We. Are. Martians.

Now, we all know that the American constitution establishes free speech as an essential human freedom. But if we are martians what does this mean? Does it mean we are humans? Does it means we are martians? Does it, in fact, invalidate the American constitution?

I fielded several media calls about this major, earth shattering announcment: first from the New York Times, then from Chicago Tribune, and then from Vinny Bega in Trenton, a free-lancer who frequently consults with me in matters of national and global importance.

Vinny's first question naturally was this: "John, you're a media analyst and film critic. What's your take on the possibility that parts of our genetic make-up could be derived from martian genes?"

"Well, Vinny," I answered, "you know I shouldn't talk about this because I'm expecting a call from the president (who, by the way, felt that my review of 'Man In the Moon' was quite informative, and ..."

"Wait, you mean Man on the Moon?"

"Man In The Moon, Vinny. Please. Listen to what I'm saying and don't correct me. Now, the announcment that --"

"Jon, is it true you're a college freshman?"

"Huh?"

"On Slashdot. I read that."

"A freshman?"

"Someone said what's a college freshman doing making movie reviews and fielding calls from major news agencies?"

"No, I'm older than that--"

"It's just a lie?"

"Vinny, you asked me a question."

"Yeah--"

"Then let me analyze."

"Biblical proportions," Vinny said, checking his notes. "Something about not since Moses parted the Red Sea did such --"

"Yes. Well, the question is this: free speech. I know the EFF is working on this one. But it's brings up the question of open source."

"Open source?"

"Yeah."

"What about the red sea?"

"Well not since then did a matter of this crucial, critical urgency arise."

"What about the AOL/Time Warner merger?"

"What about it?"

"You said the same about that."

"Yeah?"

"So not since the AOL/TimeWarner merger did such a critical, crucial event happen?"

Pause. "Wait, that was three days ago."

"Yeah..."

"Yeah, not since the AOL/Time Warner merger."

"You want me to write that, Jon?"

"That not since the merger? Or not since the red sea?"

"I dunno Jon, you tell me."

"Yeah."

"The Red Sea..."

"No..."

"The Time Warner..."

"Yeah."

"Okay, not since --"

"No skip it."

"What?"

"The merger. Don't write that."

"Don't write the Red Sea?"

"Or the Time Warner."

Pause. "Don't write any of it."

"Yeah."

"Okay."

Pause. "So that's it then? You got what you need Vinny?"

"Uh..."

"Remember this."

"This... what ...?"

"The martian story. Remember this. Write that."

"That we should remember this?"

"Yeah. Because it's big, Vinny. It's real big!"

"Big."

"Bigger than anything. It changes everything: free speech, open source, everything."

Vinny writing: "Changes everything."

"It's big."

"I got that."

"Real big, Vinny."

"This big?"

"No, bigger than that."

"Thiiiis big?"

"Yeah, about that."

"Wow."

"Wow is right."

"Okay thanks Jon."

"Anytime, Vinny."

Please... give me a rest

[jw3]

Another article from I-fall-for-every-hoax-on-the-net-dpt.

1. There are many qualified sources of biological information on the net. Contrary to what you probably expect(*), wired is *not* one of them, as opposed to Nature science update, for example.

2. Although spores of B. subtilis are quite resistant to many external factors, it is a highly evolved gram negative bacterium - and it's ancestors, as much we can tell, do not share its peculiar capabilities. I could think about several higher organisms which could survived a direct impact deep inside a meteorite, but they could not give rise to the diversity of life as we know, not to mention that it would not fit into any theory explaining the mechanisms of observed evolution, because those insects - as well as B. subtilis - are quite specialized and, genetically speaking, very complicated life forms.

3. It is a well known fact that one could imagine a very primitive ancestor of all life forms as we know it capable of hitch-hiking through our solar system. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for a sound scientific theory. This is why nobody takes the panspermia theory seriously, even though some great scientists are promoting it. Nobody but the media, but media take seriously even Microsoft publicity, right?

Regards,

January

(*) Whenever I read something like this /. news I feel the urge to reply quoting two polish humourists, J. Tuwim and A. Slonimski: "Dear madam; either someone did not inform you precisely enough, either - what the editors consider more probable - you didn't understand something. The man is not a descendant of Darwin."