Posted by
Hemos
on from the put-the-test-tube-here dept.
swestcott writes "This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post today about an experiment on the Viking mission to Mars apparently found life on Mars - or not."
We need people like this to be exploring and researching the far-out things. In doing so, they may discover something totally unrealated or solve the problems of the universe. Only time will tell if he was right or wrong. But saying you shouldn't even try, well that's just silly!
"What Leonardo? A flying machine with blades that spin? You're an obsessed guy who should be concentrating on the problems we have today! Not on some crazy pipe dream!"
=-=-=-=-=
"Do you hear the Slashdotters sing,
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Not as crackpot as it sounds
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4
What is interesting about this is that before the probes were sent to Mars, they realized the importance of the experiments for life. So the NASA scientists in charge of experiments made a very explicit protocol to anylize the results of the experiments by -- what exactly would be a positive or negative result, and what to do if the experiments were mixed in the results.
This was done so that the results could be viewed objectively based on the science and not reinterpreted for the sake of anyone's theroy of whether life was there or not.
Strangely enough, the results came back and Levin's was positive by every standard established before the mission left earth. The second test was negative. The third test (which was supposed to be a "tiebreaker") was inconclusive.
The result? NASA changed the standard for Levin's test, declared that it was inconclusive, and that therefore there was no life on Mars.
It was purely coincidental that many involved in that decision were geologists who felt slighted that their experiments were not flown -- they thought that if there were no life on Mars, they would be able to get all the experiment space on future missions because people would stop sending biological experiments.
Of course, that was wrong -- we stopped sending ALL experiments because nobody cares on a gut level about geology, we care about life.
But the greatest crime is that they lied about the results -- it was 100% POSITIVE for life based on the criterea set before the missions were launched.
But NASA really doesn't like us to talk about this stuff -- that we found good, strong evidence of some biological activity taking place and walked away.
Re:Not as crackpot as it sounds
by
Rocketboy
·
· Score: 3
Acting under the orders of the Trilateral Commission, a young student, William Gates, was induced to modify computer programming at a major NASA research facility in the mid 1970's. The software modification inserted bogus indications of the presence of hydrogen peroxide in Martian soil samples analyzed by Viking experiments with the express purpose of providing a plausable alternative to other experiments' positive indications of Martian microbial life.
The Commission desired that the terrestrial public (in particular, the voting population of the United States) believe that no life existed on Mars in order that the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would be financially strangled of public funding and thus not possess the exploration resources it would have received had the general population known of the existance of life on Mars. Had NASA pursued an aggressive Martian exploration program in the mid- to late 1980's it would almost certainly have discovered the secret Trilateral Commission base located inside the caldera of Olympus Mons, which at that time was responsible for the exploitation of the indigenous Martian population in its notorious gold mines. Gold mined from copious Martian resources has been secretly exported back to Earth for the past two decades and the Commission now has all of that valuable metal that it needs for its nefarious plan to destabilize world currency markets, bring on global economic chaos, and eventually end up owning the entire planet outright, which it intends to sell to Vogon civil engineers.
For the record, as payment for his programming exploit, Mr. Gates was rewarded with detailed knowledge of alien computer technology gleaned from a crashed UFO (see: "Area 51"). Mr. Gate's reward was not, however, as generous as it seemed as the technology he was given was used to create the famous "Windows" line of products which by themselves, due to their instability and unreliability, threaten to demolish industry and bring on global economic chaos.
More on the new experiment
by
snookums
·
· Score: 4
I'm going to go out on a limb here and take a guess at the nature of the new experiment being proposed.
If you read the description of Gil Levin's other work, you will see that he is the man responsible for discovering a magic indigestible sugar (tagatose). This sugar is indigestible because it is the mirror image of normal sugar (or certain interesting parts of it are). The enzymes that digest sugar are asymmetric and won't fit together with the tagatose properly. This asymmetry is a fundamental property of life.
If the agent in the soil which produces the carbon-dioxide reacts with one nutrient, but not it's mirror-image, then the agent must be asymmetric. There is no known natrual, non-biological process on Earth that can produce an asymmetric molecule.
If this experiment provides a positive result, it will not prove the existence of life, but it is a very strong indicator. Even if there is no life, the discovery of a naturally-occuring, non-biological process for producing these molecules will have a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
I've seen people do ASCII carbon stick figures of sugars on/. -- but I'm not that ambitious, so do a search. Basically, you can think of a sugar as being a chain of carbons with a H sticking off one side of each carbon and a OH sticking off the other (HOH = water, hence "carbohydrates")
Take the carbon chain and bend it into a ring (you may have one carbon sticking out, and voila! you have a sugar. The different sugars differ *only* in
a) the number of carbons (typically 3-7, but longer would also count)
b) the exact way the end carbons are bound (this is where the stick figure helps)
c) if the OH's are above or below the ring (as biochemists like to say - up-down-up is different then down-up-down or up-up-up)
d) some common sugars (like sucrose = table sugar= alpha-glucosido-beta-D-fructofuranoside) are actually multiple simple sugars tacked together. In the case of table suger, it's a glucose ("blood sugar" aka dextrose) molecule bound to a fructose ("fruit sugar")
That may demystify the 'assymetry' we're talking about.
Secondly, there are most definitely physicochemical non-biological processes that produce assymetric molecules. Your argument goes way back , but it's pretty old and faded today. Indeed, they are widely used in industry, especially the pharmaceutical industry (to make only one 'handedness', which are more effective with fewer side effects) While originally biological byproducts were used to create that handedness, today we can do it from scratch.
How could nature produce such compounds? Here's a simple scenario: many chiral compunds prefer to form crystals with their "own kind" (i.e. a recemic mixture carefullt crystalized, will produce D (right handed) and L (left handed) crystals. So somewhere, some time, primeval goo could slowly have crystalized into D and L crystals in some drying puddle.
Once you have a naturally made D or L crystal, the rest of molecular evolution to 'organic biology' can proceed as we expect. Perhaps there is an advantage to D or L, or maybe it's just that an organism that belongs to the (accidental) majority simply finds more appropriately-oriented "food" or "prey" that it can more easily process. It doesn't really matter which -- though there are some interesting arguments that there are advantages to the overall biosphere to settle on (for example) L-amino acids and D-sugars rather than a random mix of both.
There is life on Mars, and I've got proof
by
Flounder
·
· Score: 4
They spoke in front of the Supreme Court today.
--
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Another interesting Viking mission note
by
ethereal
·
· Score: 5
According to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when the three tests that were sent to Mars were also tested in Antarctica (a much more hospitable environment than Mars), one of the tests that indicated there was no life on Mars, also indicated there was no life in Antarctica! Coupled with Levin's positive results, the prospects for native life on Mars may be much better than expected.
They need to do a recount! By hand this time and not a mechanical probe hand either!:)
It is very obvious that we should have lawyers on Mars so for this sort of thing... Who needs scientists when lawyers can make decisons for us!
I agree 100% which is why I call for the next Mars probe to be outfitted with a Lawyer Landing System (LLS). This is very similar to the system used to successfully allow the Mars Prospector to land, except replacing the airbag with lawyers. Since Lawyers are 99% hot air, and a naturally produced product of California and New York, we should be able to condense them into a small enough space by placing them into sensory deprevation tanks. Once they near the point of deployment, a micro-cassette of the closing arguments in the Gore vs. Bush campaign can be played, there-by causing the lawyers to emit hot air and inflate, protecting the payload from harm during the inevitable rough landing. Those lawyers that survive the landing will then be on hand to arrange themselves to properly argue the case of whether or not there is life on Mars (while those of us back on Earth will be assured that even if there is life, there is certainly no intelligent life).
-- This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Re:A fictional author isn't a good center
by
ethereal
·
· Score: 3
Not sure if this is a troll or not, but:
Carl Sagan was not a fictional persona, and generally did not write works of fiction. Cosmos was not a work of fiction.
Mars hasn't really been scanned very much - we've sent a few fairly stupid robots which have explored less territory than the state of Rhode Island. Sure, there's the Mars Global Surveyor, but although that covers a lot of territory, it's not exactly a close inspection of the places where life forms would hide - underground, or just under the surface of large rocks are likely spots. We're not going to see bacteria (or anything up to the size of a small mammal) from a satellite.
If you did find cells capable of burning dextrose and not sinstrose on mars, you had positive proof of having found earth bacteria.
How likely would it be that an organism that originated and evolved on mars would use a molecule that is the product of living organisms that originated and evolved on earth as a substrate,
and
use oxygen to burn this molecule (which on earth is the product of organisms that originated and evolved on earth, and is very rare in the martian atmosphere),
and
evolved the same preference for a certain stereo isomer? Organisms like that would be extremely ill-adapted to conditions on mars, yet very adapted to life on earth.
If you found organisms like that on mars, you have found proof that bacteria from earth contaminated your experiment.
The Washington Post left out a key element of Levin's experiment and why he wants to do it again. The Viking landers used dextrose, the stuff we and most other lifeforms consume, as bait for possible Mars beasties. He wants to rerun it with dextrose in one chamber and sinstrose in the other. If one and not the other is consumed it's a strong indicator of life since the chemistry of life (as we know it) prefers organics with a specific orientation. If both are consumed, then it indicates weird chemistry, probably inorganic.
Re:No support?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
ok, he apparently has no supporters other than himself. Peer review seems to say that he is wrong
No, he has supporters throughout the astrobiology and mars programs at NASA -- just not among the administrators and other factions. There really is no science that says he's wrong, he's just written off as being a nut because his experiments all tested positive and NASA changed the criteria AFTER the results were recieved.
I suppose that might be plausible, if NASA scientists were a bunch of religionists
you don't work in research, I'm guessing -- we fight all the time, over funding, pet theories, etc. There are different cliques and fiefdoms all over NASA, each fighting for shrinking budgets and small payload space. There is a several year wait for flight experiments even once accepted -- many scientists would kill their mother to remove another experiment in favor of their own (because their funding might very well dry up before it ever flies!).
Eventually NASA accepted Levin's idea for a biology test. But before he could participate, NASA officials told him, he had to get better credentials. He lacked a PhD.
Apparently at NASA, being smart means having a piece of paper. Either that or they are concerned about some sort of image they wish to portray. I understand that people without those credentials have a harder time, but their ideas should not be discounted because of their schooling.
This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post today about an experiment on the Viking mission to Mars apparently found life on Mars - or not."
Apparently there are a number of uncounted results that have yet to be tabulated. The machine outputted the data from Viking onto punchcards, and the debate is about the status of those cards that were not entirely punched (ie. contained "hanging chad"). "I wish they would either decide that Mars contains life or not" one pedestrian comentated, "I just want to get back to my normal life and this question has been hanging over our heads for far too long already!"
-- This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Hollywood to the contrary, sending humans to Mars and bringing them back (!) would be an incredibly difficult feat. I wouldn't count on it in the next century. There are serious health problems involved (long-term zero-g, radiation, and psychological effects) which are not likely to be solved any time soon. The amount of mass involved and the sizes of the delta-vees is just incredible.
Moreover, there isn't any good reason to do it. Sending humans into space has never yielded any scientific results that were proportionate to the costs. The Apollo program was purely a cold-war porkbarrel project. Don't get me wrong, those guys were my boyhood heroes, but the program was not justifiable scientifically.
The right thing to do is a sample return mission. A hundred grams of dirt back in a lab on earth would answer the whole question definitively, and it could probably be done within 20 years with moderate funding.
"hack of your testicles and carve out your ovaries"
I don't know about you my friend, but the vast majority of the population typically has a set of one or the other... or are you one a them unisex Martians?!
god nasa really piss me off sometimes. first they take all my tax dollars and give them to some longhair running a screen saver so that they can scan for alien signals. now they are looking for life on mars, well maybe they got confused!! see james cameron wrote titanic, that was a movie about a big boat that crashed and it was based on a true story. now this red planet movie is out and apparently nasa thinks THAT ONE is true too, well if they don't know the difference between a foot and a meter that is not surprising, what a bunch of dopes.
well i've got an idea nasa!! instead of giving my money to the martians how about giving it back to me!! now we are in the middle of WINTER, i (george) would like a snowblower because it takes my wife too goddam long to shovel the driveway in the morning, if she had a machine to do it i could get to work alot earlier. so here is the deal nasa, give me the money, i'll buy a snow blower and then i will be more productive at work and then microsoft will make more money and then paul allen will be able to buy another radio telescope and also the seattle super sonics.
now do you got that!!
-- -gbd
Pretty ingenious - not definitive
by
eXtro
·
· Score: 3
Levin's method is pretty ingeneous: determine whether anything is 'breathing' by giving it radio-active carbon dioxide to exhale.
NASA's answer, while possibly worded too strictly, was correct though. Levin's test gives circumstantial evidence that would support the possibility of life. There are other mechanisms (such as those provided by NASA) which can be used to explain it. All by itself this experiment can't be used as proof of life on mars.
It would take a number of different tests, enough tests so that explaining the results without invoking the saying "it's alive" would require an impossibly narrow set of conditions to reproduce the results otherwise.
So this is how we treat life?
by
BradleyUffner
·
· Score: 3
The articale states that the sail was "baked" after the first test to kill off anything that may have bene producing the gas. So we went up there looking for life, and then tried to kill it... No wonder the aliens don't want to talk to us:)
Slashdot Mirror
"What Leonardo? A flying machine with blades that spin? You're an obsessed guy who should be concentrating on the problems we have today! Not on some crazy pipe dream!"
=-=-=-=-=
"Do you hear the Slashdotters sing,
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
What is interesting about this is that before the probes were sent to Mars, they realized the importance of the experiments for life. So the NASA scientists in charge of experiments made a very explicit protocol to anylize the results of the experiments by -- what exactly would be a positive or negative result, and what to do if the experiments were mixed in the results.
This was done so that the results could be viewed objectively based on the science and not reinterpreted for the sake of anyone's theroy of whether life was there or not.
Strangely enough, the results came back and Levin's was positive by every standard established before the mission left earth. The second test was negative. The third test (which was supposed to be a "tiebreaker") was inconclusive.
The result? NASA changed the standard for Levin's test, declared that it was inconclusive, and that therefore there was no life on Mars.
It was purely coincidental that many involved in that decision were geologists who felt slighted that their experiments were not flown -- they thought that if there were no life on Mars, they would be able to get all the experiment space on future missions because people would stop sending biological experiments.
Of course, that was wrong -- we stopped sending ALL experiments because nobody cares on a gut level about geology, we care about life.
But the greatest crime is that they lied about the results -- it was 100% POSITIVE for life based on the criterea set before the missions were launched.
But NASA really doesn't like us to talk about this stuff -- that we found good, strong evidence of some biological activity taking place and walked away.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and take a guess at the nature of the new experiment being proposed.
If you read the description of Gil Levin's other work, you will see that he is the man responsible for discovering a magic indigestible sugar (tagatose). This sugar is indigestible because it is the mirror image of normal sugar (or certain interesting parts of it are). The enzymes that digest sugar are asymmetric and won't fit together with the tagatose properly. This asymmetry is a fundamental property of life.
If the agent in the soil which produces the carbon-dioxide reacts with one nutrient, but not it's mirror-image, then the agent must be asymmetric. There is no known natrual, non-biological process on Earth that can produce an asymmetric molecule.
If this experiment provides a positive result, it will not prove the existence of life, but it is a very strong indicator. Even if there is no life, the discovery of a naturally-occuring, non-biological process for producing these molecules will have a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
They spoke in front of the Supreme Court today.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
According to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when the three tests that were sent to Mars were also tested in Antarctica (a much more hospitable environment than Mars), one of the tests that indicated there was no life on Mars, also indicated there was no life in Antarctica! Coupled with Levin's positive results, the prospects for native life on Mars may be much better than expected.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
They need to do a recount! By hand this time and not a mechanical probe hand either! :)
It is very obvious that we should have lawyers on Mars so for this sort of thing... Who needs scientists when lawyers can make decisons for us!
I agree 100% which is why I call for the next Mars probe to be outfitted with a Lawyer Landing System (LLS). This is very similar to the system used to successfully allow the Mars Prospector to land, except replacing the airbag with lawyers. Since Lawyers are 99% hot air, and a naturally produced product of California and New York, we should be able to condense them into a small enough space by placing them into sensory deprevation tanks. Once they near the point of deployment, a micro-cassette of the closing arguments in the Gore vs. Bush campaign can be played, there-by causing the lawyers to emit hot air and inflate, protecting the payload from harm during the inevitable rough landing. Those lawyers that survive the landing will then be on hand to arrange themselves to properly argue the case of whether or not there is life on Mars (while those of us back on Earth will be assured that even if there is life, there is certainly no intelligent life).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Not sure if this is a troll or not, but:
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The alchohol has killed off the intelligent aliens.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
How likely would it be that an organism that originated and evolved on mars would use a molecule that is the product of living organisms that originated and evolved on earth as a substrate,
- and
use oxygen to burn this molecule (which on earth is the product of organisms that originated and evolved on earth, and is very rare in the martian atmosphere),- and
evolved the same preference for a certain stereo isomer? Organisms like that would be extremely ill-adapted to conditions on mars, yet very adapted to life on earth.If you found organisms like that on mars, you have found proof that bacteria from earth contaminated your experiment.
The Washington Post left out a key element of Levin's experiment and why he wants to do it again. The Viking landers used dextrose, the stuff we and most other lifeforms consume, as bait for possible Mars beasties. He wants to rerun it with dextrose in one chamber and sinstrose in the other. If one and not the other is consumed it's a strong indicator of life since the chemistry of life (as we know it) prefers organics with a specific orientation. If both are consumed, then it indicates weird chemistry, probably inorganic.
ok, he apparently has no supporters other than himself. Peer review seems to say that he is wrong
No, he has supporters throughout the astrobiology and mars programs at NASA -- just not among the administrators and other factions. There really is no science that says he's wrong, he's just written off as being a nut because his experiments all tested positive and NASA changed the criteria AFTER the results were recieved.
I suppose that might be plausible, if NASA scientists were a bunch of religionists
you don't work in research, I'm guessing -- we fight all the time, over funding, pet theories, etc. There are different cliques and fiefdoms all over NASA, each fighting for shrinking budgets and small payload space. There is a several year wait for flight experiments even once accepted -- many scientists would kill their mother to remove another experiment in favor of their own (because their funding might very well dry up before it ever flies!).
From the article:
Eventually NASA accepted Levin's idea for a biology test. But before he could participate, NASA officials told him, he had to get better credentials. He lacked a PhD.
Apparently at NASA, being smart means having a piece of paper. Either that or they are concerned about some sort of image they wish to portray. I understand that people without those credentials have a harder time, but their ideas should not be discounted because of their schooling.
-Frijoles-
This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post today about an experiment on the Viking mission to Mars apparently found life on Mars - or not."
Apparently there are a number of uncounted results that have yet to be tabulated. The machine outputted the data from Viking onto punchcards, and the debate is about the status of those cards that were not entirely punched (ie. contained "hanging chad"). "I wish they would either decide that Mars contains life or not" one pedestrian comentated, "I just want to get back to my normal life and this question has been hanging over our heads for far too long already!"
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Moreover, there isn't any good reason to do it. Sending humans into space has never yielded any scientific results that were proportionate to the costs. The Apollo program was purely a cold-war porkbarrel project. Don't get me wrong, those guys were my boyhood heroes, but the program was not justifiable scientifically.
The right thing to do is a sample return mission. A hundred grams of dirt back in a lab on earth would answer the whole question definitively, and it could probably be done within 20 years with moderate funding.
--
Find free books.
I don't know about you my friend, but the vast majority of the population typically has a set of one or the other... or are you one a them unisex Martians?!
I ate my sig.
hi all (george here)
god nasa really piss me off sometimes. first they take all my tax dollars and give them to some longhair running a screen saver so that they can scan for alien signals. now they are looking for life on mars, well maybe they got confused!! see james cameron wrote titanic, that was a movie about a big boat that crashed and it was based on a true story. now this red planet movie is out and apparently nasa thinks THAT ONE is true too, well if they don't know the difference between a foot and a meter that is not surprising, what a bunch of dopes.
well i've got an idea nasa!! instead of giving my money to the martians how about giving it back to me!! now we are in the middle of WINTER, i (george) would like a snowblower because it takes my wife too goddam long to shovel the driveway in the morning, if she had a machine to do it i could get to work alot earlier. so here is the deal nasa, give me the money, i'll buy a snow blower and then i will be more productive at work and then microsoft will make more money and then paul allen will be able to buy another radio telescope and also the seattle super sonics.
now do you got that!!
-gbd
NASA's answer, while possibly worded too strictly, was correct though. Levin's test gives circumstantial evidence that would support the possibility of life. There are other mechanisms (such as those provided by NASA) which can be used to explain it. All by itself this experiment can't be used as proof of life on mars.
It would take a number of different tests, enough tests so that explaining the results without invoking the saying "it's alive" would require an impossibly narrow set of conditions to reproduce the results otherwise.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
The articale states that the sail was "baked" after the first test to kill off anything that may have bene producing the gas. So we went up there looking for life, and then tried to kill it... No wonder the aliens don't want to talk to us :)