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Might Mars Contain Life?
stagmeister writes "According to the BBC, the Viking probes to Mars in the 1970s "detected strange signs of activity in the Martian soil - akin to microbes giving off gas," and that while those findings were not acknowledged as proof of life then, "in 1997, reached the conclusion ... that the so-called LR (labelled release) work had detected life." At the same time, the British are launching a probe to try to find life on Mars."
Of course it does I've seen them
Oh, wait...they're hoping to Succeed...silly me.
Folks sitting around giving off gas tend to give me less hope of finding intelligent life.
Then again, I hail from Tennessee, so I see a lot of this sort of thing. Bring on the Martian trailerparks!
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
Well, I suppose if there is life on Mars, the likelyhood of more advanced life elsewhere in the universe is greater. That would certainly make me feel more comfortable as this universe is an awfully big place and to think we were all alone would be......scary.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
We send multi-billion dollar probes to Mars to discover microbes farting.
This has been batted around for several years now. It's an interesting controversy, since the scientific community studying Mars life has seen a lot of turnover since then. We're going to have to wait for the new data.
Helium balloons want to be free.
after lying around in the sun too long..
oh you mean the planet.. never mind
Everybody knows that Men are from Mars.... Women are also from Venus. Proof here, here, and here
So let me read this again:
Dr Levin, one of three scientists on the life detection experiments, has never given up on the idea that Viking did find living micro-organisms in the surface soil of Mars.
Beagle is looking for life He continued to experiment and study all new evidence from Mars and Earth, and, in 1997, reached the conclusion and published that the so-called LR (labelled release) work had detected life.
He says new evidence is emerging that could settle the debate, once and for all.
A crazy guy has been ranting for almost 30 years about his own personal theories and only now, shortly before we go back to mars, does the "new evidence" emerge? Please. Maybe the beeb should wait until they get hard evidence before printing paranoiac fantasies like this one.
"If we're the only life in the universe, it's an awefully big waste of space..."
New standard for life, microbial farting! Bonus points if it reeks like hell, extra bonus points if the gas is combustible! Cookie for CBN if the microbial farts smell worse then his!
Hate me!
A probe 30 years ago almost found life, and in December, another one is going to try again. I guess it was either this or another $COX or spam story. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
In one of Carl Sagan's books (I forget which one) he talks about these findings - he helped design the test. Although seemingly compelling, even he himself concluded that the results were incorrect (I just can't recall why). I wish I was at home so I could check Cosmos and Billions and Billions, I know that it is one of those books. Anyone have these books handy?
.......and its been known that they don't like us poking around their planet, damn, last time that Marvin guy was trying to get us with "an earth shattering KABOOM!"
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
- Launch probe
- ?????
- Profit!
On Soviet Mars, life finds you!Just think what a beowulf cluster of probes would find...
There better not be any life on Mars because I have a contract with God that states I am the sole reseller of life. If someone else is releasing life on Mars then there is obviously some patent violation or something similar that is happening and I demand one billion dollars.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/0 8/1351200&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160
/. contain dups?
Might
Someone had to carve that giant face !
Seriously, though... no, I got nothing. I'm a hack.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Until we have enough solid data to say positively "Yes, there is a form of life on Mars, and here it is," *points* we won't really know.
As it stands right now, both sides can use the very same data and say either "There is!" or "There isn't!"
That's how firm and solid the information is so far.
I'll wait until we have something reliable and reproducible to go on, OK?
(Personally I think there IS and hope there is.)
--
Tomas
and they're also working on proving that wormholes can be created and that apes "naturally" turned into humans.
Nice to see the BBC article invoking Carl Sagan by repeating his famed aphorism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
No disrespect to Sagan, but does nobody see the glaring error in that statement?
Extraordinary claims require the same amount of proof that absolutely mundane claims require! If some claims required more proof, science wouldn't be very scientific, would it? Who knows how much truth has been cast aside because the evidence just wasn't extraordinary enough?
This has got to be the single worst headline I've ever read, ever. The alliteration is just annoying, and since when do planets "contain" anything?
Jesus, guys. English isn't that hard, you know? "Is there life on Mars?" That's your headline, right there. This "might Mars contain" shit has to go.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Slashdot's dead already. This is just random twitching.
I would have to agree, this is the tough part. The evidence is 20 years old from Viking, and its still being debated. Remember the martian rocks that "contained signs of life"? Me either.
. We're not even sure what to look for ... at least we're pretty damn sure what water looks like at this point ... these missions are expensive, I wouldn't waste a mission on something unlikely to succeed anyway.
If we can find life somewhere else out there it's going to be fascinating.
For example, is the life DNA based? All life on earth is DNA based, and if the life elsewhere isn't then we are going to learn a lot by studying it - it will be an using an entirely different mechanism to do essentially the same thing as DNA. How does it work? How did it evolve?
And if it *IS* DNA based then we need to find out if DNA is the logical conclusion of evolutionary biology... ie, I can imagine that intelligent life elsewhere have designed the same things we have (think "the wheel") because there are only so many ways you can do something. Therefore, is DNA (or something very similar) the only mechanism life can use to sustain itself? Or did the DNA originate from the same place as DNA on the earth? And if so, how?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Eck Eck
..jumps up and down..
Nanu Nanu
No.
Only three have succeeded so far: the two Viking probes in the 1970s and Mars Pathfinder in 1997.
What are the chances those probes contaminated Mars with terrestrian microorganisms? Since the 1970's it was discovered life is more resilient than it was thought, with bacteria not only surviving, but thiriving, in mediums considered to be sterile - like in thermal water springs or nuclear reactor cores.
The meaning of "sterile" has changed a lot - see what measures NASA is preparing to take now for a (still theoretical) mission to Europa (Jupiter's satellite, for the challenged).
if you use a good enough junk-filter, slashdot.org will display a single, *blank*, page
... There's a /. post about life on Mars. Really people, is it so hard to talk about something new? Maybe there should be a new catagory for 'life on Mars' articles? Taco or whoever could draw a new logo. Hey, we could all play reporter! Just make something up! It would be a lot more interesting.
Who cares, I want to know two things, is there intelligent life in SCO?
And is there intelligent life on Slashdot?
Ok, three things, is there life after Slashdot?
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Education doesn't make you intelligent, just... educated.
Apollogies to the source...
Also launching this month is the "2003 Mars Exploration Rover Mission" It includes two rovers that can treck signigantly further then the previous rover sent. Check it on their web site: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/
:-)
Both of these missions land later this year / January. They'll be providing more information about Mars over the following year then have gathered in total over the past 50. That is assuming they work.
that cool face isn't really too visible anymore. Either erosion has changed the look of the rock, or there were shadows when the picture was taken (and I forget which).
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
No, there will be an electrical fault and it will fry any life it finds. :)
[...] signs of activity in the Martian soil - akin to microbes giving off gas
Let the Taco Bell jokes begin!
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
ok some 'fart' jokes were inevitable, but we don't need any more.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Any word yet on whether or not they'll have representatives aboard the probe to setup an appropriate IP embargo and become the sole distribution channel of Earth's music and movies to a whole new captive audience?
Hint: I know it's an unmanned probe - it's a joke...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
My article A Closer Look at the Summer of '76 written in July of 2001 Begins:
I remember the summer of 1976 well.
Not because our big cartoon-broadcasting neighbor to the south had just turned 200 years old. Not because the Olympics were in Canada, nor because Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history - causing one of the most famous computer crashes in history. Not even because Disco Duck was Top 40.
I remember the summer of 1976 vividly because Viking 1 touched down on the flat plains of Chryse Planitia on Mars, and shortly thereafter discovered the first scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life - a very big event for a nine year old spacegeek like me. Curiously though, not long after NASA announced discovering life on Mars, they retracted their statement and said what they detected was not life, but rather an unusual chemical reaction.
Well maybe there wasn't life on Mars before, maybe there was, but we can be pretty sure that there is life there now, with all the probes we have sent, who's to say that we have not planted microbes there from our previous visits? If this were so, then that means colonizing Mars has a greater chance of success, forget trying to find other life, lets send life there and see if it can survive.
Boy, the way it happened in close encounters was so much more exciting: bright lights, music, Richard Dreyfus making mashed potato sculptures. Instead, we detect farts. Nice.
[FromTheMorning]
...would someone please just include a microscope and look? Even if Mars is dead, the information would be of some value.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
i believe in strong antropological principle: the universe is such that intelligent life must exist over a cosimic time scale.
how does nature guarantees it? few mad men can easily destroy intelligent life on earth. theoretically, even nearby stellar systems are not safe, since we can always send virii there. the only way for nature to ensure that intelligent life can exist over cosmic time, is to distribute life over cosmic distances. these means that intelligent life exists throughout the universe. further, to ensure success, the nature must have tried to create life wherever possible. thus, "if life can exist, then most likely it does exist or existed" is the final outcome of this principle.
so if mars environment does allow life to exist and flourish, then perhaps, life still exists there or atleast existed earlier.
http://www.biospherics.com/mars/
Yep, its a dupe!
I quickly found this by doing this.
Next time, please search before you post.
Hey now, I've seen "Capricorn I". The only things that the viking probes contaminated were the Holywood backlots where the landings were staged.
(I've seen "Wag the Dog" too, and thus question the convention wisdom that Albania exists)
If one of these martians comes to earth, would he start a religion and make love to everybody? I am begining to grok the situation.
Why do some humans find it so hard to grasp that life more than likely exists elsewhere and likely close than we think?
My mother-in-law is that kind of person, she said one night that we are the only living planet in the universe, I had to point out how would she explain the sheer diversity of life on this planet alone? Whereever life can survive it seems to do so.
The more we look, the more we find, we've looked deep underground and found life, we've looked at cold arctic areas and found life, we have found life floating high in the atmosphere.
So, life on Mars? You bet some microbes are doing just fine there, and who knows what else.
Let's also not forget that life existed LONG before humanity ever came into being, of course some people refuse to accept that fact too.
"I fart in your general direction!"
Isn't this the scientist that claimed the results showed a kind of errrr... internal clock behaviour? 's been too long since i read about it, but it went something like this: the outcome of the experiments showing fluctuations, possibly pointing to organisms that exhibit some signs of a diurnal rhythm, even sealed off from the exterior conditions. It looked promising, but i never heard about it since. So, is this the same guy, and if not, what happened with that avenue of thinking?
No sig? Sigh...
You know, believe there's life on Mars or not, we're not going be able to study enough until we learn to have a base farther out there.
I think the idea of finding water/fuel for such an endeavor would benefit more than sending a lot of probes for speculation.
From my understanding of the "signs of life" found by the Viking probes, they didn't find anything even remotely alive.
They found nothing more than solid peroxides (which tend to evolve oxygen when exposed to water), along with some unusual (but entirely explicable) iron-catalyzed reactions (remember why we call it the "red" planet).
Now, that doesn't disprove the presence of life, particularly a few meters below the surface. It does, however, present a VERY hostile surface environment (even ignoring the temperature and lack of an active planetary magnetic field) to life as we know it on Earth.
Hey, I'd like to find life there as much as the next guy... But it takes quite a leap of faith to interpret the Vikings' readings as "life". And science does not (or at least, should not) include any aspect of "faith".
it would seem amazingly lucky that Mars happened to have life on it, and if that was the case would probably mean there is a lot more "life" out there.
Funny?.
Hmmm...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
but something tells me that Martian microbes just may be a higher form of intelligent life than the earthbound microbes we commonly refer to as homo sapiens....
....
at least i can dream, anyway
maybe not, but I know there is life on Myanus. Oh wait... Shoot, I can never tell a joke right.
Carl Sagan : "Why no, officer, that's not pot"!
Giving out gas? Does that happen if you eat red dust?
...
Pretty nasty if you ask me
As another poster quoted, it's hard to do specific experiments when you don't know what to look for. So are we trying to find proof of life LIKE US, Intelligent life LIKE US or just beings on Mars?
What if Martian sands are just one of those beings, they can teleport, communicate and do many other amazing things that we don't know about, we'll conclude there's no life on Mars and Martian sands, like Earth sands, isn't a life.
"If Martian sands were some form of life, why can't we see them moving? Why are they there? and why aren't they doing anything?" we asked.
At the same time, these very Martian sands might be asking the same questions about life on Earth - "Is there life on Earth? Why can't we see them moving? We did smell some gases, so if there was life on Earth, why are they there? And why aren't they doing anything?"
Run OJ, Run!
"Life was created in the initial Big Bang, when crunchy particles of wheat collided with creamy milk to form the foundation for all else to come. It wasn't until man developed the technology to build spoons and bowls could we harness the true power of Life. "
They are including one.
It's about time, too.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
link to the evidence
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
long enough, some people will believe it.
Its true, I read it in the Bible...
Hmmm. Replication... intellectual property... replication... intellectual property...
Juristictional issues notwithstanding, how long do you think it'd be before the RIAA puts a stop to this?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It's possible, but (as someone else has already stated), most likely you wouldn't get the extreme-environment bugs, but rather normal florida bacteria...
If you're concerned that we might confuse 'our bugs' with martian ones, a simple DNA comparison is all it would take to establish where they came from.
What really interests me is if we find life that _is_ linked to ours, but from billions of years back... there is a theory that the cliched 'building blocks of life' may have been deposited from space; we know asteroids have amino acids... if the chemistry was more advanced, and both planets were populated with bugs from space... well, time to rewrite the biology books.
Plus, all those 'exobiologists' won't get laughed at anymore.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Mabey i am a dreamer but i think life is all over the universe. Mars is definetly the best place to look for it atm. Statistics alone tells us there is at least one other inhabited planet, moon, or asteroid. People should be a little more concerned about such things i believe at least for the future generations. Guess our government would rather see stealth bombers murdering people than a manned space flight to mars. Make space shuttles not war....
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."
Now if the British probe can find the Seal of Sir Francis Drake on Mars, then the U.K. owns the planet (the Seal in place before the U.N. treaty)... Oh well, they lost California to the Spanish squatters a few hundred years ago, but who cares? They wound up with Mars! And you all thought *Space 1889* was just a game...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Wouldn't it be more scientifically interesting to establish bacteria colonies on a space-borne time capsule of sorts, with just enough resources to enable them to mutate over a set number of generations and adapt to an increasingly harsh environment?
A "crazy guy"? "Paranoic fantasies"?
"Dr. Levin was the second scientist funded by NASA to build a life detection instrument for planetary missions to Mars. Dr. Levin has been a co-investigator for NASA's Mariner 9 misson to Mars in 1971; a Principal Investigator for the Viking Biology Team in 1976; a JPL Mox Team co-experimenter on the Russian Mars 96 mission to Mars."
Now, I'm not sure if your own credentials surpass DR. Levins, but seems only a "crazy, paranoid" person would label this man as such.
Not to mention, he's been attempting to show people his "hard evidence" for 30 years, dumbass! I can't believe you received 5 karma points for doing NOTHING more than calling this scientist "crazy" due to your inability to comprehend the fact that it may be true.
Very sad.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I don't. But in general, yeah, it is pretty damned annoying. Look at global warming research for a good example.
Of course, if you think it's bad in the "hard" sciences, don't even think about examining social sciences. There, "We can't evaluate that theory because it has to be wrong. It's not politically correct" is a perfectly valid reasoning.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Space popularists have been harping about life on Mars way way too much. It has reached a sort of cult-like status as the primary reason to go into space. While it might be interesting to know, the answer is really quite irrelevant.
Exploration is not about finding answers to pre-formulated questions. It is much more open ended than than, its about expanding horizons and finding new unexpected opportunities.
Another problem with the life-as-a-reason to explore mentality is that at some point the jig is gonna be up: there is very little chance of finding life on Mars and once the answer is concluded positively no, will the people turn away from space exploration?
Start transferring those Country Music 8-tracks to MP3s.
Got to be ready when the Martians land.
Why do some humans find it so hard to grasp that life more than likely does not exist elsewhere?
My mother-in-law is that kind of person, she said one night that we are only one of a gazillion living planets in the universe, I had to point out how would she explain the sheer absence of any radio signals or contact attempts.
The more we look, the more we find, we've looked deep underground and found life, we've looked at cold arctic areas and found life, we have found life floating high in the atmosphere. Of course
everything we've found is confined to this single planet. The odds of another rock having the exact right conditions to create and sustain life are just too big.
So, life on Mars? No way. These are just some whacked instruments registering blips.
Let's also not forget that all the life that existed LONG before humanity ever came into being has simply supported the evolution and existance of humanity. Of course some people refuse to accept that fact too.
NASA has declared that results for the search for life in my apartment are "inconclusive".
"You'd have to be some kind of fool to think we're all alone in this universe"
really, folks, isn't /. supposed to give bonuspoints to people who post thing that make you think a bit more critically?
I've seen this guy going from interesting to flamebait!!! why for Csake?
I, for one, admit havin read sagans statement several times, thinking 'whoa, cool one,' but the parent is right.
its just that extraordinary claims provoke a natural reaction: disbelief, and for the NON scientific crowd, it requires extr. proof.
Real scientist are supposed to be objective (i know, they too, are only human, so in a way Sagan WAS right, but still...
What will the religous establishments say IF they do find undeniable evidence of life (past or present) on Mars?
I can not wait to hear the spin put on that one.
Note: I am serious when I say it is the most interesting question. I really do want to hear how the world's religons grapple with this issue if/when it does arise.
they might as well look around for Saddam's WMD too.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. - Carl Sagan
I've heard that SARS is suspected to have come from a meteor that originated from Mars, or have passed through Mars's atmosphere.
"War of the Worlds" now has new meaning. Martians might very well kill off humanity - except the only martians are microbes.
I kinda suspect that there are a lot of people that don't believe in God will use this, and similarly related items, as "direct evidence" for evolution (to the degree of saying that there was no creation). (The simple principle of cause and effect kind of nullifies this, but people tend to dream up potential clauses that are about as likely as a jolt of electricity jumping from my computer and electrifying my coffee, creating a new super-virus. Potentially interesting science fiction, though.)
All said, I don't doubt that there is life on Mars, especially after so many positives. Whether the life there is original to Mars, or has floated through space from our outter atmosphere to Mars, (and then mutated) sometime during the history of time will be interesting to see.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
But what do you mean by "same"? It would be astounding if extraterrestrial life we descovered was fundamentally different than our own. What if it uses a different set of base pairs than our DNA? Or mirror-images of them. What if it's not based on DNA at all? A discovery like this would revolutionize the biological sciences, by demonstrating that there are other (and by probable extension, innumerable) chemical bases of life. It would also throw the "contamination" argument right out of the water.
Earth is next!
Jump on your Avenger and get ready to kick some alien butt! Oh yeah!
I can't believe this article doesn't mention Beagle II is part of the Mars Express mission. Beagle II is a piggyback probe ridding on the Mars Express orbiter which will be launched in a few days. While Beagle II will search for life on Mars, the orbiter will take pictures (different wavelenghts), gather atmospheric data, radar map the surface and relay Beagle II data back to Earth.
Take a look at the mission facts.
We are proud to present the results of our most recent analysis in which prove that the life
on Mars started around 1960 and is developping actively ever since. The Marsian microbes show
a striking similarities to microbes that
live at the airports and places like
Cape Canaveral or Bajkonur. We have noticed
that variety of Marsian microbes increases
in jumps - every new mission to Mars
show more variety!
We are not alone!
I read this and the first thought I had was "Is the probability of other life existing inversely proportional to the probability of us contacting this life given that it exists?" If so, no matter what the size of our universe, the probability of coming into contact with other life is a constant. Bayes' rule (sloppy notation) L: other life exists C: we contact it P(C|L) = ( P(L|C) P(C) ) / P(L) P(L|C)=1 since there definitely is life if we contacted it P(C|L) = P(C) / P(L) Now redefine the probabilities as function in terms of x, the size of our universe P(C|L)(x) = PC(x) / PL(x) Is PCL(x) a constant function? linear? is it monotonic? Thank you for allowing me to geek out for a minute.
With all the evidence we got so far i almost give the idea of life in mars as a fact, but I dont think thats exactly surprising. What I would like to find out its if there is conscientious beings somewhere else in the universe, the conscience is even more strange than life itself.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
What if it's not microbes, but microbe sized advanced sub-soil cross dimensional civilizations more advanced then our own?
If we probe them, will they retaliate?
Tin foil is falling!
...who else would have made that smiley to welcome us?
happy face
However, you cannot prove that life does not exist elsewhere, since to do so would mean a very thorough examination of every planet, asteroid, and other assorted bits scattered throughout the cosmos.
I can imagine trying to get the grant money for that.
Remember the time before planets around other suns was merely a theoretical possibility? Now we take this for granted. Religion did not crumble as a result. The same will be true for when (not if) we discover life elsewhere.
Religion will just expand to the new reality.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
(wrong post mode, sorry)
I read this and the first thought I had was "Is the probability of other life existing inversely proportional to the probability of us contacting this life given that it exists?" If so, no matter what the size of our universe, the probability of coming into contact with other life is a constant.
Bayes' rule
(sloppy notation)
L: other life exists
C: we contact it
P(C|L) = ( P(L|C) P(C) ) / P(L)
P(L|C)=1 since there definitely is life if we contacted it
P(C|L) = P(C) / P(L)
Now redefine the probabilities as function in terms of x, the size of our universe
PCL(x) = PC(x) / PL(x)
Is PCL(x) a constant function? linear? is it monotonic?
Thank you for allowing me to geek out for a minute.
It seems you've confused the unqualified presence of life with intelligence. Humans represent on the tiniest fraction of the planet's biomass. The overwhelming majority of Earth's inhabitants are incapable of emitting radio in any organized manner. While intelligence might not be as fecund as we would like, don't confuse those chances with the probability of there being an unpopulated universe altogether.
What really sux is that even if there is life somewhere in a galaxy far far away there isn't anything we can do to talk to them due to "c"
What for to keep th planet in its strile status? Contamenate it! Make a garden there!By the end of this centure, when Earth will be deadly overcrowded, you will deeply regret if you don't contamenate Mars now and thus don't prepare it for future colonists. You save either few billions of people from dying on earth or few billions of "native martian" bacteria from killing by contamentating terrastrian life forms. Which choice is yours?
Less is more !
So, when will they start probing Uranus?
(sorry, had a bit too much too drink tonight)
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When people suggest the universe is uninhabited and life is not all over the place. Reminds me of a Neanderthal that paddled out a mile or so into the Atlantic clutching a log, and came back and reported there was nothing out there but water. We know next to nothing, but I doubt that means nothing much is out there.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
CmdrTaco writes:
"Might Mars Contain Life?"
Might? Yes.
My
Limekiller
Who says we haven't encountered any contact attempts?
Any intelligent life form is statistically likely to be many millions of years more advanced than we are. Who can tell what forms of communication they are using, but it will almost certainly be lower energy/higher bandwidth than the radio signals we use.
A simple analogy would be two islands in the Pacific Ocean. On one island, the inhabitants communicate via cell phone. On the other island they communicate via smoke-signals. The elders on island 2 have decided that there must be intelligent beings on the remote islands they can see, so they start to try and communicate. For many years they send smoke signals high into the sky, and for many years, no response comes. Eventually, the islanders decide that no intelligent life must exist elsewhere and give up.
Of course, the problem with this is by the time the islanders on island 2 have developed cell phones, the people on island 1 are using something even more advanced.
a particle of pre-animate matter caught in the matrix.
True. But suppose the Big Bang theory is correct. Then even if there are millions of planets capable of supporting life, there's going to be one where it first appears. Maybe that just happens to be ours.
That works the other way. The cell-phone island would still see the smoke signals, and know there is life on the smoke-island. The smoke-island wouldnt have anything that can pick up low powered multi-megahertz EM radiation
Didn't Commander Keen already discover life on Mars? I remember running all over that place.
Billy Blaze, eight year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse has created an interstellar starship from old soup cans, rubber cement and plastic tubing. While his folks are out on the town and the babysitter has fallen asleep, Billy travels into his backyard workshop, dons his brother's football helmet, and transforms into... COMMANDER KEEN--defender of Earth! In his ship, the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket, Keen dispenses galactic justice with an iron hand!
Remember that meteorite thingy that NASA announced several years back which supposedly showed signs of life? If nothing else, it shows that it's not impossible to blast parts of one planet onto another nearby planet. So if we find life on Mars, how will we know that it wasn't Earth cross contamination from, oh say, a bad-day-for-T-Rex asteroid?
We are deducing the possivbility of life from the farts of martians, right? Whatever works, i guess.
Don't forget that, over the next month, NASA is launching two Mars Exploration Rovers, with one of the primary goals looking for evidence of life. Specifically, they hope to find evidence of liquid water sometime in Mars' past:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/science/
The Personal Rover Project
We should be looking for weapons of mass destruction. If there's any chance there are any on Mars we should invade it and liberate the Martians.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Look-
There is one thing that I see that is fundamentally wrong with missions to Mars. NO LIFE EXPERIMENTS. Both of Nasa's Mars Rovers, the Beagle 2 or anything coming down the pike for that matter do not have ANY experiments to directly detect life of any form.
Should life be the primary mission? No. But cripes, at least place Dr. Levin's LR experiment on board? Whats that big deal?
This argument has been raging for decades. It's time to put it to bed and friggin move on. If there is life, no doubt its microbial. We learn about it, document it and move on.
I don't know about anyone else, but there are only so many gamma x-ray spectrometer experiments that you can subject a Mars rock to. Lets quit spending Millions on these "Fluff" missions and get down to the meat and potatos.
FPS - Frag the weak, Hurdle the dead...
Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you dont'...
If some form of life is found then the genetic study of that life would be crucial to our understanding of life, atleast localy. There is the real possibility that life on Earth is geneticaly linked to something greater than Terran genesis.
Much of our common legends state exactly this possibility. Greek legends of Gods, Assyrian legends. These legends are so powerfull that they became religions.
In short discovering that life originated off world would be the greatest scientific discovery ever. Perhaps in some way we might have decended from Martians. Just maybe some of the Martians still boot around out in space living in bodies adapted to space, not Terran life.
The God legends and first hand reports of encounters are too pervasive and ongoing to ignore. What a kick in the balls for our sense of Human superiority if we find out we are not the most advanced form of life hanging around our solar system! Perhaps this and many other reasons is why advanced life would be reluctant to communicate directly with us anymore. We would take it the wrong way.
I personally do not run around with tin foil over my head to talk to aliens. However I cannot dismiss the posibility that they exist and just find things tricky as we advance, perhaps even dangerous. In the time of the Greeks we did not have nuclear tipped missiles to lob at them when they came into our atmosphere. Come to think of it the best the Greeks and Assyrians could do was chuck arrows, which they reportedly did.
So in conclusion until we become much less aggresive as a species I do not think contact with advanced life is possible. We need to go to Mars to find out if we are not the original intelligence in our solar system. It will take tremendous International cooperation go to Mars so it is a crucial step in our social evolution, as well as our technology.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
To get a better idea about life on Mars, we really need a robotic sample return mission. Such missions are planned for the near future. Having samples returned should make it much easier to settle the question of whether there is life on Mars.
With sample return mission, we can also afford to do things like look for DNA, RNA, and proteins. That would be impractical and too high risk to do with just a robotic lander, but it would be cheap and easy to perform those tests on returned samples.
That colonization link has a photo of "The Face" on Mars. When I looked at it this time, the feature to the lower right of it looked just like an extended hand giving a "thumbs up" sign. Coincidence? I think not!
The original experiments were designed to test for life under a few likely scenarios. Remember that they were not sure if the life processes they found there would be based on the same chemistry as on Earth, so they came up with some good guesses, and sent them up.
(For those who remember the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan, there is a section on this where he mentions the experiment designed by his friend Wolf Vishniac, which IIRC was not one that was included on the Mars jaunts, but did discover life in Antarctic valleys previously thought sterile.)
There were three experiments. It was agreed that the likelyhood of life was so low that a positive in any one would be treated as evidence of living processes. Two were positive, the other was negative. Despite the undertakings before the mission, the single negative was treated as the official and definitive answer to the question "is there life on Mars". The other two were explained away as 'merely chemical processes'. (Of course, so are things like respiration and digestion.)
Given the current state of evidence, the best we can say as to life on Mars is 'maybe', and we need more experiments -- experiments where the rules aren't changed halfway through because the data is unexpected would be nice!
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
"More like stuck his foot in the water and looked at the horizon" That may be more accurate!!!
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1) Do they have women?
2) How big are their breasts?
3) How many breasts do they have?
4) Has Captain Kirk slept with them yet?
(If so, check for STDs)
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Your better half lets you get away with keeping ecosystems going in the fridge???
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I, for one, welcome our alien new overlords.
Jimmy _______ | | | \__/
...you insensitive clod.
The dumpster truck delivering a nice shiny new
dumpster to stick our trash in. No idea that was our local hospital blowing up patients.
Nobody likes too many farts.
All the aliens moved to Roswell, NM.
The soils on Mars are heavily laden with superoxides which reacted in the biological test procedure used by the probe and gave off gasses. The team initially thought that the gasses were a product of microbes in the soil but figured out much later that the reaction was purely chemical.
Intelligent being from other planets would be bound by the same physics we are which means they have to use the same frequency transmissions that we do. The radio spectrum is only so big. We know all frequencies they would use. Not all frequencies have the capabilities to travel vast distances.
Assuming they have learned how to properly use radio frequencies and they fully understand their properties then any attempts to contact us would most certainly be on frequencies they KNOW would reach vast distances.
It is also entirely possible that the first messages received will not be designed for contact. We may well suddenly start hearing the transmission of some distant planet for decades before we receive the "we come in peace" message. Instead we may find ourselves watching or hearing their early broadcasts just as they will be receiving ours.
Can you realy prove that there is not life on mars? Planets are big!.How can you ever prove that there is not single living cell on mars. And galaxies are even biggier. There are so many planets that some of em propably carry even more stunning an wonderful things than life.
jk
Might Mars Contain Life?
And it might contain lots of red sterile rocks. Either way the excitement will be just too much for many.
...why dont they just Ask Jeeves?
What are you talking about?
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Who knows? Maybe that is god's plan. How can we mortals presume to think otherwise, when it's obvious that humanity was destined to evolve to this point. Why else were we provided with silicon, and the ability to use it?
Maybe I should start a religion base on this notion. Killing time on slasdot has got to be better than killing people on a battlefield. Besides, didn't Heinlein suggest that founding a religion was a good way to get rich?
Would you notice smoke siganls? It'd just look like a distant fire to me.
Intelligent being from other planets would be bound by the same physics
A civilization is bound by the physics it is aware of. Try explaining the concept of radio to a Roman messenger.
Certainly the universe was created. I mean, it's here, isn't it? Individuals may disagree about whether it was created by a natural process or some supernatural Creator, but can't we at least agree that it was created, period? So, no need to put "created" in quotes.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
To be fair, there are some new positive findings that emerged after Carl Sagan's death. In 2000 it was discovered that the data from the Labeled Release experiment exhibited circadian rhythms that could only be explained by the presence of living organisms.
If Sagan had lived to see this work, I think he'd look more kindly on the Labeled Release results.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Dique? Que significa esa?
Last year I visited the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was created. The creator of the Grand Canyon was a natural process, namely, erosion by the Colorado River.
When I say the Grand Canyon was created, there's no need to put "created" in quotes. Indeed, it would be stupid to do so.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
mi opiniÃne; gnome es realmente solamente un dique :^)
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