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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."
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.
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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.
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
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
It's in Cosmos, but it's about early life on earth. He forced a reaction between several gases and water with lightning, and it produced organic molecules. Interesting read.
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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.
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".
Havn't read those ( read Pale Blue Dot ) but if I recall the nay sayers to the results claimed preasure/temperature change or some such in test chamber caused a change in state from the matian soil. IE say you have alkaseltser sitting on top of a cube of ice... no gas change. You scoop up the ice and alkazeltzer into a chamber with a different temperature.. one which melts the water, the liquid water then begins to react with the alkaseltzer causing a gaseus change ( what the experiment was looking for ).
Can't recall off the top of my head if it was the preasure/temp or both that changed.. but the environment in the experiment was not that of mars surface which caused the problem.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
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?
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?
Guess our government would rather see stealth bombers murdering people than a manned space flight to mars. Make space shuttles not war....
Dont forget that much of our space technology came from things learned while planning/preparing/inventing for war.. as well as the other way around
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.
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.
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