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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."
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.
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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
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.
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!
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
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?
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.
On Soviet Mars...
Ha! The -red- planet! Ha!
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
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
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.
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.
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]
Yep, its a dupe!
I quickly found this by doing this.
Next time, please search before you post.
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.
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".
maybe not, but I know there is life on Myanus. Oh wait... Shoot, I can never tell a joke right.
"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. "
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."
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
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.
Incidently, overcrowding is not an issue of space, it's an issue of logistics and economics. There are still HUGE areas on the planet (read: 80% of North America) that are both inhabitable and essentially empty. But it's not easy or cheap to put people there, so until it make economic sense (i.e., there is a demand) why bother?
Gets kinda sad, when you think about the fact that the US could supply enough food to stop all starvation in the world (California could feed all of the US), but there's no money in it...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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.
Two problems with your argument.
First, evacuation to Mars is not practical, period. Figure out how much ten billion people weigh. Now figure out the amortized travel cost per kilogram for an earth/mars transport, bearing in mind that infrastructure is not free. Put these two numbers together, and you see why evacuation scenarios are laughed at.
Second, if the population of the earth keeps growing (as you seem to be assuming), colonizing Mars won't help. The doubling time is under a century, so you'll face exactly the same problem very soon.
The only stable scenario is one in which the population no longer grows. This seems to be happening on its own in the first world.
We are deducing the possivbility of life from the farts of martians, right? Whatever works, i guess.
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...
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.
On Soviet Mars... ...life searches out *you*.
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
Quite frankly, religion (at least, religions based on the Hebrew scriptures) will not crumble even if life is discovered on other planets. Read Genesis 1:1-2 - "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void." There's a brief mention of the universe, and the focus immediately shifts to the earth. The universe at large is never mentioned again except to point out that God created it and that it will come to an end. Everything else that is mentioned is focused on the earth, the people on it, and the relationship of God to them. Is there life on other planets? Who knows? It doesn't say either way.
Let me propose the analogy of the elementary arithmetic textbook. It describes some properties of the real number system and describes how to calculate with it. Does it describe all the properties of the real number system? Does it detail other mathematical structures that have the same properties? Does it detail how to derive those properties from Peano's postulates, or how to use those properties to prove the consistency of all higher mathematics? No. There mathematical truth outside the elementary arithmetic text, but that does not invalidate the truth in the textbook. The focus for the elementary student is learning arithmetic; the other stuff makes a lot more sense when arithmetic is mastered.
Science is not antithetical to religion; it is merely irrelevant to it. Science is the study of the world you can see, touch, hear, and otherwise measure. It will be gone (from your perspective) when you die. God and the essence of you, on the other hand, are presumed by religion to last forever. So, what is the point in studying a system that will be obsolete in 100 years when you could be studying one that will be useful for eons?
Might Mars Contain Life?
And it might contain lots of red sterile rocks. Either way the excitement will be just too much for many.