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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.
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
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!
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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.
If I claim that I saw a mouse in your bedroom, you wouldn't require much evidence to believe me.
If I claim that I saw a fully-grown African elephant in your bedroom, you would require significantly more evidence before you would believe me.
If both claims would require the same amount of proof before they would be accepted, we would either be accepting virtually nothing or virtually everything.
The reason science works is that the proof is never 100% final.
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]
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.
If I claim that I saw a mouse in your bedroom, you wouldn't require much evidence to believe me.
I would simply want to see the mouse, or some physical evidence like mouse tracks or mouse droppings.
If I claim that I saw a fully-grown African elephant in your bedroom, you would require significantly more evidence before you would believe me.
Once again, I'd want to see the elephant, or some physical evidence like elephant tracks or elephant droppings. This seems like the same amount of proof to me.
Saying that some claims require an extraordinary amount of proof is just a convenient way for "skeptics" to avoid dealing with things they'd rather not believe.
OK, this is the challenge. You're a police officer, verifying the identities of people you pull over.
Offender #1 gives you an ID that says "John Smith". You believe him and give him his ticket.
Offender #2 gives you an ID that says "Yahweh, creater of the universe". You don't believe that could be correct.
Other than that, the ID's look the same. The difference there is that when you make a claim of a larger magnitude, you need more evidence to back it up.
Who knows how much truth has been cast aside because the evidence just wasn't extraordinary enough?
And who knows how much crap has been swallowed whole by people who don't have open minds? Remember, the definition of an open mind is a skeptic that can be persuaded by sufficient evidence. See also, burden of proof.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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".
There is no such thing as an 'extraordinary claim'.
Yes, there is.
Ordinary claim: I saw a light in the sky last night.
Extraordinary claim: I saw an alien spacecraft over my house last night. It was piloted by aliens from a planet in the galaxy we know as M33. It was constructed of elements from the trans-uranic island of stability and had a faster-than-light stardrive. Oh, and it used marshmallow Easter peeps for power.
No, the original poster is right. In order to maintain scientific integrity and consistency, you must be willing to accept the truth or falsity of two equivalent claims with equivalent amounts of evidence, even if one claim is less "plausible" than the other.
But the key is this: a claim is plausible if most of the evidence required to prove it is already known and accepted by the skeptic. In other words, the same amount of evidence is required, but for implausible claims, more of it is lacking.
Imagine someone shows you a picture of a mouse in their backyard. The fact that mice are alive and scurry through backyards is proven. You'd be inclined to accept this man's story with a simple picture of the event. Now this person claims an alien is in their back yard. Aliens have never been proven to exist, and therefore have not been proven to have landed on Earth -- ever. If someone makes this claim, it would be an extraordinary claim.
Yes it would. But in both cases, the following evidence is required to prove the claim: evidence that
--- said creatures exist
--- said creatures scurry in backyards
--- one such creature did so at the time and place claimed.
Now for mice, a skeptic is likely to concede that the first two pieces of evidence are readily known and accepted. For aliens, the skeptic would make no such concession.
But again, in the end, the same amount of evidence is needed; but more of that evidence is lacking in the case of the alien.
Look at it this way: what if you grew up in such a way that you had never heard of a mouse? Suddenly the claimant has more work to do before you'll believe a mouse was in his backyard!