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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."
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
/Tor (somebody famous said something similar once)
I don't know what is scarier: that we are alone in the universe - or that we are not alone in the universe.
I hate to point this out, but even if there is life on mars it doesn't in any way change the statistical probablity of finding life on other planets else where. The problem would be not only do you have to prove there IS life on mars, but that it didn't come from earth, earth's didn't come from mars and they taht didn't come from the same (non earth/mars)source. If you can prove all that then you increase the liklyhood of life elsewhere, however even they you don't increase the odds greatly. Also, just because you increase the odds doesn't make it any more or less true. If questions of ETs is already solved, 100% we just don't know the answer. :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
There is evidence for at least _some_ cross-contamination between Earth and Mars occurring. If we find DNA or RNA based organisms there it may just be that they were seeded from here (or vice versa, back when Mars had water and a thicker atmosphere).
The place to look for *really* interesting things is environments that are isolated from ours, or that have conditions different enough that a different basic chemistry would be required.
Thermal vents on Io would be one option - there's lots of interesting sulphur-based chemistry upon which complex organisms could be based.
The oceans of Europa would also be an interesting spot - it's far from earth, and the potentially (earth-like-) life-bearing areas are beneath a thick crust of ice, so cross-contamination is less likely.
Cold worlds like tidally-heated moons of the outer gas giants would also be an interesting place to look. At those temperatures, life would a) run much more slowly and b) have to be based on lower-energy processes and substances with weaker binding forces for the available energy to be used to break down and rebuild biochemicals.
When we finally have probes capable of doing really detailed chemical and biological surveys of the outer solar system, we're going to find some very interesting things. Our own world shows us that microbes, at least, will show up wherever there's the energy and chemistry to support them.
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.