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'Life on Mars' Meteorite Rejected After 10 Years
An anonymous reader writes "Ten years ago, NASA announced that the Martian meteorite ALH84001 showed evidence of life on Mars. The announcement made headlines around the world, and even prompted President Clinton to make a statement. Ten years later, most scientists believe that everything in the meteorite can be explained by non-biological processes. "We certainly have not convinced the community, and that's been a little bit disappointing," said David McKay, a scientist behind the 'life on Mars' paper. Unfortunately, David McKay's own brother is one of his critics. "He [David] got a little testy about the results we were getting," said Gordon McKay. "What we have shown is that it is possible to form these things inorganically.""
Curious that this statement was made during the Bush administration
Compare to Creationism. *Cough* excuse me, "Intelligent Design".
If I may inject a personal note, I do believe in God. But I don't believe He created an existance so simple that anything we don't understand must have His hand directly involved.
I tend to take the opposite view to life on Mars (and other planets/moons).
I assume there will be "life" in most places.
Just look around this great varied Earth of ours. In the furthest reaches, in the darkest depths and the most impossible places we find that it flourishes.
We have barely begun to look around on Mars and we certainly haven't dug far below the surface, give it time and I think we will find it.
Why is it so difficult to believe we are alone?
liqbase
Coming in the wake of this recent news about atmospheric hydrogen-peroxide possibly scouring Mars's surface of microbial life it looks like the odds of finding life easily on Mars are dwindling. Subsurface drilling still holds out hope.
Regardless of current life conditions I still hold out hope for past life fossil discoveries, multi-cellular past life. Several of the Mars rover pictures look to show fossils, but NASA is being very cautious in it assessments. Not sure what the ID camp or Creationists will make of bring back criniod like fossils from Mars estimated to be 1-2 billion years old. Actually I already pretty much do know, so consider the question rhetorical.
Letter To Iran
Science has to be skeptical about anything. For example, let's take two statements:
1. Life had its origins on Earth, and is not to be found elsewhere.
2. Life started elsewhere, and is only present on Earth by virtue of some metorite hitting the right spot.
Science will accept NEITHER of these without proof. Science (good science anyway) is always testing EVERY hypothesis. Anything in science is ALWAYS open to being challenged, revisited, updated, or thrown out if contradicted. If it isn't, it's not science.
This is a very uncomfortable thing for lots of people, who want certainties in their lives. But science is what it is - certainties last only as long as the evidence supports them. F=ma could go out the window tomorrow if conclusive experimental evidence indicates it isn't true. (Now, after a certain point, things are assumed to be correct until proven otherwise, in order to make progress possible. But EVERYTHING in science is ALWAYS subject to challenge. Your challenge had better be good for F=ma though, since there is a VERY large body of evidence suggesting that relationship is a useful description of part of the natural world.)
So I'd say that instead of it being hard for people to believe there is life beyond Earth, it is important that any evidence of such life be subject to skeptical and rigorous test. This is why you have people looking for ways something could NOT be a sign of life - to make sure we don't overlook something in our hope that there IS other life out there. Good science has no favorites, and the facts will ALWAYS overrule wishful thinking (one way or the other.) If someone gets a result they want, one of the best things for them to do is sit down and think of ways this result could NOT mean what you want it to mean.
If we have first contact with a superior race (what is superior, anyway? more advanced? more peaceful?) the consequences will likely be completely unpredictable. I doubt meaningful communication would be established for a VERY long time (if it even CAN be established) - science fiction grossly underestimates that difficulty, in my opinion. And no doubt a sizable percentage of the population wouldn't be able to handle it, particularly if it/they are really different from us. We have enough trouble handling ourselves, nevermind something REALLY alien.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Whether that little rock had evidence or not, I agree with Einstein: There is no logical number between 0 and infiniti. Therefore if there is life HERE, there is and has been life all over the damned place. One little rock doesn't change the statistical likelihood of that.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Life doesnt "begin" on a meteorite, but the building blocks can be found on meteorites.
And why would "building blocks" be more likely to be found on meteorites rather than Earth itself? And conversely, why would Earth not have any building blocks?
And why does it matter at all what role meteorites might or might not play in abiogenesis?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The colonizers certainly considered themselves superior, and their greater technology meant that they were able to prove it to themselves.
What greater technology? Guns, religion, butter churners? It didn't take long for the Indians to get guns. It was the diseases from the Europeans filthy way of life that did them in, after that is was simply the vast numbers of ever increasing invaders that finished them off. It had nothing to do with superiority.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Yet, even assuming such races exist, the probability for our meeting them is exceedingly small. Consider that it took about ten thousand years for us to go from the stone age to space exploration. Viable planets for developing life had existed for several billion years before life arose in the Earth.
Therefore, for us to meet a race that's more advanced than us, but not so advanced for that contact to become completely irrelevant, we would have to meet a race that developed just a tiny bit of time, percentage wise, before we did.
If and when we find life outside the Earth, it will most probably be either very primitive or very advanced relative to us. Baring extreme coincidence, any more advanced race we are likely to meet will have as much to teach us as we have to teach to a garden slug.
Well, think about it. Organized crystal structures form much more readily in low-gravity, and an impact event (two asteroids violently meeting in the black) could easily produced the sort of initial chaos needed to allow for a life-formation event (formation of amino acids and proteins as the rocks cool). Smash that into the earth, and you have a similar situation. I wouldn't be surprised if an impact event is the catalyst for life on those planets which can support it.
Before people start getting uppity about silicon-based life and how it could exist on a very hot planet, keep this in mind: Yes, silicon organics are possible and have been synthesized - but what would they use instead of water? In order to be as flexible as carbon organics, they have to be much hotter (> 100C), so there is a need for a liquid that handles those temperatures with similar properties (Anyone know the properties of Li2S?)
I submit that it is no accident that earth life is carbon-based. Lower energies needed to remain pliable and adaptable at the molecular level, and it just happens to be the most promiscuous atom to be found (can handle four covalent bonds and links up far more rapidly to the next-best, silicon).
I think if we're going to find life out there, we should be looking for a planet with similar heat characteristics to earth, with an asteroid belt or cometary system that would cause likley impacts every hundered thousand years or so (often enough to produce many many high-energy impact events to stir things up enough to form life, but not often enough to kill all life before it's got a chance to go multicellular)
I mean, once you're in our temperature range, water's a no brainer. Just captured solar wind over the millenia may be enough hydrogen to allow enough water to accrete on a planetoid (especially if there's enough oxygen in the planetoid's original mass-mix).
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