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NASA May Have Killed The Martians
Sneakernets writes "CNN reports that NASA may have found life on Mars via the Viking space probes in 1976-77, but failed to recognize it and killed it by accident. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geology professor at Washington State University, says that Mars microbes that the space probes had found were possibly drowned and baked by accident. Other experts said the new concept is plausible, but more work is needed before they are convinced. From the article: 'A new NASA Mars mission called Phoenix is set for launch this summer, and one of the scientists involved said he is eager to test the new theory about life on Mars. However, scientists must come up with a way to do that using the mission's existing scientific instruments, said NASA astrobiologist and Phoenix co-investigator Chris McKay.'"
That would explain why we haven't heard from K'breel or the Council of the Elders for a while :(
liqbase
(To intelligent life under his microscope)
We come in peace!
*Adjusts lens to get a better view*
*Squish*
Demented But Determined.
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They better hope there's no more life on Mars, or NASA will have some 'splaining to do!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Scarlet
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Well, at least we can learn from this sad lesson in our future missions to other sandy, desolate places. Right?
Right?
Lenny at NASA: "I used to have a little friend, but he don't move no more."
This is rather similar to what I thought when I was watching a video at school once. The video claimed their was no life on Mars (Or any other planet for that matter) because they lacked the key conditions life needs. The lack of water, or stable temperature or decent atmosphere etc were all touted as being proof that life couldn't exist on these planets.
My immediate thought was Why are we deciding all life is the same here? There are different species on the earth who need different amounts of things, Just because we all need water and a regular-ish temperature doesn't make potential alien life follow that rule. This scientist seems to be agreeing with me. Which is more then my teacher did at the time.
NASA may have found life on Mars via the Viking space probes in 1976-77, but failed to recognize it and killed it by accident.
Small consolation for the millions of affected microbes.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
And Gerald Ford.
You kids think Bush is evil-he just kills Bad Muslims. Those incompetent losers we had back in the 1970s killed the MARTIANS!!!
I've seen "Mars Attacks!" Better them than us.
This same article was on digg a while back, so I've read it already.
The title implies that NASA killed off all of the martians, while the article says that if Viking had found a few martian microbes in its sample, it would have killed those.
There's no need for the sensationalism.
Pop a Poppler in your mouth, when you come to Fishy Joe's. What they're made of is a mystery. Where they come from, no one knows. You can lick 'em. You can pick 'em. You can stuff 'em. You can stick 'em. If you promise not to sue us, you can shove one up your nose.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
6 more people have shown interest in space exploration, and the NASA in particular.
Seriously... NASA's credibility and image is diminishing by the hour, despite 'breakthrough' announcements every other day.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I for one, welcome our new Martian- oops.. Nevermind.
"I feel a great disturbanc in the Force, as if billions of microbes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"
--
BMO
Here's a deep question for the intellectuals to ponder...
In your opinion, what exactly constitutes the definition of "life"?
Famed for their navigational abilities...
No kidding. They sacked Mars! Another planet entirely!
I, for one, welcome our new Earthling overlords.
-- A. Martian
"He's dead, Jim..."
Who did what now?
There will be a time when martian colonists divide into subfactions including the reds (opposed to terraforming) and the greens (advocates of terraforming)... until in 2061 the martian revolution will take place including the destruction of the UNTA Space Elevator, during said revolution many colonies tents are popped from space by UNTA forcing the remainder of the first 100 colonists to flee underground where tensions between the reds and greens are forgotten until the next revolution.
Mostly harmless
Seems that no one can follow the stupid thing.
No, I'm New Here
...they don't have a microphone on the lander.
That way, all they have to do is run the same tests, and listen for millions of tiny little screams.
They're *dead*. :-)
How do you say "You killed Kenny! You Bastard!" in Martian?
According to my Biology prof many years ago, life is anything that resists entropy....
Kyle: Wow! That's a lot of seamen, Cartman.
Cartman: Yeah, I bought all that I could at this bank, and then I got the rest from this guy Ralph in an alley.
Stan: That's cool.
Cartman: Yeah, and the sweet thing is, the stupid asshole didn't even charge me money for it. He just made me close my eyes and suck on a hose.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Have you read my journal today?
From TFA: "Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Schulze-Makuch."
The important point is that a new possibility for the nature of life on Mars has been suggested. If there is any life in this form it would not have been detected by previous experiements. This is interesting because it keeps open the possibility of what would be the greatest discovery ever - life on another planet. The minor point that the testing process could have killed the specific bacteria it sampled is - apart from the obligatory jokes - totally irellevant.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
... of old objections with a slight new twist about peroxides.
Back in the 70's the results of the "chicken soup" (gas exchange) experiment on board the Vikings were frustratingly inconclusive - the resulting single release of gas when combining martian soil with a mixture of likely nutrients could have been produced by several mechanisms: (1) a simple chemical reaction between the soil sample and the "soup", or (2) the death rattles of an organism poisoned by the "soup" or (3) the initial metabolic release of (an) organism(s) that ate itself to death like a goldfish on the nutrient "soup".
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"..failed to recognize it and killed it by accident"
I seem to recall Cheney using a similar excuse when he shotgunned a hunting partner in his ass...
OF course this means that intelligent martians might have been frozen there for millions of years, yet easily revived since they don't form ice crystals in their cells. We just have to go there, dig one out of the ice and thaw him out (or her, to be non-sexist, or hir, if they have three sexes, or...)
Oh my God they killed the Aliens! - You NASA Bastards!
...and to think... for decades people were worried about martians invading when in reality the martians should have been worried about *US* invading them!
----
Link of the day
Heroes Wiki
it looks like nasa beat bush to the chase, we'll we still have aliens to forward too.
That's what you get for sending a robot to do a man's job. Let's quit futzing around with probes, and put a properly equipped science team on the planet.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Oh my god, they killed Kenny. You bastards!
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
What did they expect when they named it "Viking"?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
The article says the rover thing wouldnt have 'killed' the sample. Its said the tools on the rover did not analyze the sample right.
That's of course to say that all possible life either evolved at this location, or spontaneously migrated to the landing and operation site of the Vikings and died? There's no other microbial life left on the planet except the chance area where humans landed? I find that hard to be even speculatively or hypothetically true...
From the article:
Good reporting:
The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.
Sensationatilism:
Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.
To show how full of crap it is:
Schulze-Makuch acknowledges he can't prove that Martian microbes exist, but given the Martian environment and how evolution works, "it makes sense."
So if there are microbes left, NASA was lucky, and if there are none, NASA has killed them all.
And if there are microbes, Schulze-Makuch is happy because NASA didn't kill them all and his name is in history again, while if there are none, it would be exactly how Schulze-Makuch had predicted it!
bash$
In the 1970's, comedian Don Novello (of Father Guido Sarducci fame) wrote a book called the "Lazlo Lettets" where he would write tongue in cheek letters to a wide variety of people and places like the President, Hotels, and of course NASA. His alter ego Lazlo Toth observered that if NASA were to scoop up martian soil and burn it to find life, that NASA would have more appropriately found life, but killed it so they wouldn't be able to actually prove that life still existed. I don't recall the content what NASA's response letter.
I love it when comedians get these things right ahead of time.
P.S. Another example at the Onion. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 saw the new Fusion with six blades coming way back in Feb 2004!
The Viking landed, unfortunately, on top of the Yarg king! And, to no surprise, they are really P.O'd about it.
Fear not! Commander Keen has already sorted it all out.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
a lot of sci-fi films start this way.... then bad thing happen
It is very difficult to devise experiments for distant probes because they cannot adapt experiments to previous findings from themselves very well. The only real way to know if there is life is to take samples back to a well-equiped manned lab with top microscopes. The problem is the risk of contaminating the whole planet. It is small, but well worth preventing. This leaves an in-orbit or moon lab. That way if the astronaut scientists find bad stuff, they are quarenteened in space. This is the *real* use for a moonbase in my opinion.
Table-ized A.I.
That'll teach them for trying to kidnap Santa Claus.
We have found many new and oddball extremophiles over the last few decades living right here on Earth in places that were once considered impossibly "hostile to life". This has resulted in a tree of life with many more branches than the animal, plant and fungi ones I was taught at high school.
The three "essential ingredients" for life now seem to be carbon, water and energy but we haven't finished searching the planet yet, let alone our solar system and beyond.
To summerize: "It's life Jim, but not as we know it".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You bastards!
Why was the NASA probe playing yodeling music?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Future missions will offer the microbes teeny, tiny microbe-sized blankets.
This whole thing is really like "War Of The Worlds" in reverse, isn't it? We do to others exactly what we fear and claim they're trying to do to us.
Projection and shadow work on a national scale...which brings us back to the beginning of this little subthread.
"Now playing at the Marsiplex 25: Earth Attacks!"
And I had to try to tag the article "metricmartians". Because if they were "englishstandardunitsmartians", they might have gotten it right.
I talk about stuff.
Weapons of Mars Destruction?
a world in progress...
This sounds like a lot of hooey to me. Basically, this guys supposes that there could possibly be a form of life that would have gotten killed by the various Viking experiments. As far as I can tell from the article, there is absolutely no evidence that (a) such life forms exist, or (b) he has found signatures of such in Viking experiments. I think science demands a bit more evidence before making such suppositions. Of course, "human probe kills martians" does make for good copy...
NASA better hope that personal injury lawyers don't catch wind of this. They may be on the hook for untold millions in reparations if we begin colonizing Mars in the future.
Either way, the City of Berkeley is probably working on passing a resolution condemming NASA for "waging space warfare" and acts of genocide against an innocent lifeform.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Debate over the validity of the biological experiments on the Viking probes has been going on since the probes landed.
You see.... several of the biological experiments on Viking turned up positive. However, this result contradicted other components of the same experiment, which indicated that there were no organic molecules in the soil, among other factors, making the possibility of life existing in those soil samples remotely minute.
It was largely agreed upon that the experiments were inconclusive and poorly designed all the way back in the 80s. The fact that this guy is making this argument about an experiment that yielded a false-positive is somewhat absurd. The bits of the experiment that turned up negative would have hypothetically yielded the same result on a living organism as a dead one.
The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was supposed to repeat/confirm several of the Viking experiments.
Of course, that's not to say that we shouldn't be reproducing these experiments to figure out what went wrong, and what produced the false positive, as I'm sure there's plenty of interesting science to be explored there as well. I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of life on mars either -- as mentioned earlier, the experiments were inconclusive.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The guy was probably drunk when he was doing the research.
For those of you just tuning in, WSU is a well-known drinking school. People wear sweatshirts that say, "Our Drinking Team Has a Football Problem." And their football team has its share of problems, too: They lost to the UW Huskies when the latter was having a horrible year. This proves, of course, that the Cougars are still the Cougars.
> This whole thing is really like "War Of The Worlds" in reverse, isn't it? We do to others exactly what we fear and claim they're trying to do to us.
...oh, wait. Never mind!
Oh, now come on! It's not like we intentionally sent giant tripods to another world and started vaporizing the indigenous...
They accidentally killed it? Mmmm-nope. I jist don't tink so. Here's why: I presume that they probably meant a silica-based lifeform, totally anaerobic, containing no carbon, no RNA and no DNA - perhaps something like our prion, which is already redefining the scientific usage of the term "life". Here's an idea: Before we start collecting new forms of "heretical life" let's try to find AT LEAST ONE WAY to kill the only example that we've ever discovered here on planet earth. Those brain-eating bastards are immortal. "Infectuous protiens" and other living dead things without lifespans scare the living hell out of me. I never bought into the CDC's theory that the prion was primordial, (that theory might have been issued by the scientists at the World Health Organization, I read way too much to keep track of the minor details) No, if the prion was "from 'round these here parts", we'd have most-likely found more examplar species and subspecies. the fact that we haven't indicates that it had probably not evolved here. Spaceborne points of origin, hitching rides on meteorites, NEOs or in the frozen particles constituting the tails of comets sound far more plausible to me.
...did they ever figger THAT ONE out, by the way?
If we really DID kill something like a prion, I'd DEFINITELY like to know how!!! That's the weaponized equivalent of the holy grail on the tiny battleground of sub-microscopic molecular partical warfare. It's kinda like putting out a magnesium fire.
Uhhh...
NOTE TO SELF: (Remember to edit this later - Enter randomly generated cliche'-based, typical, random, run-of-the-mill, g
Is it too hard to put a microscope on one of these landers? The rovers has a close up camera.
Its like War of the Worlds, but in reverse.
No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century. That Mars was being watched by intelligences equal to our own. That as Martians busied themselves about their various concerns.
We observed and studied. The way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency Martians went to and fro about Mars, confidant of their empire over that world.
Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded Mars with envious eyes and slowly and surely we drew our plans against them.
Sorry Mars =(
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
Phssthpok was able to kill off a marauding squad of martians using his ships water tank, and later Jack Brennan crashed a comet into Mars, the atmospheric humidity making the martians extinct.
Don't mess with the protector.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Dude, these are the Sea Monkeys, not the martians...
"Oh, no...not again." :)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
You can be sure the probes brought some microorganisms to Mars...
And given microorganisms are quite more resilient, than, say, mammals, who knows. Those probes might begin the life on Mars, if there wasn't any.
If you follow how nature works, there's only one thing to know: life will push and proliferate in incredible ways, if given the chance. The probes could've been enough of a chance.
I Am New Here
This is a good development.
Now when we invade Mars we won't fall victim to the same gruesome fate.
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov
Interesting, will it look like this one? http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Horta
This reminds me of the short story "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury.
r -Ray_Bradbury.pdf
http://www.onebee.com/media/PDF/A_Sound_of_Thunde
What are the odds NASA brings some bacteria to Mars instead?
Do not trust this signature.
The first step in Human/Martian relations.
So, if I read this right, all we need to do is to collect the unwashed coffee cups that have had a chance to germinate over the weekend, put them in a space probe and send them off?
:-)
That'll save NASA some budget
Insert
In Soviet Russia, the microbes kill YOU!
Another idiotic headline... but at least they're consistent about it!
"The chances of anything coming from Earth, are a million to one they said..."
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
...they drew their plans against us.
There is no principled definition of "life," just like there is no principled definition of "planet." These are terms that we inherite from traditions that cut up the world into categories that, knowing what we do today, we can most certainly tell that the world does not respect.
To the founders of astronomy and biology, it seemed that there was a clear and uncontrovertible difference of kind between, for the former, stars (which moved in circles, to put it roughly) and planets (which had a more irregular trajectory in the sky), and for the latter, living creatures and inanimate objects. When it comes to the latter, also, the idea that facts about living creatures could be wholly explained in terms of facts about inanimate objects was a hard one to swallow.
We, today, on the other hand, know of all sorts of celestial objects of all sorts of compositions and moving in all sorts of trajectories; we know about viruses; we know about molecular biology; we have the theory of evolution; we have speculative theories of abiogenesis; and so on. These are things that show that the traditional concepts we have received are based on flawed assumptions.
Are you adequate?
I thought that the roovers had landed on some and then runned over the rest.
So say we all
Just because they're dead, doesn't mean we shouldn't welcome our new Martian microbial overlords! Where are your manners?
Yankee Go Home!
are when a person's true colors are shown and it's obvious they pine for fanciful stories and rampant speculation and leave the science for arguing with "religious nutcases".
All this guy said was IF there was this certain kind of life on Mars, we COULD NOT have detected it. That's it. It's just as easy to say that we landed in the wrong place, or came at the wrong time, etc.
I'd like to know what tangible benefits NASA and space travel are actually providing... if there are some then great... if not let's invest in developing clean renewable energy so we don't kill the life here on this planet. (through war, pollution, and killing off the trees in the forests I like to hike in... and maybe global warming to... the jury is still out on that one). Pretty pictures of far of galaxies and remote control cars on Mars are neat an all... but is "cool" really the priority right now?
I don't know if you're trolling, but there are people who HAVE considered fire as a life form for the very points you specify and this has been brought into popular culture in several science fiction books (and I think one episode of Star Trek TNG had a "living flame" lifeform)
Is Mars really worth studying all that much? I mean, with the calculated decay of the moon Phobos, Mars will be quite different in a matter of 150 years or so.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
and never noticed it. I hope for its sake I didn't have chili that day...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Get them before they get us.
Didn't anyone else see Mars Attacks??
Facts are stubborn things.
I just hope we have a resistance to the Martian microbes. Remember how that movie ended?
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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Subsequently, the survivors moved into underground dwellings and grew a third tit.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Hopefully I'm not completely wrong and this was done...
Why didn't any of the Mars landers have a collector with a high-power microscope and perhaps a digger to look in the soil. Then we can get back good images capable of capturing single-cell organisms from each of the location the rovers went too.
You know that some race out there will "accidentally" do the same thing to humans one day.
Oblig. South Park ref:
NASA Killed the Martians! YOU BASTARDS!
They killed Kenny (the Martian Microbe)!!
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
NASA...you guys suck at life!
Dammit, where's Spartacus when you need him? :-)