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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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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
"He's dead, Jim..."
Who did what now?
Mostly harmless
No, I'm New Here
They're *dead*. :-)
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)>_<^>
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...
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.
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!
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.
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
Weapons of Mars Destruction?
a world in progress...
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.
Got a half trillion bucks laying around? Or did you blow it on a dumb war again?
Seriously, if the goal is to detect life, probes are still far cheaper. A sample return mission can relatively easily be carried out by remote control probably at about 1/5 to 1/10 the cost of a manned mission per rock.
Table-ized A.I.
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
> 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...
may be on the hook for untold millions in reparations if we begin colonizing Mars in the future.
On the bright side, 12,463 microbes confessed to being Al Queda members just before their death.
Table-ized A.I.
I just hope we have a resistance to the Martian microbes. Remember how that movie ended?
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.