Study: Martian Soil Has Signs of Life

geoffrobinson writes "Reuters is reporting that a scientist from Germany believes Viking probe data shows signs of life. From the article: "Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface. His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin.""

Comments

Take with a whole shaker-full of salt

[dontthink]

Our friend Joop has also published a lot of work on ESP and paranormal activity: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Joop+Houtkoope r&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search.

I call BS.

Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt

[QuoteMstr]

And how would you go about disproving the existence of ESP? Studies have been done (I don't have references handy, but I could go find some if needed), and have failed to find evidence of ESP. These studies have been repeated. How many would you need to be convinced that ESP does not exist? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?

ESP is about as likely as creationism, and the people believing in it are using the same thought processes as the made-in-seven-days crowd. Science can disprove nothing. What it can do is collect evidence and give us likelyhoods. With no reliable evidence supporting it, ESP is as likely as the tooth fairy. You can't believe something simply because you'd prefer it to be true.

Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt

[bcrowell]

And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
Newton did alchemy at a time when the modern field of chemistry didn't exist. This was a period when the concept of a chemical element was unknown, the periodic table didn't exist, nobody had ever thought of weighing their chemicals or doing any kind of quantitative measurements of reactions, there were no scientific journals of any kind, and people studying what we would now call chemistry were caught up in a tradition in which it was considered normal to keep your results secret and record them in code. Newton basically invented the modern science of physics; I think we can excuse him for not inventing the modern science of chemistry as well. If he'd lived in the 19th century, and chosen to work in the alchemical tradition rather than the newly spawned field of chemistry, then we could rightfully call him a quack, an idiot, or a charlatan.

Newton was also a closet heretic (didn't believe in the trinity), and wrote gazillions of words of theological silliness. So what? It was religion. It wasn't science, and he didn't claim that it was science.

Numerology? I call bullshit, unless you just mean something tied up with his religious ideas.

If any scientist today is a true believer in ESP, etc., then yes, it does call into question that scientist's judgment. The evidence against all that paranormal bullshit is so strong that you'd have to be an incompetent scientist to ignore it.

Re:A lot of scientists thought so at NASA, too

[AJWM]

If I remember right, the one that said "no" was later re-run in an Antarctic dry valley. It said "no" there, too. Basically it's lower limit of detection was too high.

Mind, my favorite way of describing the whole Viking experiment situation is:

The Viking Lander experiments were designed to answer the question, "is there life on Mars?". They landed, performed their experiments, and beamed back: "could you repeat the question?"

Re:IF its proven..

[ushering05401]

Extending that concept... God explicitly handed supremacy over all living things to mankind... so if 'the world' becomes interpreted as 'the universe' we are going to have a very difficult time being good neighbors.

Not that it would be a cakewalk without religious fundamentalism. There will just be one more barrier to overcome before we can hope to deal with the existence of E.T. life in a rational manner.

my thoughts...

[daddyrief]

I am not an expert in space-related fields in any way, but I always thought, if life was discovered somewhere else in the universe, who's to say it remotely resembles anything we have here on Earth? Just as humans are a result of adaptation and evolution to Earth's atmosphere and chemical makeup, I bet the first form of life found outside of Earth is wacky and customized to its home planet's conditions.

Of course, if the alien being's stage of life is infantile upon discovery, little microbes aren't very exciting. But imagine finding some race that walks on 5 legs with two tails, that is smarter than humans, but dies upon contact with oxygen or something......

/end speculation :p

Re:IF its proven..

[Man On Pink Corner]

The Bible doesn't say anything at all about life forms on other planets. Intelligent life I might have issues with....

I'm an atheist. A few weeks ago, a Christian friend asked me, "When you look out at the night sky, across billions of light-years of interstellar space filled with billions of worlds we haven't even imagined yet, aren't you a little afraid that you might be wrong?"

Your idiotic post made me realize -- way too late, of course -- that I should've asked her the same question in reply.

Re:IF its proven..

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I'm a geek, but I believe in supernatural things and beings greater than ourselves. I don't believe they are Gods or whatever, but I do believe there are things in -this- world we can't even understand fully yet, so I'm pretty sure there are things -out there- which I can't even start to grasp. I have no evidence for this, I have no faith for this, I just think logically the universe is way too big for there not to be other life and the way we evolved and changed won't be the same as others, so for all we know there are beings who can breath fire or live in molten lead without flinching.

Logic tells me there is some crazy stuff out there, stuff I probably don't want to mess with, but I'm not going to worship it, just going to go "oh it's possible, believe if you like but I want to meet this guy before I believe in him directly".

Re:IF its proven..

[cmowire]

If you read the Catechism of the Catholic church, it states that "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."

A belief in a God does not require you to contradict the Big Bang or evolution or anything else. Unless, of course, you think that it is important for a god to lie.

What this leads to is that some fairly savvy folks in the religious community primarily don't want you to try and argue that because we descended from the same stock as the Bonobo it's OK to fuck like Bonobos... but it's OK to say that we descended from the same stock as Bonobos. This, of course, gets turned by the far-less-savvy religious right into an excuse to attack evolution.

I tend to think that the whackos on the religious right has pushed the thinking person towards aethism, when a thinking person might had been a member of a fairly liberal faith or agnostic before.

Define "credible"

[mangu]

So long as there are millions of credible reports in the field no failure to replicate the condition in a lab would prove to me that the condition can not exist

So, you think science is something like democracy, if enough people believe in something then it must be true?

To me, credibility is pretty much linked to repeatability. In order for something to be credible it must be either replicated or shown by a well-reasoned chain of evidence to be possible. If you report a phenomenon that (a) no one can repeat and (b) negates facts that we know both from the labs and from day-to-day experience, then you are in trouble.

Reliability of evidence does not determine likelyhood

Yes, it does. Ask any judge, any lawyer, any juror. Would you like to be convicted of a crime based solely on unreliable evidence presented by the DA?

There is no evidence of a tooth fairy credible or otherwise

Yes, there is. Millions of children have put a tooth under their pillows and found a bicycle in the porch next morning. What more evidence do you need? There's *more* evidence for the tooth fairy than for any other ESP phenomena.

Re:IF its proven..

[E 99]

In saying you're a geek, I assume you're a pretty intelligent fellow who uses reason to form his view of the universe. I assume you don't follow crowds, that you evaluate products you buy on their merits, and that, at least sometime in your life, you've reasoned out who would win in a battle between two fantasy characters.

How is it, then, that you make a special exemption for your god? How do you reconcile the inherent illogic of religion with the rest of your life?

Saying there's an inherent illogic of religion is like saying there's an inherent illogic of math. The opposite is in fact true. We have God-given capacity for reason which lets us perceive the truth of maxims of logic and math. These are things that all math and science are based upon, for which proof is impossible. We know them only because they are self-evident to us. We perceive them directly. This could be called "faith" or it could be called the strongest proof of all. (It is necessarily the strongest proof of all, because the next-strongest proof, mathematical proof relies upon it for all its fundamental givens.) It is the same capacity for perception of truth, for fundamental knowledge, that is the basis for the recognition of Divine Truth in its various forms, especially in the sacred scriptures of various religions. Different people are capable of perceiving different types of it, and different aspects of it is contained in different religions. Most people are receptive to at least some form of it.

However, for "geeks," we have a disadvantage in that, being clever, we also tend to have a certain pride in our own intelligence. It's a pretty high barrier to have the intellectual honesty to recognize that those I had considered idiots, and who in truth are much simpler in their thinking, were far more correct in what they believed than I was. At least for me, it was nothing short of humiliating to come to that conclusion. But my allegiance has always been, and always will be, to the pursuit of Truth.

Anyway, I don't know what inherent illogic you see in a omnipotent and omniscient God. Geeks, more than anyone, should be capable of understanding the intricacies of the meanings of those terms, and seeing beyond the confines of time-space to reconcile them with the concept of free will. If you want some good geek theology, look no further than here: http://www.theisticscience.org/books/dlw/dlw.html

Re:IF its proven..

[Man On Pink Corner]

Yeah, that's a reasonable point of view; it's one I held myself for a long time. However, I eventually rejected it because there's no way I can distinguish the Universe of an absent God from a Universe that never had one in the first place.

In other words, since the universe apparently doesn't want me to know anything about my Creator, I'll just assume there was never a knowable Creator to begin with, at least until proven otherwise. There are no concrete questions I can ask about God, so it would be absurd to think that I already have any of the answers.

One thing I would never do is make arrogant statements about having "issues" with the potential discovery of other intelligent life forms. IMHO, to believe that no other intelligent life exists anywhere in the Universe, as the grandparent apparently does, takes more of a leap of faith than even a belief in God.

Re:IF its proven..

[Man On Pink Corner]

If she's wrong, it doesn't matter...

Unless, of course, it turns out that Zeus is the HMFIC.

If so, then all that grovelling to Jesus is going to turn out to be a career-limiting move, to say the least.

Re:IF its proven..

[jdogalt]

"How is it, then, that you make a special exemption for your god? How do you reconcile the inherent illogic of religion with the rest of your life?" Excuse me, but have you been watching the news recently? As a geek christian, who fits your profile- I ask you- How is it, then, that you reconcile the inherent illogic of society around you with the rest of your life? 3.2.1... Did I guess right- Did you blame it on religion? The "inherent illogic of religion" is the only thing that makes me think I'm sane in a world where George W Bush gets to be president for 2 full terms. I was an atheist before 2000. Around the time of the PATRIOT act, I blamed christians for the end of freedom and liberty and decency in my country. It was only then, that I started studying the bible, with humility, to find out WTF was going on in the world that I couldn't comprehend. You see, as a geek, using the cop-out that "those religious people are irrational", just wasn't cutting it anymore. I tell you brother (or sister)- if you keep on going through life, thinking that religious people are irrational, you are going to live a very sad and confused life. If however you suck up a little humility, and try to read the religious texts with an open mind that the people who cherish them, might _actually_ not be irrational, then you might soon discover that the world makes quite a bit more sense that you previously thought. And one thing you'll never do, is think again that the religious texts sugar-coat the harsh *reality* of human social interaction.

Re:IF its proven..

[SenseiLeNoir]

I agree which you. In fact what you talk about is also true of the deistic "Dharma" philosophy.

Dharma, is the diestic philosophy, of the thestic "religions" of Bhuddism, Jainism, Siehkism, and vedism (aka Hinduism).

Dharma describes everything (of which the universe is a part of) as a single entity, that morphs and forms. This "entity" does not have a "known" personality nor anything that can be attributed to human factors, and nuances, and we are all part of it. The universe forms, disforms, destroys and rebuilds. its just a huge never ending cycle. Life cannot truely be defined, as we only can define life as what we "know".

To take your "men in black principle", there is a more readily available description of describing it. Our bodies are made of millions of individual cells. Each of them have life on their own, as well as a purpose. Some die after 2 weeks and are replaced, some live much longer, and are not replaced when they die (eg brain cells). Each individual cell may not be "aware" of the implications on each other. However, formed together, they make us. Our lives, our emotions, our being, as a singular compounded organism. With this in mind, there is nothing to say that we are not part of a bigger so called organism, its just that we don't understand it if it does exist, and maybe its not even REQUIRED to understand it.

I agree with your views of deism can itself support science. Dhramic philosophy has never discouraged the pursuit of science, unlike it appears of Abrahamic religions (such as Chistiantiy, Islam). Indeed, thousands of years ago Dharmic "scientists" (of all the main dharmic religions) worked out things such as the fact that Earth revolved around the sun, that there are other planets, and indeed other stars, and galaxys, etc, even as others still viewed the earth as flat, surrounded by a "dome". One particular assertion by Dharmism is that energy and matter are the same thing, in that energy "clumps" together to form matter. Recent works on quantum physics, have agreed somewhat to that idea, including a recent experiment at CERN, where "energy" were accelerated and then "smashed" together, and for a split second formed "matter".

Frankly i find all this rather interesting, and somewhat overwhelming. What we have is such a large concept, that is difficult to sometimes comprehend with our limited minds, and consciences. However, i woudl rather not go back to the "safe cocoon" of thestic views.

Re:IF its proven..

[Filip22012005]

Thinking there's no basis for morality without God is a rather scary thought. First, of course, because you seem to imply that I, as an atheist, am somehow incapable of moral reasoning. Read up on the ethical foundations that may lie at the basis of atheism. You might be surprised. Also, your god leaves open so many interpretations of your texts, that religions have been warring for millenia. Religion didn't really help setting a uniform morality. The second reason why your statement is scary, is that it implies that you (and religious people like you) are somehow only restrained by an imaginary god. Only a fear of punishment keeps you in line. If you were 6, that wouldn't be a problem. Adults however, may aspire to more than that.