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: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..

[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..

[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..

[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.