Slashdot Mirror
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.""
Who are we kidding, he's gotta have privileged information. With a name like Joop Houtkooper, he has *got* to be an alien. :-)
(Just kidding there Joop)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I for one welcome our hydrogen-peroxide breathing overlords...
Viking probe data shows signs of life.
So the Viking probe data is ALIVE?!!!
This isn't anything new... A lot of scientists at NASA thought the same thing 30 years ago.
When one experiment says yes, and one says no and you can't run them again there will be a lot of debate about what it all means.
Imagine what people might learn from data we're getting now from the two rovers on mars.
Mars is one big beach, so peroxided organisms are to be expected.
If this is proven to be fact ( and i dont think this really *proves* anything. Its still theory ), how is this going to sit with the religions of the world that truly think we are the only ones 'god' created?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
I react very badly with them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
/end speculation :p
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......
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
Here's an article with some counter-points to this theory.
It is clear that we must promptly launch an investigation on whether this "life" believes in a democratic system of government. If not, we should immediately impose sanctions, inform the public their WMDs, and begin planning a military invasion to begin approximately 18 months from now. If the terrorists possess oil and make attempts to trade it under the Euro currency, we must accelerate this plan, using any means possible to defeat this threat to America. It is clear this life poses a terrorist threat to America. We must preemptively strike against us before they bring their War on Terror to our soil.
Evidence isn't proof, chief. The stars alone are evidence that there could be life. The only way to prove there's life is to get a container, identify what we think is alive, and watch it reproduce. That won't happen until we actually send humans there, and probably won't really be settled until it's come back to earth for extensive testing.
Fine, as long as I don't have to mow it.
Fine, you have god creating the universe. So now god is your uncaused cause. What's that you say? Your god exists outside space and time so that question is meaningless? Fine then - my single infinitely dense point exists outside space and time. Now, which should I (given no evidence) believe exists outside space and time? A single point or an entire all-powerful being? That my friend is what happens when you have double standards... you forget that if I can't break a rule you can't either. And don't go claiming "god is special" or something because that's the same as claiming the laws of physics change as you go backward.
Conscious? Well, what happens to a species that goes around destroying all other examples of itself? Why, it loses diversity mister AC! And then what happens if something goes wrong? Why, that species goes and dies out, doesn't it! And so, for long term protection of similar genes, we tend to protect things that are similar to ourselves. As we have advanced as a species we have come to identify non-human animals as close to ourself, and instantly began to emphasize with them as per the above trend. And now we find ourselves aware that destroying things (even if we see them as competition) will end in a bad way... so we have more environmental awareness.
"So what is this thing? I say, it's God. Now I fervently dispute that acknowledging a God should stop scientific discovery. I feel, like many early scientists, that scientific exploration is a form of pulling back the curtain of the mind of God and should absolutely be encouraged."
Oh, so we should keep looking into the cause of the universe when we know god caused it? That seems kinda contradictory. Either he didn't cause it or we should stop looking. Now take that back a few tens of hundreds of years... the sun rises every day. God did it, no need to study it. Hense the dark ages.
Now grow some balls and question your religious mythos, and that goes for everyone.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Actually, the cute girl from marketing made eye contact and winked so this is conclusive evidence that sex may have or will happen at some point in the fullness of time. Or not.
Sheesh, could we give the sensationalist headlines some rest?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I worked on the Viking Lander project (but not on the biology side). Before the landing, NASA published and sent around little promo phamplets describing what a positive (biological) response would be from each of the 3 biological experiments. (Along the lines of, add nutrients to a soil sample, get CO2 out, sterilize the next soil sample, add nutrients, get no CO2, that is evidence for life. No CO2, or CO2 with a sterlized sample, not evidence for life.) I still have mine in my basement.
Each of the two landers had 3 biological experiements. All six worked fine. All six had a positive response based on the criteria published before landing.
However, because the mass spectrometer detected no organic molecules (not one of the pre-published tests), these results were ascribed to non-biological causes.
I could never understand why one of the biological researchers didn't just say, "we have detected life, by our published criteria, but we don't understand it." However, none did.
Science doesn't always move in the nice linear fashion described in the text books...
http://mars.spherix.com/
In 1997 he presented a paper showing that after 21 years of study of the data he felt that:
The main argument against Levin's conclusions was that the Viking lander's Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GCMS) experiment showed no evidence for the presence of organic compounds in the Martian soil. As an analytical chemist who has worked in the field of GCMS since before the time of the Viking probes, I have my doubts about the Viking GCMS experiment having enough sensitivity and reliability to exclude the low level presence of organic material in the Martian soil.
In 2000, Dr. Steven A. Benner published a paper concluding that the Viking GCMS was insensitive to certain organic molecules including those left behind by any microbial life that might have been on Mars. At the same time Dr Joseph Miller reanalyzed the original Viking labelled release experiment data and concluded that it showed circadian rhythms thus supporting the case for Martian life.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-life-00g.html
Now Joop Houtkooper proposes further evidence that Levin was right. I think Levin will go down in scientific history like Wigner the proposer of the continental drift theory in the 1920's, as a researcher whose ideas were scorned by large sections of the scientific community at the time, but that were eventually proved right.
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.
just as a side note.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
There is a lot more going on with the whole "Life On Mars" thing than you will see really published anywhere. I'm not saying there are little green men on mars, but it seems like every article I read, this one included, downplays the significance of finding Life Outside Earth. That is a Big Deal.
If you're interested, there is quite a bit of background material surrounding Life on Mars and the really famous '76 Viking Lander experiments that were completely glossed over in the article.
One absolutely interesting bit of research (that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the article) has to do with circadian rhythms.
IIRC the '76 viking lander had 3 types of experiments on board that would conduct various kinds of tests to determine if there was life on mars. One of those was cell respiration.. another a test for known organic compounds or organic materials. Two of the three tests showed signs for life in at least one of the experimental runs.. but the test for "organic material" consistently failed. I met one of the folks at a conference that claimed to have worked on this and he made it very clear that NASA's usual policy was 2/3 experiments w/positive results == Strong Indications for Life. Yet for some reason NASA announced something to the effect of "No Organics, No Life" . He was very bitter about it because he was absolutely convinced there was life on Mars.
In 2000 someone thought to analyze the cell respiration study that already indicated there was life or at least a life-like biological process. SURPRISE! The cell respiration data seemed to indicate cell respiration with circadian rhythms. Could not possibly be a simple chemical reaction. The whole idea of Circadian rhytms did not even exist in 1976! But the data fits. Not only that, but the rhythm itself was tuned to a martian day! I quietly decided there was life on mars at that moment. See this or here.
This new article is interesting, but it is Yet Another Analysis of 30 year old data!! I'd love to see what would happen if NASA (or CNN. I'd take CNN) would announce, in big bold letters, "HEY! We found very conclusive signs of life on another planet! Short of going there and looking at the soil under a microscope ourselves, we're 95% sure the planet is not quite dead and has new and unique life!" Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like we should be actually doing modern experiments to compare with the '76 experiments. It seems more like a pissing contest to see which person/group/agency is right more than The Search for Truth and Knowledge. "Why do we need to search for life on mars? We already found out there isn't life, right?"
That's where mankind came from before he destroyed Mars and landed on Earth.
The Bible doesn't say anything at all about life forms on other planets. Intelligent life I might have issues with, but microbes? No problem there.
Do you mean the Bible of the Jews and Christians or the Koran? The Tongva people's creation myth? Or what about the Hopi? And who are we to ignore the Hindu world creation epos?
Kurt Vonnegut's martian soldiers in Sirens of Titan got their oxygen from Tang mixed with hydrogen peroxide. Rented a tent! Rented a tent! Rented a tent, a tent, a tent!
What, people that don't believe God created the universe have to somehow test their theory on how it came to be, but people who do believe in God don't have to? Talk about double standards.
Now I know why lying is bad and I feel wronged when someone does it to me. You totally explained the concept of holiness. Amazing!You feel "wronged" because it puts you at a disadvantage; basically, it's a threat to your existence or well-being. You trusted someone, and then found out that they abused that trust. In most cases in our society that's not too dangerous as we don't wind up in life-or-death situations very often, so it may not threaten your existence as such, but when people lie it's usually to gain an advantage over you.
You also seem to be trying to claim that "lying is bad" is a universal truth that everybody feels, but that's ludicrous. Haven't you ever heard of con artists? You know, people who base their entire lives around lying and cheating other people? People who feel no sense of remorse or shame or guilt for doing this -- often completely destroying people's lives in order to get a bunch of money? What about politicians? I know they don't all lie all the time, but many of them play very fast and loose with the truth. Do you really think they actually feel "bad" for doing it?
Morality is so clearly a product of society, I can't help but think you're trolling. For example, most western societies have pretty strong views on sex with minors, but there's plenty of cultures where such things are commonplace and expected. Homophobes are another good example of people with very strong-held convictions that particular acts or behaviour are Wrong, yet other people view it completely differently. I'm actually amazed someone would attempt to make an argument that anything relating to morality and "right or wrong" are somehow ingrained in us as a universal, unchanging truth.
I don't have a problem with reconciling God and science, but some of your comments there were just too stupid to ignore. Unless you were actually trolling, please put a big more thought into it next time.
Subject applies to both the analysis and the conclusion.
Analysis at the time for one test showed negative, the other was inconclusive (not "yes").
At that point (as Sagan announced) they were cautiously hopeful, since the tests looked at different things, and some forms of life could appear negative to one and not the other. The negative test was replicated in Antarctica and showed negative there too, making that Mars analysis also inconclusive. No idea what Sagan had to say about it then.
It's unlikely life as we know it could be "based on" H2O2. It'd be far more likely to be based on water and highly tolerant of H2O2. The peroxide would come from ultraviolet from the sun hitting exposed water. I expect pretty much any exposed water (even ice, though the reaction would be slow) would have a fairly high percentage. But the water wouldn't be pure and so the peroxide would break down, keeping it at a low equilibrium. Life as we don't know it might use H2O2 for energy catalyzing it to break it down, pulling in more selectively from the environment or creating its own via an ultraviolet driven photosynthesis-like process.
To exist in H2O2 living things have to be able to break it down, such as we do using superoxide dismutase. If we didn't, the peroxide would eat (among other things) the walls off our cells because it destroys the lipids that the walls are made of. Germs don't have this mechanism, and that's why peroxide is a good antiseptic. However, with nothing like lipids or their precursors to work with, any Martian life is not likely to have lipid shells. That makes it unlikely the have any similarity to Earth life. Even the (theoretically) first living things on Earth, cyanobacteria, have lipid-based shells.
So, the news here is that someone's projecting a specific form Martian life might take based on the Viking data. The implication is that if correct, the Panspermia hypothesis probably doesn't hold. On the other hand, there can be a highly complex collection of compounds collecting ultraviolet, making and/or using H2O2, and developing more of itself via an endothremic self-organization process. Life as we don't know it might not be confined to a small, protected, self-contained module, but might be spread over large areas. It stretches the definition of life, but it's about time we do so, so we know it when we find it because "The thing about aliens is, they're alien".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Mbone, sorry I'm posting AC, but I hope you see this...
o r_Space_Studies) in the late 1970s/early 1980s. He was an interesting guy (I could tell some stories...) but a little embittered, (a) because he claimed that he was second choice and just missed out on hosting the PBS TV special Cosmos that made Dr. Carl Sagan famous, and (b) because of the conclusion after Viking that there wasn't life on Mars.
I took a course with Dr. Robert Jastrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jastrow) of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddard_Institute_f
He frequently exclaimed in class that he was absolutely convinced that Martian life had been found, citing the fact that every single Viking experiment had returned positive results. He said that those who evaluated the results were so surprised to find a complete unanimity of positive results that they assumed that there MUST have been something wrong with the tests, and, proceeding from that premise, drew their faulty "no life" conclusions from there.
I find it very gratifying to read your post almost 30 years later. I always wondered whether Dr. Jastrow was blowing hot air or if he was really on to something. Thank you for filling in another piece of the puzzle.
The truth is out there.
This study did not claim to show signs of life, it just claims to of found away that life could produce such results.
Help me become the most spamed person on earth! sign up qw_xd@yahoo.com to what ever