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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.
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.
"I for one welcome our hydrogen-peroxide breathing overlords" You live in LA?
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.
our hydrogen-peroxide breathing overlords
I wonder if our overlords would consume rocket fuel? Are they inherently as corrosive as peroxide normally is to metals? It would be ironic to discover the beginnings of life there only to find that it would be a major barrier to visiting the planet.
We are all just people.
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.
No, I doubt that it's Kathy Ireland posting on Slashdot.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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.
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