Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

White House Briefed On "Potential For Life" On Mars

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the spin-the-wheel dept.

Veeoh writes "FTA: It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more 'provocative' than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface. This news comes just as the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) confirmed experimental evidence for the existence of water in the Mars regolith on Thursday."

5 of 610 comments (clear)

  1. Colour me confused by 4D6963 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Heed my word, my brothers, for I have RTFA! It says that there's no way it has confirmed the presence of life right now or in the past on Mars. So what can be the big story they want to tell the President first?

    Or if it's no bigger than "we found something that may or may not indicate the possibility that Mars may or may not have probably potentially hosted a form a life, maybe eventually?" then why the secrecy?

    --
    You just got troll'd!
    1. Re:Colour me confused by Mprx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Or alternatively, strong evidence for abiogenic petroleum origin.

  2. Re:Short briefing by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bush is a member of the Methodist Church, which is a mainline Protestant denomination that does not take a literal reading of Genesis. People tend to paint bush as some kind of Christian Fundamentalist, but that's just the company he keeps, not his own beliefs to judge from his denominational affiliation.

  3. Re:Am I the only one? by cnettel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, the GP has kind of a point. If we would find carbon-based life with DNA and the same mapping between triplet codons and amino acids as is found on Earth, the sensible conclusion would be that we still have not seen two instances of life originating, but only a single on that was capable of spreading to another planet. That is still interesting, but the amount of material that would leave a life-inhabited planet with enough velocity to ever get to another star system would be miniscule.

    It would still be totally possible that the solar system would be the only inhabited system in the galaxy, or even the observable universe. If we find life on Mars, that is recognizable as such, but still radically different, THEN we are really talking.

  4. Reason for informing White House? by videoBuff · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Since this news is about potential for Mars Life, it follows that NASA is going by âoeSETI Post Detection Protocol.â Special Issue Acta Astronautica, Vol. 21, No. 2, J.C. Tarter and M.A. Michaud (eds.) (1990) or its variants.

    http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/protdet.htm "The discoverer should inform his/her or its relevant national authorities." This is in Step 2 of the protocol. The implication is that Step 3 will not happen, unless Step 2 is allowed.

    This practice is not anything new. When Mars meteorite ALH 84001 was suspected to have fossilized life, previous White House administration was notified. Only after getting permission from White House (took about couple of weeks) was that news even published.