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White House Briefed On "Potential For Life" On Mars
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."
It's always provocative when you hear they spotted a big black monolith in the regolith.
His first response was probably to ask if this meant Jenna was pregnant.
How fortunate that a potentially major scientific discovery happens on President Bush's watch. His keen intellect, intense curiousity of the natural world, and scientific rationality has been such a boon to our country and indeed our world.
damn, he hid good!!
This is my sig, there are many like it but this is mine
Wow, are they already out of funds? That was fast.
If there's life, we can kill it. If there's been life for a long time, it's probably left an oily residue somewhere.
Prepare for the Space War I! Spreading democracy throughout the Solar System!
--
make install -not war
It's probably some form of Martian Lichen growing on one of the equipment arms that is kept above freezing by the waste heat from the nuclear batteries. They'll let us know that it's some sort of f'd up moss that has been causing some of the problems with doing their experiments.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/WH08018.xml&headline=White%20House%20Briefed%20On%20Potential%20For%20Mars%20Life&channel=space
For a moment I though NASA discovered intelligent lifeforms in the white house.
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!
they have always said that the existance of water would make the discovery of life more certain. if indeed they confirmed the existance of water, it seems to me very likely that they will also find at least the building blocks of life if not evidence that basic lifeforms once existed on Mars. It's still a long way from confirming the existance of advance life forms, and even a longer way from confirming the existance of civilization.
i would find it incredible if, after finding life, they did not find any traces of aminoacids or any other building blocks. frankly, i think not finding any evidence of life even though water existed on Mars would be a bigger discovery then finding that some single cell life existed once. but that's just me.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
The Viking lander checked for microscopic life on Mars back in 1971. It wasn't a very sensitive test; the lander shot out some "sticky strings" and wound them back in. The lander had a unit which tested whether anything collected assimilated any of a few simple compounds. It didn't.
This established that Mars isn't teeming with microorganisms, like Earth. That doesn't eliminate all possibility of life, or something like it, but it did establish that there's no pervasive ecosystem there.
Finally an iron-clad reason to keep the Republicans from aborting Mars missions...
At least until we find actual life, when I guess they'll stop caring and start suggesting that such life invest in its own individual retirement plan.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
NASA Scientist: Mr. President we have confirmed there is water in the martian soil!
Bush: What? The Martians have oil? Can we still extract the water to produce gasoiline?
How do we deport these Illegal Aliens?
While i realize you are just bush-bashing, that same statement holds true for a surprisingly large number of humans.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...The President of Mars was briefed about the improbability of Intelligent Life governing the Earth.
Do you have a source for that?
President Bush is the CEO of a large corporation called the Executive Branch. Failing to tell the CEO before a major announcement is bound to get you in trouble. I'm more worried about Mr. Bush quashing or modifying the announcement for religious compliance.
And we all know that someone does deserve to be fired; unfortunately, we have to wait until January for that.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
While i realize you are just bush-bashing, that same statement holds true for a surprisingly large number of humans.
Which shows how little humanity has progressed in the last 2,000 years. The human race is just a bunch of superstitious bald apes with better tools than their cousins with fur.
Here is a hint.
Since Phoenix can find organics and (I think) has a mass spectrometer perhaps it has found DNA? If they just found some carbon compounds that wouldn't seem that noteworthy, they find them everywhere in space (like carbonaceous meteorites). Of course if it's DNA (or RNA) then the possibility of contamination comes in (of course it if uses a totally different "code" that would make me believe at least it wasn't deliberate. A really sneaky scientist could put some DNA in there that didn't bear any resemblance to Earthian DNA thus leading one to believe it was martian. I say this in reference to some experiments where scientists are adding some new "letters" to the alphabet of amino acids that DNA codes for, the triplet codons in nature redundantly code for only 20 amino acids, not the 64 it could.)
Reminds me of the scene if "E.T." when during the capture of E.T. someone announces "he's got DNA!".
Of course this is completely idle wishful speculation on my part, the discovery is likely much more pedestrian. Feel free to ignore this post. ;)
They got some grainy camera shots of Decepticons right before they lost the signal.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
While i realize you are just bush-bashing, that same statement holds true for a surprisingly large number of humans.
... that concerns me a lot more than the possibility of microbes on Mars.
Yes
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Genesis also neglects to mention life anywhere else but earth, doesn't mean it isn't out there.
The deepest part of the ocean floor has never been seen firsthand by human eyes without cameras, but it doesn't mean it's not there.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
If they'd just spent a little more time thinking it through, they could probably have come up with something more appropriate like Field Aerosol Recognition Thermal Sensing Nonionic Interference Failtested Frankly Erotic Robot. The resulting acronym would, I am sure, have been more memorable.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
ummm... Bush is still in office, and still causing damage.
Impeaching the bastard would do wonders for our political system, regardless of how much time he's got left.
My bet is on some kind of organic molecules, perhaps amino acids. Certainly interesting, probably not of interest to the non-scientist. Bush is probably not enjoying his briefing.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
On the contrary. We know of one place life originated. If we find a second, suddenly we know that life is almost certainly commonplace, and that intelligent life is almost certainly commonplace.
Right now we don't know anything because we've only got one data point.
Um...it's still 2008, and Bush is still president. He's part of the news story. And it's damn odd that scientific results have to be 'discussed' with him before they're released.
he's still in office and defending things like torture
take a look at this book review
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Brinkley-t.html?ref=review
still don't want to bash Bush?
"People tend to paint bush as some kind of Christian Fundamentalist,"
Probably because they form his political base and he tends to act, in an official capacity, in accordance with their beliefs and wishes.
"not his own beliefs to judge from his denominational affiliation."
He can believe whatever he wants, its his actions that we are to be concerned with.
Not at all. They're being kind and considerate. They know it's going to take him a lot longer to figure out than most people. It is really embarrassing when the "leader" of the "free world" doesn't get it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
2008 just called...[...]and all some people can do is keep hating the past.
2048 just called, and they want their time machine back. Also, I just hung up the phone with 1987 and they want their fucking stupid joke back.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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.
No, although theoretically if something swims past one of the microscopy instruments (there's an Atomic Force Microsoft as well as an optical instrument) that could be seen. However the Aviation Leak report specifically says their sources say "it's not life itself", but something to do with the behaviour of the soil in the presence of water - which is exactly what the "wet chemistry" aspect of MECA is about; adding pure water (carried from earth) to the samples to see what happens.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
to discuss ways to combat Martian terrorism. President Bush said "The War on Martian Terrorism" has just begun. Billions will be needed for various agencies to fight against the interplanetary menace.
Other than that, your post is accurate.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Impeaching the bastard would do wonders for our political system, regardless of how much time he's got left.
That is a point that is too overlooked these days. In order to restore the checks and balances, Bush and Cheney much be impeached before leaving office. Failure to do so sets the precedent that a sitting president can ignore limits to his power and order his staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas And after do so, that President can still complete his term of office. Allowing Bush and Cheney to go impeached finishes the process of turning the Constitution into "just a g*d dammed piece of paper" Bush hating isn't just about the temporary damages that occur during his presidency, but the lasting damages, like the destruction done to our rights and our Constitution. Bush hating is about the amount of freedoms we have lost because of his presidency and how it is very difficult to regain lost freedoms without bloodshed.
We are all just people.
because I didn't bloody see that link obviously.
Yes, it would be MUCH more interesting if we find life with a clearly different origin, but even extraterrestrial life we strongly suspect originated on Earth would be revolutionary. It would mean that there are two places just in our solar system that can support life. You could still argue that the genesis of life is an extraordinarily rare event, but you could no longer claim that the conditions needed to support life were rare.
The link you provided says the Senate passed the Telecom Immunity Bill. Not just Bush.
What's more, Obama voted the same way that Bush did. And had he voted, McCain would have almost certainly voted the same way, too.
Reminds me of a South Park episode...
Nixon also got "lucky" with a major scientific coup (the Apollo moon landings) happening on his watch. He despised JFK and killed the program just as soon as he could. Still, it is his name and not JFK's that is on the plaque affixed to the lunar lander descent stage. Hundreds/Thousands/Millions of years from now it'll still be there.
The low TV ratings didn't help either.
Well, speaking as someone who isn't from the US, I think the rest of the world isn't going to let the US forget Bush 1 & 2. Ever.
The US inflicted him on the world, and the rest of the world does tend towards a "you break it, you bought it" policy.
Witness, for instance, the amount of hand-washing being done amongst nations with regards to Iraq - the unmistakable sentiment is "you fucked it up, now you fix it."
If the US finds a decent, workable solution to Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, numerous South American countries, WIPO, WTO, etc, etc, then we might stop ragging on the US a bit.
At least, this is what I assume. I just bash Bush because he's an emissary of Satan sent here to lower the standards.
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.
(Because) I spoke about Creationists and ID supporters.
In my world that's quite a difference with (Roman!) Catholics or main stream Protestants.
I fully agree the Bible does not at any point exclude other life.
And for me the Bible is not a fact book but a guide.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Do you really wish to compare Al Qaeda and the U.S. in the same breath?
Because, if they are comparable, the terrorists really have won.
But will this knowledge being passed to the administration be lost in translation such it's interpreted that a possible Al Qaeda cell has been found? At the very minimum, does it posit that WMD have been discovered on Mars that threatens the fabric of American society.
As a neocon, I demand to know if this encroaches on intelligent design as well.
2 data points in this humongous universe isn't going to be very significant
The funny thing is that you are exactly wrong. You have the data, and you explain to us that you have the data, but you interpret it exactly opposite of what it is.
Life in livable parts of the universe is either very rare or it is very common, it is unlikely that it is something in between. If it is rare, it is extremely rare since so few areas of the universe can support life. Even our own galaxy, which is a rather peaceful place, can only support organic life in a very limited zone in the outer spirals.
So, why are you exactly wrong? If life is rare, ss the data set grows (or the universe becomes more humongous) the chances of finding life on any random planet drops off fast. If you assume that the universe is close to infinite, the chance of finding life on any one planet is exactly zero. Yup. You got it. EXACTLY zero. Now, the universe isn't infinite, but it is damned close to it for practical purposes, so finding life on any random planet is as close to zero as you can get. For any practical math, it IS zero.
Now do you see the significance of finding life on Mars?
If life on Mars developed independently of life on Earth, then that proves beyond any reasonable doubt, that life is basically omnipresent where it is supported.
One data point says nothing. Two data points says everywhere.
Now, if life on Earth and Mars is linked, that tells us something else significant, namely that life is hardier than first thought. It means it can survive for a long period in a fairly hostile environment (vacuum, extreme radiation etc). That would also imply that life can exist in far more places than we thought.
Well, I hope that the solution is better than the one Europe found for Serbia. Oh, wait, they didn't. They stood by as hundreds of thousands of people were brutally executed and dumped into mass graves as their wives and daughters were being raped.
If that didn't happen, then I might listen to your ragging.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Of course, if they were impeached, charged, arrested, and imprisoned (unlikely, but hey, one can wished) even after the term, that would set a nice message for future holders of the office as well.
So you are essentially saying you are ok with a dictator so long as he sometimes does stuff you like? Good luck with that. I myself like freedom too much to go along with that kind of crap.
the reasoning for the briefing is because the discovery of life on mars would be very controversial.
Certain religions have been founded on the belief that mankind, all life forms, and the earth were created in 7 days. Before Galileo, all Christans *knew* that the earth was the center of the universe, and it was quite damning for the church to be proven otherwise.
Right now, all Christan fundamentalists *know* that life only exists on earth. Granted, I have no doubt they'll be able to spin it, but the point is that the bible would lose even more credibility. In a country where you have to be Christan to be elected president, that is very significant.
An even more damning event would be to find a more advanced species that has never heard of God, or worse, follows a religion significantly different than Christianity. I again have little doubt that they wouldn't be able to spin it, but when your religion is based off a novel that is considered the word of god and that novel is consistently proven wrong, your religion is going to have problems.
The key part is in the last paragraph, where it says the "provocative" results came from the experiment where they added water from Earth to a sample of soil. I bet they had a burst of oxygen like the old Viking lander experiments, which no one ever satisfactorily explained. The one that I remembered that made sense was some kind of dry peroxide in the soil formed by UV, which reacted with water to generate O2, but didn't repeat because the peroxide was used up.
I hope this indicates some kind of chemistry that makes it easy to extract breathable O2 from Martian soil, so that any explorers/exploiters won't have to take as much in consumables. Would be nice to find a nitrogen source, then you'd have CHON, which is most of what you need to live. In the right proportions, of course.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Really? So the numerous agricultural combine lobbyist groups, comprised of small farm holders, is "big cash"? La Raza, the largest Hispanic lobbying group, is "big cash"? How about lobbyists from the ABA, or the AMA?
This notion that only "big cash" hire lobbyists is a myth. And its a myth perpetrated by the ignorant that can only rail against "the MAN" while sitting on their couches doing nothing.
Really?
Mods: The "Abiogenic Petroleum Origin Hypothesis" is garbage.
It's mainly used to comfort people by telling them there is a limitless supply of petroleum, and that energy crises are frauds perpetrated by the one world government in preparation for the arrival of the anti-christ. It's popular in the WorldNetDaily Hal Lindsey circles of charlatanism.
I think parent is kidding, btw... (apologies if you're not)
And it's damn odd that scientific results have to be 'discussed' with him before they're released.
Not really. They knew he'd need more time than the average person to comprehend the news, so they're giving him a little head start.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
"...except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947
In fact, the politicians do exactly what we want. We as normal citizens tend to only talk to people that are "like" us and the Internet has only made this worse. If you spent most of your time on DailyKos, you might think everyone was a liberal. Similarly, if you hung out on the FreeRepublic, you might think everyone was conservative.
You and others of your bent complain about corporations, and how evil they are, but at the same token, there's a lot of people that actually LIKE corporations and see them as a good thing, and if they have a complaint, it is that they either do not own one themselves, bought stock in the wrong one, or are not far up enough the management chain.
If the average person thought Walmart was evil, they would not have a business worth in excess of 200 billion dollars. People wouldn't shop there, and, if you tried to ban Walmart or screw it up in some way, people would shop at the next cheapest thing that came along. If the average person really thought we should protect American manufacturing, Ford stock might be worth more than $5 a share. If the average person really wanted to take the extra expense to protect the environment, they'd do it. If the average person was against guns, they wouldn't be made. There's no law that requires people to go to church and yet churches in some parts of the country are packed. If the average person thought Linux was better, they'd be using it.
Money does talk, and many Americans have voted loud and clear. They like to shop at Walmart, buy guns, drive foreign cars and buy foreign goods and they don't really care about the homeless except for when they trip over them, the environment, except maybe to decorate the yard with some new bushes and some wind chimes, and they generally like power tools, big televisions, more channels, violent video games, loads of porn over the internet, loads of beef and chicken for dinner and sometimes some pork. Other than that, they want to be left alone.
Lobbyists get paid for a reason. They get paid because the people that hire them have a legislative message and there are -many- messages out there. You'll have environmental lobbying, racial lobbying, religious lobbying, each of which representing the membership of some organization that you or I or the man down the street belongs to.
What else could there possibly be? We want a ton of stuff from government but don't want to pay for it, so we borrow it on all levels and try and get someone else to pay. A lot of Americans flat out don't want to work so they fight for disability, social security, welfare, unions and what not, or, they fight for the right to invest without taxation or charges, so we have low capital gains taxes and loads of welfare. Americans don't like the war in Iraq but they also do not like to lose, and so we stay in Iraq.
I could go on and on and on like this, but it should be pretty clear that we are getting the government that is exactly what we want. Our politicians only suck because we do.
This is my sig.
I for one hope they don't find any life on Mars because if they discover even a single non-Earth origin microbe it will mean the end of any possibility of colonizing or even terraforming Mars. Every religious and nature group will come out against us going to Mars for science and colonization. Plus you'll get the people fearful of Martian life getting to Earth against it too. Life on Mars would almost mean the end of Space exploration for the foreseeable future.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Trying to cover up something like "life on mars" is futile and foolish.
Fancy that... The government to hide something. Not like any agent of the government, elected or not, has ever tried to do anything like that. Land mines in Central America (Iran Contra affair), Weapons for hostages (Iran hostage crisis), The The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or the Lies of the Century (this site will tick some people off!). There are so many examples of people in government doing exactly what you are arguing they would not do for whatever reason. They do not care what the future has in store. They are only focused on getting through their fears of today. People do very funny (and bad) things when they are cornered by their fears or believe they are being cornered by things that they are afraid of.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
While I find this story to be somewhat interesting, My faith in modern science is rapidly waning. Far too much of today's "science" is based upon conjecture, presupposition, assumption and, bias rather than truly objective scientific method. I do hope we have learned something useful from the red planet. It is nice to see a few cogent posts regarding the subject matter. Unfortunately, they are the vast minority. I assume those who have chosen this venue to vilify certain politicians, are well acquainted with said politicians and are privy to detailed information regarding their daily duties, private conversations and, perhaps even their thoughts . To spew such vitriol without very intimate knowledge would seem to indicate a psychological problem or a diminished capacity for reason. In any case, I look forward to the announcement of the MECA discovery with some degree of anticipation.
If there is life on Mars, then the next question is whether it uses nucleic acids (DNA/RNA) for coding. All life on earth uses nucleic acids to encode genes. [Prions may be an exception to this rule but they are parasites that were originally encoded by nucleic acids and depend on nucleic acid-encoded 'hosts'.]
Core life functions are remarkably conserved on earth, e.g., human and pea (plant) histones, which are proteins that bind DNA, remain ~80% identical after a billion years or so of evolution. If extraterrestrial life has fundamentally different molecules and 'code' (e.g., non-nucleic acid genes, or different codes for amino acids, or the sequences of histone-like proteins, etc.), then life probably originated twice, independently. If instead the core functions are similar, then there was one common origin. These differences and similarities would change our estimates on the odds of life evolving independently elsewhere.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...