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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.
Wow, are they already out of funds? That was fast.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
There's no comparison. America has killed tens of thousands more people.
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.
"...except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947
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.