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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, if you did the same test in the Sahara, it would come back positive; a gram of Sahara soil contains maybe a billion bacteria. Bacteria *are* our ecosystem, in a lot of ways. In the water, in Antarctic ice, miles beneath the surface of the earth, they are in their millions.
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.