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Martian Microbe Fossils, Not So Debunked Anymore
rubycodez writes "Three meteorites, including one that has been in a British museum for over a century, are going to be put under the electron microscope and ion microprobe by NASA. We're 'very, very close to proving there is or has been life [on Mars],' said David McKay, chief of astrobiology at Johnson Space Center."
Undebunked? Rebunked? Or just bunked?
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
The truth is out there...
June 2010: "Scientists analysing martian meteorites mysteriously dissappear after announcing they where close to a breakthrough. Majestic 12 suspected."
-paul
David McKay was created in a quantum collision between David Hewlett and the character he plays Rodney McKay.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=proof-of-martians-to-come-this-year-2010-01
we here on earth are all alone in the great big dark.
If that's true, it's an awful waste of space.
You cannot PROVE that life existed, you can only fail to disprove it exists (or existed). Very interesting nonetheless, I'd thought they disproved it a while back.
I just had a psychic vision of the future. In my vision, this test ended up either producing negative or inconclusive results--once again disappointing the millions of believers who just cannot accept that, for all practical intents and purposes, we here on earth are all alone in the great big dark. I also see myself posting a link this this very post, a year or so from now, in yet another similar thread that has the believers once again futilely hoping that the discovery of life out there is "very, very close."
I think what you're witnessing isn't some X-Files Want to Believe style cult assembly or circle jerk but instead the simple fact that should this be confirmed, it changes everything. From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation but also from a philosophical and -- perhaps most importantly -- theological point of view. Since the gravity of a decision in the positive direction is so great, the tiniest disturbances in the canon of thought surrounding extraterrestrial life gets close attention by the nerd world. Even the minuscule announcement that in a certain amount of time we will know with 100% certainty one way or the other on these fossils is actually newsworthy.
Similar to the anti-global warming decision. Huge consequences mean massive attention.
My work here is dung.
...watching us amusedly from the shadows while we blindly poke sticks in the opposite direction.
One of the comments from the actual article point to this YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfSjJeQf58
I don't know about you, but a four-frame, time lapse, YouTube video showing brown things apparently moving to good enough for me. The Mars landscape is teeming with life! Life I say!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Yeah but are we ever going to go find it or just sit on earth and twiddle our thumbs?
Personally I trust everything that McMay says. He was a great help at Stargate Command, and performed and continues to perform his duties very well in Atlantis.
..I'm curious if, based on previous evidence that water existed on Mars at some point before it hit the deep-freeze, does this essentially suggest that water = life everywhere? Theoretically, then, if Europa contains water, then it, theoretically, might also have similar "organisms" that are found on Mars?
Like I said in the title, I know zip about how all this works, but once you've got some water sloshing around on your planet, what else do you need? Organic material presumably has to start somewhere, I just don't have any clue as to where.
How did meteorites from Mars end up on Earth? I'm not trying to suggest it's not true, but how does that happen? What causes portions of mars to both erupt out of the planet AND escape Mars' gravity/orbit and wind up on Earth? Aren't those immensely small odds? And we have 3 such meteorites?
The universe is just too big and vast for this to be the only planet with life on it.
Estimates are what these days for # of galaxies? Hundreds of billions? You telling me we're the only ones out here?
I don't buy it.
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...this topic. Any here on Slashdot?
For example, how did we determine that Allan Hills 84001 came from Mars and not anywhere else? Not even a Mars-like planet in a nearby solar system? How?
How do we know that the signs of life on that rock are from before it was landed, rather than after? I see wikipedia mention that 'some argue', but there's almost no meat on these bones.
There are more questions, but I guess I'm uncomfortable with the word 'prove'. If this were in a court of law, for example, all of this would be 'circumstantial'. There generally needs to be a lot of it, and it needs to be compelling, before this sort of evidence would get a verdict. This leads me to suspect one of these scenarios:
A) There's more detail here. (I'm rooting for this one)
B) The scientific word 'prove' isn't the same as other uses of 'prove' (which would be sad, since they already have their own words - e.g. hypothesis)
Anyway if you either are a third party with sources or someone who actually works with this kind of thing, please do comment below. I'm in the mood to learn something today.
Okay, even if there is or was at some time life on Mars, evidence of microbes isn't very intersting; also, just about any way you look at it, such evidence would still leave us, as you say, "alone in the great big dark."
Still, the universe is unimaginably large. Even the distance to the nearest star boggles the human imagination. Do you really think that among all those stars and all those galaxies made up of all those stars, there is absolutely no other life than on our planet, and no intelligent life of any kind?
I'm not surprised the meteorites sat in the British Museum for so long before being given a good once over. There's so much crap in there it would blow you away. Their section on Egypt is bigger and better than the whole King Tut exhibit tour. hehe it's no wonder other countries are like "um can we have our stuff back?"
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
First of all, why bother linking to PopSci when the original story, even as quoted by PopSci, is at Spaceflight Now?
(Of course, the title of the Slashdot piece is pretty bad as well, so I be too surprised.)
Second, the quote in both the blurb and the PopSci article is taken out of context. The original, from Spaceflight Now:
"But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there," McKay tells Spaceflight Now.
The words at the beginning make a world of difference in terms of McKay's attitude. He's not asserting something he can't know, he's stating he, personally, feels confident. (But it is stated as an opinion.) That's just crappy reporting. (Or, in this case, not even reporting: copying and pasting.)
All that said, it'll be exciting if it turns up anything, but don't hold your breath. There are just so many ways to contaminate the samples or to produce a lot of the effects that they've seen abiotically that I don't think we'll answer this question from Earth. I suspect to get most scientists to agree that there's life, we'll have to find it in situ.
I just had a psychic vision of the future.
Wish I'd get psychic visions of the future. What do I get instead? I get deja vu. Serious, eerie, really-creep-you-out style deja vu.
Cunts, on slashdot...?
You must be from Mars or something... Welcome, lifeform!!
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
And "not so debunked" is still debunked. How come a martian asteroid on Earth can have life yet we didn't find any on the planet itself ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you can impugn the motives of people who believe in the possibility of life outside earth, can we impugn your motives for denying that possibility? You think we're just afraid of the dark, and being alone. Right. Well, maybe you are scared of the implications if there IS life outside earth. Maybe we aren't special, and maybe you're terrified of that possibility, and would rather be alone in the dark than have to share the universe with others.
What's the point of the statement you made? Do you really need to feel superior, and put others down? Do you need to demonstrate your superior stoicism in order to attract a mate or something? What's the deal? Do you also go around telling little kids that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are myths? Why do you even care so much?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
How's that?
near complete annihilation of Drake's equation
Whoa, there! Drake's equation has quite a few terms in it and only two of those terms are subject to reevaluation: the average number of planets per star that are suitable for life, and the fraction of planets which are suitable for life that actually have life. The other numbers, speculative as they are, should remain unchanged by the discovery of microbial life on Mars.
Until you have evidence otherwise, it's only wishful thinking.
My red flag went up though when the quote mentioned he was very close to proving of ET. Shouldn't they be more scientific and just report on if there actually is anything there? The way it is worded made it sound like he would prove it one way or another. With the implications that would have, he is only inviting [more] controversy.
God put them there to test us.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
How does this effect the Drake equation? Sure, it would alter an input, but that's hardly annihilation.
. From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation ...
Err, this would help us pin down one of the variables in the drake equation, not destroy it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation
Specifically these variables:
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fe = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
Well I could give a crap about theology. What I want to know is some of the biochemical properties of these organisms. Did they use DNA, RNA or some entirely different set of molecules of protein encoding? Did they share a common ancestor with life on Earth? Is it possible that life had evolved on Earth prior to the collision with the Mars-sized body that produced the Earth, and we have a sort of limited panspermia going on (or maybe it's visa-versa, maybe life began on Mars)? If life was on Mars, is it quite possible as its atmosphere slipped away and its surface became incredibly hostile that somewhere below their surfaces, or perhaps even in deeper valleys and rift zones like Valles Marineris, where atmospheric pressure would be higher and the potential for a more habitable zone might be found?
Of course, this infinitely increases the potential for life elsewhere in the solar system. Europa becomes target #2, and, potentially a far more likely place than Mars to find a complex ecology.
I suppose, in consideration of theology, it depends on who you're asking. Some of the IDers (Michael Behe and his ilk) and Theistic Evolutionists (Catholics tend to this one) will not have any epiphanies. For Old Earth Creationists, it probably won't sway them. But YECs, well, that's a group who has heavily painted themselves into a corner. Now, on top of having to claim the earth is only 6,000 years old, they have to deal gyrations over the age of Mars. They'll probably start by denying all of it, claiming it to be a hoax by evil evilushionists. Then they'll come around to the idea that God planted life there, but no later than 6000 years ago! The people who will change views are the fence sitters at any of these levels.
As for space exploration, well the push for a long-term manned mission to Mars is going to get a major bump. We simply do not have the probes complex enough for more than a bit scouring of the few top inches of Mars' crust. I'm not putting them down, the Mars Landers have been an overwhelming success, but the kind of science any probe sent there, or any probe they're planning to send there, is still pretty limited.
Maybe we should put off any notions of getting humans there in the next two or three decades, and stretch it out to 2050 or 2060, working on self-sustaining long-term bases for humans, so we can send people there for a few years at a time. I'm sure you would have no lack of volunteers among the scientific community.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
the same can be said for the other side of the argument too. Unless you have clear proof there isn't life out there, that's only wishful thinking.
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...fourteen ducks, and we can't quote it. Which is to say, welcome to Slashdot. Where everyone is perfectly knowledgeable about everything AND they're ready to explain that they know know far more about it than you do, all while not saying anything about it at all.
No, I'm telling you that intelligent, coincidental, perceptible alien life must be pretty damn rare. And the distances involved would be so vast that even finding them (much less communicating with them) is probably out of the question. Is it out there *somewhere*? Probably. Will we ever see it? Extremely unlikely. "Coincidental" and "perceptible" are probably the trickiest parts of finding intelligent alien life, BTW (humans have only used perceptible radio waves for 100 years out of this planet's four billion year history, for example). So, like I said, for all practical intents and purposes we're all alone in the vast empty. Every other planet in our solar system has so far proven to be more sterile than an operating theater, devoid of even the simplest life.
Well, there *are* those aliens who keep stealing out rednecks for anal probes. But, aside from those guys, no one.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
He was speaking about practical matters. It is fairly unlikely we will notice life in another galaxy, at least not anytime soon.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation but also from a philosophical and -- perhaps most importantly -- theological point of view.
For example, creation becomes a lot more plausible, within a flexible version of the concept that puts life here through magical forces, only on board a rock. And if you can keep an open enough mind to consider such a possibility, you may find that nothing is changed at all. Facts, faith, and belief will all still exist despite any findings from efforts such as these.
Yes, you *could* say it that way, in that same way you could also point out that we don't have clear proof that unicorns and leprechauns *DON'T* exist.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Since there is no evidence one way or the other, any position is wishful thinking.
Conclusive proof will be when we can grow the life in a lab repeatedly. All else is pure belief system driven.
The other numbers, speculative as they are, should remain unchanged by the discovery of microbial life on Mars.
Really? It doesn't tell you how little we know about those numbers let alone the oversimplified equation?
Do you have a reason that life can only take the form familiar to us?
Drake's equation has quite a few terms in it and only two of those terms are subject to reevaluation: the average number of planets per star that are suitable for life, and the fraction of planets which are suitable for life that actually have life.
Could also be added that Mars and Earth could have a common source of primordial life, and/or that samples from one crossed over to the other. Far greater would be the impact IF life on Mars turned out to be so radically different from Earth's as to preclude any sort of common ancestry.
The Long Now Foundation
Actually, I would be thrilled at finding life (and happy to be proven wrong). My point is that people shouldn't get their hopes up (especially in light of the very unprofessional and irresponsible hype from David McKay) and that resources spent on such a search will likely be a waste at the end of the day. It's all well to dream, as long as you realize it's still only a dream, not reality.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Disclaimer: I am a planetary scientist but do not work directly on the martian meteorites.
1) We know that the rocks are from Mars because they all have consistent isotope ratios between the various meteorites that are inconsistent with those isotope ratios on Earth but consistent with isotopic ratios on Mars
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Neutron_activation_analysis
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6T-41WBDHD-8&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2000&_alid=445411040&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=5823&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000053194&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1495569&md5=1c1b0d04dba7f06365b072655bef68b3 (May need a subscription)
2) The age(s) of the possible fossils are greater than the time the meteorites have been on Earth. Again, this can be calculated using various isotope ratios. In essence, these things formed while the rocks were still on Mars.
3) I agree with your discomfort with the word "prove." Most scientific study is based on the Popper philosophy of disproving something rather than proving its opposite.
A) The new instrumentation and techniques being used on these meteorites are greatly advancing our understanding of them. The press announcement that AH84001 might have evidence of life was premature (what we call "science by press release"), but the publications by the team were certainly good and valid work, whether they are falsified or not...
B) The scientific word "prove" is more about the lack of any valid competing hypotheses. If you can't come up with a reasonable alternative explanation for the data, you have to accept the presented explanation.
that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are myths
WHAT?!?!
Oh my God...NOOOOOOOOOO!!! You son of a bitch! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
BTW, mod up the parent. +1 Insightful
Life on fucking mars.
I'll bet you nerdy cunts never thought you'd see the day.
well, bend over and lick my balls, Jew.
Hey, Alex, I recognize your style, what in Burty's name are you doing on Slashdot?
Until you have proof that there _ISN'T_ any extraterrestrial life, it is _YOU_ who are wishfully thinking.
It's a simple matter of taking what we know about the earths history and biology, then applying probability to what we know about the universe. Unless you're one of those who think modern astronomy is bunk and what we're seeing is just an illusion made by a sphere with stars painted on it... uhm...
Anyway, even when applying the most conservative of estimates we're still going to have a pretty slim chance of being the only life to be found.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Woah woah woah! Hold the phone. What do you mean unicorns don't exist?
WTH is this thing then?
http://zuill.us/andreablog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/uni-corn-lrg1.jpg
Answer me that, smarty pants! ;-P
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It's not wishful thinking to me, as I don't think I care if Earth is the only planet with intelligent life or not. But I don't think people really have a grasp of how immense the Universe is when they talk about low probability of other life forms existing elsewhere.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
We only need a first-class five-star university for the "third world" women.
In any society where women have economic and social equality, population growth evens out. It also empowers the other half of the population to improve the condition of their communities.
It was a joke on the Stephanie Miller show, but the best way to win the war in Afghanistan is to air-lift out anything with a vagina.
We *think* we know that life arose.... There, I fixed that for you.
Not so fast. Even should life on Mars be proven, it does not "change everything". It's entirely possible that life on Mars came from Earth, or even vice versa. Meteoric impacts are quite capable of ejecting material at escape velocities. Some microbes in the ejecta can survive this environment and, upon landing on the neighboring planet, reproduce.
Although any form of life on Mars would indeed be big news, it would not mean life originated independently. Fascinating stuff, but not necessarily the big impact on the Drake equation that you surmise.
Nearby is still light years away.
An unguided rock fragment expelled from several light years away?
Odds are that we'd get missed since the diameter of the earth's gravity well is a vanishingly small arc within the solar system, never mind to a nearby system.
Nah...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Although novel and clever, your argument doesn't actually apply to this situation. Unlike unicorns and leprechauns, we actually do have life here, lots of it, and furthermore there are believed to be billions of places in the universe very similar to here.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Until you have proof that Bigfoot _ISN'T_ real, it is _YOU_ who are wishfully thinking.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Isotope ratios match those found by the 1970's Viking landers. Each planet has a different set of ratios, sort of like a female's breast-waste-hip measurements: 38-24-36 etc. (don't ask why I thot of that analogy first).
Occam's Razor says they are from Mars. Having 3+ meteorites that all match the Mars ratios are far more likely to have been blasted from Mars than some planet outside our solar system that happens to match Mars's ratios. But even discovering life from a distant planet is an important discovery in itself.
I believe there are at least 3 parts to this argument. The first is that all 3 meteorites have similar microbe fossils despite being from different places on Earth. Second, the frequency and composition of outside contamination would be different on the surface than in the interior of the rocks if contaminated. But the distribution is allegedly fairly uniform. Third, the chemical or structural pattern would be different if the life came after-the-fact. But, I don't know the details of this one. Hopefully the to-be-released paper will clarify these items.
They can tell by radiation damage patterns that a given rock has been in space relatively recently. This means that likely the rocks have been close to the surface of Earth rather than being deep underground. But the Mars fossils resemble underground life (as found on Earth).
Table-ized A.I.
1950 called and once their abiogenesis theory back. There are competing theories, in particular the possibility that life may have evolved around deep sea vents. Lots of organic compounds, liquid water and lots and lots of energy.
If there were similar conditions in the early seas of Mars, then there's no reason to suspect that life could not have began in similar fashion there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It doesn't nuke the Drake equation, it just moves the tiny number one or two steps to the right. We know that there are trillions of trillions of stars in the universe, we're slowly learning how many of them have planets and how many of those planets might be habitable. If life is confirmed on Mars we'll begin to have an idea how common simple life is. Unfortunatly, we also know that we haven't detected any alien civilizations, despite a few decades worth of looking.
The fact that we figure there are plenty of stars and planets that could support life but don'tmake contact means that one of the things we don't know about must be very unlikely. Maybe life is exceedingly rare, something life on Mars would seem to refute. Maybe intelligence is exceedingly rare, and the galaxy is filled with lush, but wild, environments. Or maybe not all intelligence leads to producing technology that can facilitate interstellar communication. After all, new research says that non-beamed radio will not travel as far as was previously thought, aliens more than a few dozen light years away won't be able to watch I Love Lucy reruns, it's washed out by the cosmic noise.
Then of course it's possible that technological civilizations don't survive very long. We've only been technologically capable of attempting contact for 50 years or so, and we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out. Not to mention the possibility of environmental damage and depletion of resources (more because they will lead to war than because they would lead to extinction of humanity in and of themselves).
My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.
We also have horses too, and numerous stories of magical ones with horns. That's way more evidence than we have of any alien life.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just hype and fishing for funding. Nothing to see here, move along.
I know that I arose from a woman called Joan and a man called Vincent. My cousin didn't have a mother called Joan or a father called Vincent, threfore she can't possibly exist. Or maybe, just maybe, just because things happened one way once doesn't mean that's the only way they can happen.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I should clarify that body measurements are not ratios. I meant that a set of numerical measurements serve as a (mostly) unique "signature". The chance of two women having the same measurements is slim (no pun intended) if there's enough precision in the measurements. Of course, if they binge in chips the next day, then all bests are off.
Table-ized A.I.
GP was paraphrasing Thomas Carlyle's take on the cosmos: "A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space."
I would agree with you, if not for Von Neumann probes.
Humanity isn't technologically far from being able to put a collection of probes in every solar system in the Galaxy. All that you need is a probe that's durable enough to cross interstellar distances and versatile enough to make a few copies of itself when it gets there. It doesn't need to be particularly fast, even at .5 c it would only take a few hundred million years (blink of an eye in cosmological terms) to probe the entire galaxy. Put a half dozen probes in each system and have them repair or replace each other when they break and they could last effectively forever.
The fact that we don't see any probes can only mean one of a few things A) We're the only ones who would come up with or implement the idea (probably pretty unlikely, and the idea has been at least discussed as a hypothetical in NASA). B) We're the first (also unlikely given the age of the earth compared to that of the galaxy). Or C) The probes remain hidden from us. This is also unlikely but it is a bit harder to understand why. Once you say there are intelligences other than us, it implies that there are many in the galaxy. Either intelligence is exceedingly rare and we're the fluke, or it isn't and with the number of stars in the galaxy there should be many intelligences. The odds of all the various hypothetical races (and divisions within races presumably) not wanting to make contact would seem to be low. It would only take one to broadcast out a signal and say "here we are!" and the game would be up.
Stupid arguments does not make your opinion equally valid.
- These characters were randomly selected.
doo doo dee doo doo!
Wow. Thank you! Thank you very much. I was nervous about posting this question, but you have definitely made my day.
That's not excitement that you are feeling, bro....
Mod parent up: it's a good, concise, balanced reply.
I'd also recommend that anyone interested in following up this story look up some of the stuff by (e.g.) John Bradley on this as well, to provide a bit of a counterpoint, as the headline-grabbing articles tend to lack scientifi balance. The following link's a good few years old, and the work has moved on a bit, but it is a pretty good potted summary of the arguments for and against a biological origin of these structures.
http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec97/LifeonMarsUpdate2.html
(Disclaimer: I'm an astrophysicist that works on astrochemistry, but I also don't personally do lab work on meteorites).
David McKay is the scientist whose own brother doesn't even believe him. See this article from back at the 10-year anniversary of the "found life" announcement. It sounds like this thing has become his own little personal crusade.
But some scientists are still bothered by the "Made in China" imprint on the bottom of the rocks.
Table-ized A.I.
I'd volunteer just to go even if it means sweeping floors and doing heavy lifting. Watch out Sariens, I may speak softly but I carry a large corn broom!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
It's disappointing to see this kind of comment (which points to an obvious conflict between reality and theory) modded as "troll" by slashdotters, who are presumably more open-minded than the average bear.
Why was this given insightful? It's just a two-part snarky comment by an AC.
The first part of the comment is just an ad hominem argument, with nothing specific to back it up. In regards to the second part, I agree that Drake's equation is oversimplified, but unless you have specific things to say about it, there's no better estimate out there.
-t.
How does this effect the Drake equation? Sure, it would alter an input, but that's hardly annihilation.
Well, it's a bit of a problem with Ludwig von Drake - when people start questioning his numbers, he gets frustrated easily, steam blows out his ears, and he has a tendency to either grab his papers carelessly and run around them, tear them up in anger, or start babbling like a madman and eat them...
Bow-ties are cool.
It's all well to dream, as long as you realize it's still only a dream, not reality.
Last night I dreamed I would wake up, eat breakfast, and have sex with a supermodel. Dreams can come true. Or at least parts of them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Until you have proof that Bigfoot _ISN'T_ real, it is _YOU_ who are wishfully thinking.
Your logic fails.
We know life exists and evolved under a given set of circumstances. We have good evidence that the set of circumstances that gave rise to life on earth may exist somewhere in the universe outside of the earth. It is therefore entirely logical to deduce with some probability that life as we know it may exist somewhere in the universe outside of the earth.
We have absolutely no evidence to support the idea that Bigfoot exists or has existed under any set of circumstances. Any evidence presented so far has been debunked as a hoax.
Assuming something exists based on the fact that the circumstances that would give rise to are known to exist is not at all the same as assuming something exists when there's no evidence to support its existence. Then again, you've just proved the existence of trolls, and I'm still pretty certain they aren't supposed to exist.
And the distances involved would be so vast that even finding them (much less communicating with them) is probably out of the question. Is it out there *somewhere*? Probably. Will we ever see it? Extremely unlikely.
Well in your original post you said you predicted this test for life on Mars (and future tests based on your prediction of remaking the same prediction) would be negative. That seemed to strongly imply your "alone in the dark" comment was regarding the rarity of life itself.
That's completely different than saying that intelligent life probably exists out there, but it's too far away for us to have a meaningful interaction with. It's also a pretty trivial statement to say to the crowd who is following the search for life. We already know that barring FTL it's going to be damn hard to find or especially talk to any alien civilization. We'd have to be damn lucky (or life turn out to be damn ubiquitous) to find sentient aliens somewhere as close as Alpha Centauri. Otherwise there's no way to be sure that by the time we detect aliens then send a message back to them that they aren't long extinct, or vice versa on aliens detecting us.
So, like I said, for all practical intents and purposes we're all alone in the vast empty.
Now that I know what you actually meant by that, I just want to say that there's no way you can go from that statement to the previous and following statements that there is and never has been life on Mars.
Every other planet in our solar system has so far proven to be more sterile than an operating theater, devoid of even the simplest life.
Except that's the very thing that's under scrutiny, now isn't it? "So far proven" means little more than we point our telescopes at it and don't see a body literally transformed by life. We're talking about the possibility of simple microbial life, past or present on Mars. If found, even if they're ancient fossils and the planet is currently as dead as a cursory glance seems to indicate, it still means the number of planets that had the potential to host life goes from one to two. It means we have to expand our view of where life can form or survive, and it means we would need to start looking closer at all those other bodies that "so far" we assume are dead.
You could have just as easily said that planetary systems themselves were incredibly rare because outside of our own we hadn't found any. But that's because we lacked the ability to detect them. Now that we do, we're finding them everywhere. Finding life on another planet is much harder than finding a planet itself, so let's let the scientists do their work before we make any more "predictions" eh?
The enemies of Democracy are
Everybody knows the Invisible Pink Unicorn exists.
Don't be a fool.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
. From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation ...
Err, this would help us pin down one of the variables in the drake equation, not destroy it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation
Specifically these variables:
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fe = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
What about Bs?
Bow-ties are cool.
Theistic Evolutionists(Catholics tend to this one) will not have any epiphanies
You're right, it has been addressed by the Vatican. Catholics believe aliens could exist. No epiphanies required.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7399661.stm
We know that life arose from self-assembling molecules formed in a primitive thick atmosphere that rained into a primordial ocean where membranes wrapped around RNA packages to create unicellular life which eventually clustered and evolved into...us. Mars has not had the atmosphere with methane and ammonia needed for amino acids to form and, if it did indeed have oceans, they were too small, too shallow, and far too short-lived to have allowed life to have evolved. Ergo...life on Mars is...impossible. Cleared that right up for ya.
Assuming, of course that all life requires RNA, methane, ammonia, amino acids and oceans of water to form and that any life in the universe will have to organic in nature. (Organic as in being carbon based, not made naturally).
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Yes, you *could* say it that way, in that same way you could also point out that we don't have clear proof that unicorns and leprechauns *DON'T* exist.
But you can't prove that they don't not exist, either!
Bow-ties are cool.
We also have horses too, and numerous stories of magical ones with horns. That's way more evidence than we have of any alien life.
Huh?
We have people, and numerous stories of people from other worlds. So I'd say the amount of evidence is about equal. XD
Bow-ties are cool.
Damnit, Cartman, get off Slashdot.
Note: Any and all anecdotes about wives or girlfriends can and will be dismissed as "beards".
Any and all anecdotes about heterosexual intercourse can and will be disregarded due to the assumption that you were fantasizing about the Goatse guy the whole time.
PS: I put an asshole in your boyfriend's asshole, so you can have gay butt sex while you're having gay butt sex.
Peace.
Not necessarily unlikely.
The universe is 13 billion years old. The Solar System's ~6 billion years old. But it's not like the universe has a 7 billion year head-start on us. There wasn't anything heavier than helium 13 billion years ago. It took multiple generations of supernovae to generate enough heavy elements that rocky planets could form.
Looking at our little rock, over the past 5.6 billion years, life took a bit over 2-3 billion of those years to get started, and multicellular life's pretty new - the Cambrian Explosion took place barely 500M years ago. 80% of our planet's inhabited history consists of nothing more than algae and bacteria.
There may be worlds with billion-year head starts on life, but not ten-billion-year head starts. If those worlds also spent 80-90% of their time inhabited only by germs, that billion-year head start could be as low as 100-200MY.
And those are eyeblinks on the same order of magnitude as it would take to colonize a galaxy using 0.1-0.5c probes.
The possibility that we're the first is, IMO, greatly underestimated.
You have Popper backwards.
Man, what's John Popper got to do with this?
Bow-ties are cool.
It depends on the meteorite being studied. When a meteorite is discovered, scientists can study it and compare it to moon rocks. They can compare the composition and makeup of the rock with the moon rocks and they'll find that the meteorites bear a strong resemblance, thus making it probable that it came from the moon.
For Martian meterorites, they can look at a few other things. You can first check to see if it's igneous. That indicates that it might have come from a place with molten rock and it solidified at some point. That in turn indicates that this came from a planetary body. Now that you've established it came from a planet or a moon and not the asteroid belt, you examine other things. The meterorite might have gas bubbles in it, so you compare the composition of the gas with your knowledge of the atmosphere of other planets. In the case of ALH84001, they may have seen that the rock had lots of Fe, like Mars, and that it had gas bubbles which matched what previous landers on the planet may have observed. They then come to the conclusion that the meteorite in question is probably from Mars.
As for your other questions, the wikipedia article rightly points out that ALH84001 might have been contaminated. That's why you see articles like this peppered with maybe and probably every few words.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Really. We already count the "golden zone", orbits hospitable to life as we know it, extending from the orbit of Venus to the orbit of Mars. Nothing changes here. It's also pretty clear that either of these planets might well have supported life before we came along.. Venus with an earlier atmosphere, Mars before it cooled off and lost most of its atmosphere, might have supported life. This term, ne, is not changed by finding life on Mars. It's definitely affected by our greater understanding of where habitable planets might be, such as large moons around warm gas giants.
The real question is a simple one: how likely is life on a planet that could support life. If we find that Mars had life, and it couldn't have been that which begat life here much later, then we have a fairly profound datapoint. Not a huge sample, obviously, but this would suggest life is fairly likely to show up on planets that can support life. This is the f term in the Drake Equation, and finding independent life on Mars impacts the Drake Equation only here.
That's a very different question than "are we alone", at least in the sense of other intelligent life. You need a planet stable enough for life to evolve into intelligence, and ecosystems that support the very high energy cost of intelligence (that's fi term in Drake's Equation... no changes here, either).
-Dave Haynie
We are all mutts.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, their standard rhetoric on dinosaurs would still apply: Either the devil put it there to destroy mankinds belief in God, or else God placed it there as part of the creation process to test the faith of true believers.
So no major boat-rocking for that crowd either. Once someone chooses to believe something and stake their personal world view on it, it's pretty hard to dislodge that belief.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
... any speculation about life in other galaxies is just that - speculation. There's no realistic hope of ever knowing whether there is or isn't any form of life in a body that's, say, 2.5 million light-years away (the distance to Andromeda). The only thing it really makes sense to even talk about is whether there's life elsewhere in THIS galaxy, and even that would be quite a trick to detect without some pretty substantial advances in technology. Mars is right next door, and we've been trying to answer this question for how many years? And we still don't really know.
I'll grant that the universe is a really huge place, and it seems likely that if life happened here, it probably happened SOMEWHERE else. But life outside the Milky Way might as well not exist, as far as we're concerned. We'll never be able to interact with it in any way.
"The scientific teams are "very, very close to proving there is or has been life [on Mars]," said David McKay, chief of astrobiology at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a Spaceflight Now interview."
Shouldn't the conclusion follow from the experiment or data?
P226
Just like how, what with all the water, nothing got "built" on earth. Oh, wait...
We know that life arose from self-assembling molecules formed in a primitive thick atmosphere that rained into a primordial ocean where membranes wrapped around RNA packages to create unicellular life which eventually clustered and evolved into...us. Mars has not had the atmosphere with methane and ammonia needed for amino acids to form and, if it did indeed have oceans, they were too small, too shallow, and far too short-lived to have allowed life to have evolved. Ergo...life on Mars is...impossible. Cleared that right up for ya.
Dude, can you share a) your time travel machine, or b) your method of achieving a lifespan of 3 billion years? I think the rest of the world would love to hear about it.
Because it was insightful. Snarky sure, but insightful.
The AC didn't say that the *equation* was in question, but that the numbers we have to plug into that equation are very suspect.
For example, how did we determine that Allan Hills 84001 came from Mars and not anywhere else? Not even a Mars-like planet in a nearby solar system? How?
On the bottom of the rock, it was stamped "Made on Mars".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Is that Rodney McKay's brother? Can't they just take an F-302 and look at Mars directly?
You're welcome! It's good to see people genuinely interested instead of automatically dismissing because they think they thought of the one thing wrong with the analysis that was missed by the possibly hundreds of scientists who do this day-in and day-out...
A clarification on my post:
A) I don't think it was misunderstood, but want to clarify that the "whether they are falsified or not..." statement was meant to say that whatever the final conclusion about the possible fossils, the initial (1996) work raising the possibility that AH84001 had fossilized martian life was good work, not that the authors might have faked their data. They did not.
I'm of two minds about holding press releases about these kinds of conclusions. 1) It's important to share this with the world. 2) It's important to be sure you've accounted for as many of the possible controversies with your data before going to the public who may not understand the details.
This doesn't really affect Drake's equation at all. Drake's equation is already a ridiculous load of hooey. It's simply splitting a single unknowable question mark into a handful of smaller, unknowable question marks. Even assuming an estimated number could be plugged in to any of the terms, the unknowns render that estimate moot, and even if they didn't, the equation is sensitive enough to small variances that the margin of error in any estimate will itself render the calculation pointless.
Drake's Equation is a thought experiment, not an actual useful mathematical calculation.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I'd love to see more Slashdot posters stop using the Subject field to start the main body of their comment. First type the body, then summarize it in the subject.
this rock sat around in a museum for over 100 years, and probably outside on ther ground for longer than that. If it really is proof of life, how sure are they that it isn't just contamination from something terrestial? It may have come from Mars, but how long has it been exposed to Earth life?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Dangit! Missed another point I wanted to make..
When we say we have "proved" something, we generally mean we've shown, to our satisfaction, that the competing hypotheses are not as strong as the hypothesis we have "proven."
So, what these guys are doing is working to show why these possible fossils are not likely to have formed on Earth, are not likely to have formed as precipitates, etc. Eventually, they expect to show that all of the competing hypotheses for the formation are weaker than (or have even been falsified) their hypothesis that they were formed by microbial life on Mars.
When I was younger and went to church, I asked this question to the local minister who replied that the bible talks about 'behemoths'. Always wondered why more church folk didn't use this stance. Seems a better excuse that the standard crap!
The universe is just too big and vast for this to be the only planet with life on it.
Estimates are what these days for # of galaxies? Hundreds of billions? You telling me we're the only ones out here?
I don't buy it.
Life, maybe, but would there be multi cellular life?
For the first 3 billion years of life on earth, there were only single celled organisms. This time span is in the same order of magnitude as the estimated timespan that life is possible on earth. If life on an earth-like ends a little early or starts a little late, life may never evolve from the goo stage.
And think of some of the extremely rare occurrences that need to coincide to make it possible for life to exist so long on a planet.
Jupiter has kept the inner planets to some extent from bombardment, by sucking up asteroids in its enormous gravity well. Without this long distance Jupiter, the earliest time that life would have been able to exist might have been pushed forward significantly. In extra solar planetary systems discovered so far, it seems that a hot Jupiter, close to the star, appears to be the norm.
Liquid water isn't stable on normal rocky planets. Too far from the star, and it just freezes. Too close to the star and water gets photolysed into hydrogen and oxygen, the oxygen getting bound in the soil and the hydrogen getting stripped away in the solar wind. The earth still has some of its water left, because it is unusually dense and has a magnetic field that protects it somewhat. Both the density and the magnetic field were made possible by an unlikely event: the early earth collided with another planet of similar size. Much of the lighter material got ejected and formed the moon in a low orbit, while much of the denser, metallic material formed the earth. Other planets in the solar system have no magnetic field to speak of. Venus lost its water due to being too close to the sun, Mars lost it due to its low density. Our large metallic core has at least one other effect essential for long lasting life: decay of radio active isotopes keeps it warm and liquid, and keeps the crust thin enough for plate tectonics to be possible. As life does its thing, CO2 gets locked up in the crust in the form of limestone and fossil carbon. Without plate tectonics and the resulting vulcanism, this carbon would not have been recycled back into the atmosphere, causing early life to run out of fuel. As the sun was a lot cooler than it is today, the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere might have caused the early earth to freeze. As the sun gradually gets hotter over the course of its lifespan, this also puts an upper limit to our existence. About a billion years from now, it will likely be too hot for liquid water to exist on earth. A billion years seems like a long time, but that would mean that some two thirds of the time period in which life can exist on earth had already passed before the first multi cellular life forms are known to have arisen.
Our unusually large moon has also served to stabilize the rotation of the earth. Without it, the earth may occasionally have been near-sterilized whenever one rotational axis pointed towards the sun, causing one hemisphere to burn to a crisp, and the other to wither in a frozen darkness for god knows how many thousands of years. The moon, when life was in its early stages, was a lot closer than it is now, causing the difference between low and high tide to be in the order of maybe a mile. This would have covered much of the earth's surface with tidal pools at some point in the day, and tidal pools are believed to have been pivotal in the development of photo synthesis. Other planets we know of have moons that are far smaller in size, relative to the planet they orbit.
The argument that I find most convincing is the observation that even here on earth, multi cellular life seems to hold only a tenuous advantage over good old single celled organisms. Single celled organisms have been dominating the world ever since life began, about
How about if it is a one-way ticket?
The burden of proof is on the positive claimant. I hope that there's more than just us, deeply, but at the same time I have to temper my hopes with the appropriate skepticism. We know too little.
Actually - it would be less amazing than you think. There's a good chance that if there had been life on Mars, it made it's way here hitchhiking on meteorites. The gravity trip from Mars to Earth is pretty easy and there have been a number of Martian meteorites discovered on Earth.
You left off option C) The media chooses to focus on statements made by scientists outside of academia and not subject peer-review to build up there story
Probably due to the fact our finite brains cannot really grasp the concept of "infinite space".
"But this one goes to 11!"
it would only take a few hundred million years (blink of an eye in cosmological terms) to probe the entire galaxy
But what good would that do us? A few hundred years is all it takes on earth for technology and language to change, empires to rise and fall. A few thousand years buries entire civilizations in the sands of time. Passage of one million years would result in evolution of the human race into something that we only superficially resemble today. Ten million years wipes species from the map, replacing their line with another. A hundred million years from now, if one of these probes responds back to us, would we be here to hear it? Would our descendants resemble us any more than we resemble a trilobite? If so, would we even recognize the transmission as ours, related somehow to ancient myths of the far distant past? Be able to decode it, and understand its message?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out.
unless the actual goal is to kill everyone and everyone is in on the plan and cooperates, we don't have the means to kill everyone. Things like the "peace activist" line about having enough "bombs" to "destroy the earth (x) times over" are hyperbole. The planet is extremely large, and we are extremely small in comparison. Humans are ridiculously adaptable. There are too many of us spread out over too large an area for us to do much beyond temporarily stall technological advancement, much less throw us into the stone age or oblivion.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
That "wooosh" sound was the movie "Contact" flying right past you.
Contact reference aside, the question which follows is whether the Universe/God is wasting the space, or whether we humans are.
Well, we're still even thinking "life as we know it"... the "golden zone" where earth-like life can exist. There might be other possibilities... we have not travelled anywhere near enough to rule this out.
"We" have actually been to two other worlds... Luna and Mars. A few short-haired dudes went to the moon, and I think we're all pretty satisfied enough there's no life on the Moon. I'll absolutely concede that one. But even in looking for life on Mars, our space probes have often been flawed: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/1442231. If they can't find life on Earth, there's a problem.
In short, we don't have a bloody clue about life in this solar system. We know there might have been as many as three planets capable of supporting it at some point throughout their history. One is a definite yes today, one a pretty damn definite no (Venus), barring the extremest of extremeophiles living that heat. Mars is more like a "was" than an "is". And we know very little about possibilities, in any practical terms... space probes only help so much, if the expected zone of life is a thousands meters below the moon's surface, as suggested of Europa. The probes to check out Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede won't launch until 2020, with an arrival sometime in 2026, see:http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/.
Then there's Titan... no liquid water seen so far, but a cold climate (94K), with liquid hydrocarbon seas, a relatively thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane, weather, rain, and earth-like features. Earth life, no. A different kind... well, I haven't been there to say for certain....
-Dave Haynie
the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation
Drake's equation is about the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy--what does finding microbes on Mars have to do with that?
I'll answer for you: very little.
Your comment is beyond absurd; the Drake equation is a tautology (and a fairly insipid one at that)--it cannot be annihilated, it is defined in such a way that it must be true, and cannot be false. The only thing finding evidence of microbial life on Mars does to the Drake equation is give us more data from which to estimate the values of certain terms.
What makes me very dubious about these claims is that the structures are so small that they'd have to be nanobacteria, and yet the so-called "nanobacteria" on Earth turn out to be non-living.
No. One does not have to accept an extraordinary scientific claim just because one does not yet have another explanation. There is lots of data on UFOs. For some of this data, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. That doesn't mean that I have to start believing in UFOs. It just means that UFOlogy is a field where the data are all a big pile of doggy doo. Science has many subfields in which the state of the art is so terrible that reputable people don't want to get involved, and no progress is being made. Two good examples that spring to mind are nanobacteria and IQ testing.
I am very skeptical about extraordinary scientific claims coming from NASA. NASA has not succeeded in instituting a culture of proper scientific peer review. For instance, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project does crank stuff, and has ties to characters like Harold Puthoff, who specializes in things like telepathic visits to Jupiter. In a way it's not surprising that NASA has problems with proper peer review. They're the handmaiden of Congress. Congress wants the crewed space program to be run as a national prestige project, but they also want to be able to give justifications for the crewed space program that don't sound like pure nationalism. Therefore they coax NASA into coming up with bogus scientific justifications for programs like the shuttle and the ISS. In a culture that's all based on puffing up bad or nonexistent scientific achievements, it's not surprising that they're susceptible to kookiness.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is not sufficient to say that there is no alternative explanation for these structures in the meteorites, and therefore they must have arisen from living organisms. No geologist has ever been to Mars. We know far less about Mars's geological history than we do about the earth's. It's not at all surprising that we find geological samples where we can't explain how they were formed. That doesn't mean that we immediately have to leap to the conclusion that they were made by nanobacteria.
Find free books.
Just out of curiosity, how unique are isotope ratios? Are there any areas on earth that are similar, or match the isotope ratios found in the samples? In other words, is it at all possible for something like this to have originated on earth based on that data?
moox. for a new generation.
I'm unsure of the passage he was referring to but it's entirely possible that the terminology was only used in a particular translation, or was errataed in that translation to a phrase deemed more suitable.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Actually, their standard rhetoric on dinosaurs would still apply: Either the devil put it there to destroy mankinds belief in God, or else God placed it there as part of the creation process to test the faith of true believers.
The only thing I have to say to people who believe that is this:
If God gave us brains yet doesn't wish us to USE them as proof of our faith, then he's not a God that I care to associate with.
Well, ok, I might also tell them that their narrow view of the world is blinding them to the majesty of all Creation, which extends not just from one horizon to the other, but instead subsumes EVERYTHING from the most minute subatomic particles to the breadth of the entire Universe.
OK, well, those aren't the only things I would say. There might be some shouting. I can't rule that out.
I am not a religious person, but I am a cranky person, and I am holding out hope for green-skinned alien women.
Given the vast numbers of galaxies, starts within those galaxies, and then planets around those stars, statistically the percentage of humans per planet is so low it can be safely assumed to be zero.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Yeah, b/c we can conclude that by exploring the planet nearest us, or just meteorites from that planet, that there is not any other life in the universe.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
False, this is a case of saying that Indian elephants are clearly the only kind on earth because we haven't found any others yet.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Only because we know that God would not make the same mistake twice. She knows better.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
In all seriousness, it's the theological implication I find interesting. Your journal entry link is interesting, thanks for the link; the idea they've put forward that aliens have their own Christ is quite fascinating. But what if the alien life we discover has no sentient intelligence? How would this evidence of life existing on another planet affect religion? Oh no, we were all wrong? Something God forgot to tell us about in religious texts? An early experiment that didn't work out?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
nonsense, RNA origin is termed a "hypothesis" by scientists, not even a theory because of huge problems it presents. One is difficulty in experiments to synthesize activated RNA nucleotides wcapable of self-polymerization. So there are more plausible alternatives raised such as other less complex nucleic acids: Peptide nucleic acid (PNA), Threose nucleic acid (TNA) or maybe Glycerol nucleic acid (GNA).
And you speculation about Martian conditions more than 3.5 Gya ago is very humorous indeed, call NASA up and save them billions of dollars on the planned probes to ascertain early Mars geophysics and topology.
One of the references (to 'behemoth') can be found in Job 40, which many scholars consider to be the earliest Hebrew Scripture:
15 "Look at the behemoth,
which I made along with you
and which feeds on grass like an ox.
16 What strength he has in his loins,
what power in the muscles of his belly!
17 His tail sways like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are close-knit.
18 His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like rods of iron."
Some scholars believe the writer is referring to an elephant or a hippo, but other scholars note that the phrase in verse 17 comparing the animal's tail to a cedar sounds more like an overall description of a dinosaur, since that particular phrase would not accurately describe the tail of the elephant or hippo.
Besides 'behemoth', the word 'leviathan' also appears in Hebrew Scriptures to describe enormous animals.
blasphemer, after that huge mistake She also had Her gender changed. you piss the transgendered Him off with that "She" talk, be careful He doesn't smite you with his surgically constructed Holy Meatstick
Of course, but I count that one as a separate species from the regular unicorn.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How many?
No brain, no pain.
We know primates exist and evolved under a given set of circumstances. We have good evidence that the set of circumstances that gave rise to human primates also produced other intelligent primates such as the Neanderthal. It is therefore entirely logical to deduce with some probability that other intelligent primates may exist somewhere on earth.
We have absolutely no evidence to support the idea that aliens exist or have existed under any set of circumstances. Any evidence presented so far has been debunked as a hoax.
Assuming something exists based on the fact that the circumstances that would give rise to are known to exist is not at all the same as assuming something exists when there's no evidence to support its existence. Then again, you've just proved the existence of *unintelligent* primates.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Exactly what is the theory of how rocks from Mars got here? Was there some eruption so great that it hurled chunks of Mars into space, out of its planetary orbit and made the trip here? I think I am missing something here.
You can add God to that list as well. ET, unicorns, leprechauns, God - all equally unproven.
Yet some consider it a fact that there is no ET because God says so. I guess we should poll the unicorns and leprechauns next, in case they have a differing opinion.
Ah, nm. I was reading so many related articles I missed the part about the asteroid impact. Still, that's quite amazing in itself. Considering it would probably take NASA a few billion to get the same payload delivered back. This was free delivery!
No, that empty space is protecting this tiny nest of life from the hostility of that dangerous universe. Where do you think all the Fe, Au, Cu, C, O, Ni, P, Mg etc came from that we rely on? Without all that empty space we would have been long fried/evaporated/fused/zapped/smashed/nova'ed/"singularized"/whatever. Your "waste" comment is like "junk" DNA.
We really are not that important on our pale blue dot.
Wow, I want a pet nanobacteria now. The infinitely trustworthy (groan) wikipedia suggests that some form of replication can occur with them so I am putting in an order for my nanobacteria farm fun set now!
I suppose, in consideration of theology, it depends on who you're asking.
This is true of everyone. The OP who is all pumped up about "this changes everything" means "this changes everything for anyone who hasn't given the matter any thought in the past hundred years, since the time we realized that other stars were much like ours and therefore likely to harbour life."
So it'll change everything for the incurious bores who haven't been paying attention. For thinking people it'll change nothing much, as the existence of extra-terrestrial life now seems so probable that its confirmation will be joyous but not surprising.
IDer's will have no problem with this. They'll just say Martians were gay, and God hates gays (and, according to Pat Robertson, Haitians) so they were killed off. Old Earth Creationists have the least tenable of any position, as they have to pretend to accept geology, including geo-chemistry, while denying the laws of probability. Who knows what they'll say--the only thing we can be sure of is that it won't make any sense. Young Earth Creationists already believe that God is either not omnipotent, or is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat, so nothing much will change for them.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Your cynicism and arrogance leave me astounded. I'd try to argue this more but I've found that arrogant cynicists are entirely incapable of being influenced by reason or logic or emotion.
Why bother
Most scientific study is based on the Popper philosophy of disproving something rather than proving its opposite.
Not so. Popper's ideas apply to a very narrow scope of actual science. Theories can sometimes be disproved by predictive failure, and for reasons that aren't clear Popperians want this to be the only process of proof or disproof that science has, although that claim is obviously nonsense. In particular, the existence of things can be proven by observation of those things.
Admittedly what constitutes an "observation" is complex and subtle, as this case shows. And there also many cases where we disprove the existence of something (n-rays, phlogiston and caloric for example, do not exist, and we proved this by experiment in the perfectly ordinary sense of "proof" that everyone including scientists uses all the time, and is only disputed by sophmoronic philosophers.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"If you can't come up with a reasonable alternative explanation for the data, you have to accept the presented explanation."
Actually, one is always free to reject all presented hypotheses, and await formulation of new ones to test. Sometimes, it's best to say "I don't know".
we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out.
unless the actual goal is to kill everyone and everyone is in on the plan and cooperates, we don't have the means to kill everyone. Things like the "peace activist" line about having enough "bombs" to "destroy the earth (x) times over" are hyperbole. The planet is extremely large, and we are extremely small in comparison. Humans are ridiculously adaptable. There are too many of us spread out over too large an area for us to do much beyond temporarily stall technological advancement, much less throw us into the stone age or oblivion.
The problem isn't technological retardation, but a nuclear winter.
No. One does not have to accept an extraordinary scientific claim just because one does not yet have another explanation. There is lots of data on UFOs. For some of this data, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. That doesn't mean that I have to start believing in UFOs. It just means that UFOlogy is a field where the data are all a big pile of doggy doo. Science has many subfields in which the state of the art is so terrible that reputable people don't want to get involved, and no progress is being made. Two good examples that spring to mind are nanobacteria and IQ testing.
UFO's aren't a very good analogy because there usually is an alternate explanation (weather balloons, secret military experiments, gullible people), not to mention that "OMG ALIENS" isn't a scientific explanation. In the worst case, "unexplained phenomenon" is still a more accurate explanation than "aliens".
From the discussions, it sounds like these people actually do have some decent evidence for what they're claiming, and while they may never be able to prove 100% that they're right, it's not like we can prove anything 100%.
but also from a philosophical and -- perhaps most importantly -- theological point of view.
Why would the discovery of life, even intelligent life in the universe have any impact on theology? Where does it say in the bible, or any other religious text for that matter, that we are alone in the universe?
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Earth does not have monopoly on microbes. Give them a bit of friendly environment and microbes will exist there. They won't be the same as microbes on Earth, but they will be micro organisms.
Well, part of the reason is the time scales involved. The records which came to be known collectively as 'the Bible' were written sometime within the last 6000 (give or take) years, according to internal chronology. Even give this an overly generous 10x margin of error, and say that it was within 60,000 years. You are still orders of magnitude away from anything dinosaur related.
Not sure what the passage you mention would be referring to, but I doubt that it is a dinosaur...
Cheers
I see what you did there.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
I love pointing this out to strict (read evangelical) creationists right after they quote the Pope on something else.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
You seem to be confusing the position of young earth vs old earth creationists. Theories that allow for old earth creation rely on all sorts of time morphing, flat out lies, or complete disregard of scripture. A view that leads to young earth creation can be had simply by reading Genesis 1. When God says 6 days, he means 6 days, and when he claims responsibility for creation personally he means personally, not through use of natural selection or mutation.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I doubt our definition of life is anywhere near broad enough to ever be sure what is out there.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
It would be very cool if it was some kind of extinct megafauna, although even that is pretty bloody unlikely.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
ETA to a televangelist showing how the Bible predicted life on other worlds: 2 days and counting. :rolleyes:
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Unicorn is a corn that has all of the "cornoids" facing the same direction.
The assumption seems to be that if these things are shown be the remnants of microorganisms or we get a signal form SETI then we can finally put this God thing to rest.
I've searched the bible and did not find any references to North America- therefore, since God forgot to mention it in his book, its confirmed existence should suffice in proving the non-existence of God and we will not be needing these Martial Fossils.
If they grow, reproduce, and evolve, in what way are they not life?
Where does the Bible even claim that God has to tell us anything? The spirit of the book of Job seems to be that God has his own motivations and will do whatever he well pleases. We are subject to his whims, should obey his commands, and shouldn't be questioning his motives.
Being upset that he chose to create another world would be a little strange for a Biblical scholar.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
From what I can tell, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics lab investigates crackpot theories on the off chance that some might have merit. I'm not convinced that this exercise is completely without merit.
The rest of NASA's science work, however, appears to be up the same standards you'd find anywhere else. Look at all the planetary science and material science work: you can't fake that. NASA's results would have been discredited long ago if they weren't engaging in legitimate research.
That's when your red flag went up? Mine went up when someone claimed to be wondering around in the antartic and happen to stumble on a rock from Mars. They determine that it is from Mars, because it has a similar chemical makeup of what they think Mars is composed of, and determine that it has been in the anartic for hundreds of thousands of years.
THEN, they cut into it and find what they believe to be microscopic markings resembling markings left by bacteria. IPSO FACTO...life on Mars.
This chain of ownership has to many holes in it. No amount of analysis will *prove* anything.
WHEN we get to Mars, bend over and pick up a several rocks, cut into them and find some fossils...THEN we'll have proof of something.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
We also have horses too, and numerous stories of magical ones with horns. That's way more evidence than we have of any alien life.
Unicorn legends are a combination of one-horned mountain goats and narwhals. When a goat loses a horn, the remaining one tends to drift to the center. Sightings of unicorns were sightings of such goats.
Unicorn horns sold in Europe were actually narwhal horns, which have the characteristic spiral shape.
So there is no evidence for unicorns, because the evidence actually points to something else.
If the final analysis of the samples from Mars shows that it came from something else, then your statement will be (basically) true in that the amount of evidence will be the same.
Otherwise, your statement will be the opposite of true.
The enemies of Democracy are
...should this be confirmed, it changes everything. From not only a scientific point of view...but also from a philosophical and -- perhaps most importantly -- theological [slashdot.org] point of view.
Important to you, perhaps. Not to me. Theology and associated cultism if of no interest or value to me and many others, therefore any changes theology and cultism experience as a result of the testing of Martian meteorites are utterly meaningless.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but I don't accept that those timescales are irrelevant.
Technology changes everything. We can record our experiences in a fixed medium and propagate our knowledge over and over again. Certain things --- mathematics, science, philosophy, intrigue --- are universal, and will be useful to any sentient creature. And now that we have digital technology, we can reproduce everything, forever, with perfect fidelity.
Sure, in 100 million years, our descendants will be as incomprehensibly different as a sauropod and a duck. But these creatures will know who Aristotle, Einstein, and Shakespeare were, and they'll be able to watch Casablanca as easily as we read Cicero today.
I see no reason to think that our cultural offspring, no matter what their physical form, won't live on until the heat death of the universe.
If ancient probes were to finally report back, our descendants would surely be able to extract some old computer files and decipher the signals.
Besides: it's not as if these probes would disappear for an aeon, only to suddenly return with their findings. They'd be sending a continual stream of telemetry that we'd continue to study relentlessly.
What about mammoths? They died out around the time Jericho was founded and agriculture invented.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Yeah, but in a completely different part of the world.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
"OMG ALIENS" isn't a scientific explanation, and neither is "OMG MARTIAN LIFE".
We have rock periodically raining down on us, none of which are blamed on a galactic fender-bender. If two planets or planetoids collided with enough impact to throw chunks from Mars to Earth, you'd expect that there would be a fairly large debris field.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
In extra solar planetary systems discovered so far, it seems that a hot Jupiter, close to the star, appears to be the norm.
Posting as AC because I'm moderating this thread. What you have here is a case of selection bias. Hot Jupiters appear to be the norm because the methods responsible for the vast majority of detections (radial velocity and transit) are most able to detect large planets in close orbits. It's easier to see hot Jupiters. That's why we have (so far) detected more of them.
I think what you're witnessing isn't some X-Files Want to Believe style cult assembly or circle jerk but instead the simple fact that should this be confirmed, it changes everything. From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation but also from a philosophical and -- perhaps most importantly -- theological [slashdot.org] point of view.
God put microbes on mars in the last 6000 years to test our faith.
What was that you were saying about theological point of view?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
How often does this happen to you? Evangelicals generally dislike Catholics nearly as much as they dislike atheists. They think that the Catholics aren't even really Christians. If they were old-fashioned enough they'd call them "papists".
My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.
That (quite depressing) theory has been dubbed "The Great Filter" by Robin Hanson.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
"B) The scientific word "prove" is more about the lack of any valid competing hypotheses. If you can't come up with a reasonable alternative explanation for the data, you have to accept the presented explanation."
No you don't. If the remaining hypotheses is, for whatever reason, flawed, you can still say "I don't know."
Drake's equation is already a ridiculous load of hooey
The word you are looking for is tautology. It is not "hooey," or "horse hockey," or anything of the like. It is an insipid tautology, but a minorly useful one for framing the question of life in terms of those smaller less-unknowable question marks and giving a baseline for discussing them.
There are too many of us spread out over too large an area for us to do much beyond temporarily stall technological advancement, much less throw us into the stone age or oblivion.
Except billions of us are packed into highly concentrated areas. They're goners. Of the remainder, millions will die from the effects of nuclear winter, of contaminated food and water, and from the simple fact that most people in developed nations don't have the first clue how to survive, in the most fundamental sense of the word, without modern infrastructure. Survivors will be spread far and wide, ragtag groups of clueless people without effective means of communicating with the other groups.
No, homo sapiens as a species is unlikely to completely perish in an all-out nuclear exchange, but in a very real way, the world would end.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
That would be so cool. Imagine a vastly powerful, intergalactic race, tracing the origins of the only extraterrestrial contact they've ever had, these probes. Imagine they find their path circling back around, to originate from their very own home planet, from so far in the past as to be lost beyond memory.
Awesome.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I have the sinking suspicion that in 100 million years, so much art and culture will be created as to render both Cicero and Casablanca meaningless, and likely totally lost in the vast multitudes of time.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
That "wooosh" sound was the movie "Contact" flying right past you.
And past the box office, award nominations, second viewings...
We know that there are trillions of trillions of stars in the universe
Hold your flaimbait and troll buttons, I'm genuinely curious.
I've always wondered when people say this, doesn't science actually disprove this? Don't get me wrong, I have ADD and to say I wasn't paying attention in science would be a gross understatement, but isn't there something about the speed of light and all that that basically says we surmise that millions of years ago, there were trillions of stars, and the light is just now reaching us? (or something like that...) Which would mean there is no way to see stars that still exists now? I mean, I'm sure there are other tests and such voodoo you can do besides simply looking, but the statement just seems a little off.
Not only that, but how can you know there are trillions and trillions of stars? Unless of course that was hyperbole. I mean, have you counted them? Can anyone even count that high? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "we theorize..." or "we believe..." or something to leave a window open that you could either:
a) be just plain wrong
b) be misguided in a calculation, etc, and figure it out and correct it 10 years down the road (like eggs are bad for you, no they're not, yes they are)
c) some other thing that is escaping my limited attention span
I mean, when you try to poke fun of the creationist crowd for saying "We KNOW God created the world 6000 years ago", you don't do yourself any favors by saying "We know that X does/did/is/was Y" and then 5-10 years down the road, or even 50-100, coming back and saying "Well actually we didn't realize that Q has an effect on X and X actually does/did/is/was Z"...
Assuming something exists based on the fact that the circumstances that would give rise to are known to exist is not at all the same as assuming something exists when there's no evidence to support its existence.
Then again, Knowing something exists based on the fact that the circumstances that would give rise to it are known to exist is not at all the same as saying the evidence points to it. You don't know jack crap.
And if you don't believe me, ask stephen hawking >> Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
we here on earth are all alone in the great big dark.
If that's true, it's an awful waste of space.
Not to be disagreeable but saying that it's a "waste of space" implies that space is specifically supposed to be used for something. (Your statement implies that its purpose is to contain life but that's not entirely relevant here.) What you're essentially doing is assigning a meaning to space itself, but "meaning" (not to be confused with cause-and-effect as it so frequently is in philosophical arguments) is a totally human created concept so the "waste of space" argument is unfortunately invalid.
That said, I really, REALLY hope that life is abundant in the universe. I just don't think that much can be said to predict whether or not it is until we get out there and look for it which is exactly what they're doing here.
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
Nonsense. There are loads of reasonable alternative explations. Almost all UFO sightings can be explained as weather phenomena or human aircraft. In the remaining cases, weather phenomena or human aircraft remain at least as reasonable explanations as ET.
(Also: UFO means Unidentified Flying Object, and they do factually exist, since anything flying is an uidentified flying object until you know what it is. Trite but true.)
This isn't "OMG MARTIAN LIFE". It's a scientific study testing the meteorite for signatures considered by the scientific community to be associated with life.
"Not sure what the passage you mention would be referring to, but I doubt that it is a dinosaur... "
Unless they found a dinosaur skeleton, looked at the fossilized remains and said: "Hey, this is interesting, we should write about this.".
No. One does not have to accept an extraordinary scientific claim just because one does not yet have another explanation. There is lots of data on UFOs. For some of this data, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. That doesn't mean that I have to start believing in UFOs. It just means that UFOlogy is a field where the data are all a big pile of doggy doo.
You are attacking a straw man here because obviously if you can't trust the observations you can't trust the evidence. But we're talking about meteorites in a lab and test samples by scientific probes here, not somebody who saw weird lights in the sky. If any scientist can pull up a microscope and confirm the patterns are there, then that is pretty much an established fact that the patterns exist, the only question is how. The same can not at all be said about UFOs, least not the alien craft variety.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
More like UDP-by-asteroid than TCP-by-sample-return-mission, though.
I love those arguments. Both god and the devil are trying to screw with you, and it's equally plausible that they're doing so in the same way.
Do you think they go out for a beer afterward and congratulate each other?
It gets a little chillier. People will survive. We have made it through an ice age.
If they grow, reproduce, and evolve, in what way are they not life?
Usually we count metabolism too (vs., say prions), but yeah.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Estimates are what these days for # of galaxies? Hundreds of billions?
No, don't think so small. 7x10^22, at least.
You may have heard, "there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth." Then a few years back, they also added "and desserts" and then you still have to at least multiply by 10.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Mars, motherfucker! Do you grok it?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Ahh... You must be Dan Brown. Welcome to /.
\,,,/_[o . o]_\,,,/
Cunts, on slashdot...?
You must be from Mars or something... Welcome, lifeform!!
I, for one, welcome our new c*nt overlords.
The only real reason for life to organize into multi cellular structures that I can think of is to build radio telescopes and look for other clusters of cells that have done the same on other worlds.
I doubt that very much. There must be a thermodynamic motivation for the development of multicellular organisms despite the fact they are negentropic (trap information) - living organisms metabolize energy to maintain structure and information (and so don't decay). Your explanation means assuming a mystical anthropocentric driving force to evolution otherwise it's nonsensical - maybe there is one but can it be proved? How can the existence of multi cellular organisms on other planets exert selection pressure here (unless they invade)?
I rather liked "Contact". Read the Carl Sagan book, too.
That would be so cool. Imagine a vastly powerful, intergalactic race, tracing the origins of the only extraterrestrial contact they've ever had, these probes. Imagine they find their path circling back around, to originate from their very own home planet, from so far in the past as to be lost beyond memory.
Awesome.
Which trilogy was that again?
Learn to read. He didn't say they should remain unchanged forever, just that THIS PARTICULAR DISCOVERY (assuming it'll end up being one) won't change them.
From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation but also from a philosophical and -- perhaps most importantly -- theological point of view.
A lot of people may consider it rather strange that you find mind constructs more important than the real world (whether or not they add value to one's daily life).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Some scholars believe the writer is referring to an elephant or a hippo, but other scholars note that the phrase in verse 17 comparing the animal's tail to a cedar sounds more like an overall description of a dinosaur, since that particular phrase would not accurately describe the tail of the elephant or hippo.
It could work with an elephant described front to back.
People weren't very good at natural sciences back then.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
No need to be that furious about the matter. We know there was life on Mars and an EPIC battle in the past. Just look at the craters on the Moon. Sadly some scientists will not admit the truth that we are the only living species in the Universe. Not so! To help you out, I am reading the "Ancient Egyption Book of the Dead", buy Budge all 3 volumes first editions which are extremely rare including illustrations of hieroglyphics that are not included in other books. They define a UFO's and martians and technology. Furthermore, I have read the bible and q'ran and but the book of the dead explained the Lords Prayer Christian and Catholic religions and prayers to say the least. Now I wanted to finish this post, but I am getting money together for the people of Haiti. I only have one pair of hands and am taking a massive amount of calls.
All cows eat grass!
Take a look at the paper I linked to. They grow and reproduce in the same sense that crystals evolve. They don't evolve.
Find free books.
The only real reason for life to organize into multi cellular structures that I can think of is to build radio telescopes and look for other clusters of cells that have done the same on other worlds.
I doubt that very much. There must be a thermodynamic motivation for the development of multicellular organisms despite the fact they are negentropic (trap information) - living organisms metabolize energy to maintain structure and information (and so don't decay).
Your explanation means assuming a mystical anthropocentric driving force to evolution otherwise it's nonsensical - maybe there is one but can it be proved? How can the existence of multi cellular organisms on other planets exert selection pressure here (unless they invade)?
Intriguing theory, but it does not pass Occam's razor. It is far more likely that I meant it as a jest, and actually meant to imply multi cellular organization may not inevitably follow the existence of life
Not that I consider myself a Popperian, but what kind of proof wouldn't be technically a disproof of the predictive power of all plausible competing theories? Sure, generally people work by the measure of 'good enough', but that's usually showing that competing theories are not predictive.
.evom ton seod gis eht