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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."
we here on earth are all alone in the great big dark.
If that's true, it's an awful waste of space.
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.
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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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.
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...
. 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
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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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.
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?
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
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.
Water is the universal solvent. Once you've got it in liquid form (meaning there's at least thermal energy around), you've got conditions ripe for some pretty cool and complex chemistry.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Someone wants to know how things work and some limp Slashdork automatically jerks their knee to assume that means the person is a theological lemming.
Any posts recently about how much worse Slashdot has become? If not, you just read one.
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.
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
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.
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.....
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
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.
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.
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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
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
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?