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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."
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.
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."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Undebunked? Rebunked? Or just bunked?
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
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
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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.
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.
God put them there to test us.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
...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.
Conclusive proof will be when we can grow the life in a lab repeatedly. All else is pure belief system driven.
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.
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.
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.
Just hype and fishing for funding. Nothing to see here, move along.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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...
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.
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.
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
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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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.
How many?
No brain, no pain.
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.
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!
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!
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".
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%.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
"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
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."
Well all I can say is great! I would like to imagine that life existed in our solar system before our ancestors waded out of the swamps but I remain sceptical. The main problem I find is the time involved isnt thousands or even millions of years but billions. I know our scientists are doing the best damn job to get an accurate report on this rock but there could be factors we havent even considered. If we knew the origin of life we would then know what to look for on the planet Mars to see if the same conditions were met over there.
What I do know is this helps my website(www.thedramapod.com) as my team and I will be releasing our own modern audiodrama of war of the worlds this year, thanks to this rock it doesnt entirely debunk the theory of life on mars.
Ill be keeping a close eye on this story
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.
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.
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More like UDP-by-asteroid than TCP-by-sample-return-mission, though.
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!
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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]_\,,,/
Take a look at the paper I linked to. They grow and reproduce in the same sense that crystals evolve. They don't evolve.
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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