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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
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.
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.
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.
Sent from your iPad.
...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.
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.
Cunts, on slashdot...?
You must be from Mars or something... Welcome, lifeform!!
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
I think the baby Jesus put those "microbes" there to relax after a hard day of burying fake dinosaur bones.
God put them there to test us.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Because we have carefully studied every bit of the pieces of mars available on earth with the best scientific laboratories available. Whereas we have only looked at a minuscule fraction of mars on site, and done so with tools light enough to transport to mars.
Its like asking why we can not prove the nature of human metabolic functions with nothing more than a thermometer in your behind.
. 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.
Sent from your iPad.
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
Because we are only rolling around our RC toys and they lack an electron microscope powerful enough?
But we will never get to Mars, because we need all funds we ever had on other things, like that interesting branch of science where we can clearly prove anything and where isolated experiments to the contrary don't disprove anthing. The science there is settled, folks. For. Ever.
Now excuse me while save some CO2 and pay some taxes.
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.
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
Sent from your iPad.
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.
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?
Hint. Top Cat had whiskers, Garfield has whiskers. Does this essentially suggest that whiskers=cats everywhere?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.
You have Popper backwards.
You can prove a Black Swan exists by finding one. (Finding proof of life on Mars)
You cannot disprove a Black Swan by only finding white ones. (Finding life only on Earth, thus "proving" life does not exist elsewhere)
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
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).
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
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 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.
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
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.....
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.
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.
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.
I suspect we will have to wait significantly less than "centuries" for larger dataset regarding life in the Universe. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in less than two decades we will have telescopes capable of resolving Earth-like planets and analyzing their atmospheres (and highly active biospheres probably tend to heavily influence those)
Even in our system the list of suspect places is quite long, giving us plenty opportunities for exploration. Not only Mars, but also Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, even Enceladus of high atmosphere of Venus; at the least.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Rocks may have a greater chance of falling towards the Sun.
But don't discount the Solar Wind. I believe I've read similar discussions that suggest the overall probability is greater for life pushing outward from the Sun due to Solar Wind. We have found microbes very high up in our biosphere. And there tends to be a larger dust trail around Earth.
So dust particles carrying life may get a free ride outwards.
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
Wow, really? To date we have two Martian rovers on the planet and the Phoenix lander. We also managed to land the Viking 1 and Viking 2 probes and a Soviet probe that transmitted for 22 seconds and quit out on us. So, to clarify, we have 5-6 successful surface missions for an entire planet that lost its atmosphere millions of years ago. Millions of years is a long time for the geophysical structure of the planet to change/morph/transform. It's not a big stretch of the imagination to think that any signs of life (fossils, some kind of living bacteria, etc) could have been buried awhile ago. There is also the possibility that any life that still does exist on Mars (or any signs of life) exist in a very small niche area of the planet, where the conditions are just right. So we have a combined 5 active spacecraft to explore an planet's entire surface and you are surprised that we haven't happened to stumble upon the types of evidence we are looking for? (which could also be a limiting factor). Just to put things in perspective, mankind has been actively wandering around this particular planet for more than 15,000 years and there are still a few places we haven't managed to explore. I think we can be forgiven for not finding life on a different planet in the last 40 years of exploration just yet. Sheesh. Why was this modded anything but 'retarded, unsound cynicism?'
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Because they're looking at mineralized "footprints". I doubt very much in a single century an Earth-based microbial colony could live, die and then leave mineralized evidence.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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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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.
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.
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
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".
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?
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?
Carbon and Nitrogen. And an energy source. And time, a billion years or so should do the trick.