Slashdot Mirror
Viking Landers Might Have Missed Martian Organics
Sonny Yatsen writes "A new study suggests that the Viking Landers might have found organic compounds on Mars, but failed to recognize them because of the methodology used to detect organics. The findings may suggest specific strategies that would improve on the way organic compounds are detected on the red planet."
... suggests that Carl Sagan said exactly the same thing over three decades ago.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
until there's an actual organism located and cultured the correct response is skepticism.
I, personally, think life doesn't just inhabit niches.. if there's life on Mars anywhere, there should be life on Mars everywhere.
How we know is more important than what we know.
until there's an actual organism located and cultured the correct response is skepticism.
Not if we're just talking about organic compounds, which I and TFA are. Organic compounds have been found in all kinds of places where life is highly unlikely to exist, like Titan (which has oceans of methane) or gaseous nebulae.
I, personally, think life doesn't just inhabit niches.. if there's life on Mars anywhere, there should be life on Mars everywhere.
Eh. Everywhere there's sufficient food and energy, sure. If there's a Martian equivalent to deep-sea thermal vents, where life on earth is theorized to have started, then there might be life all around them but not on the surface where it's easy to find. Or maybe there was life on the surface while there was water there, but not it's no longer suitable.
The point of this new analysis is to see if maybe Viking really did discover organics, and also to refine techniques for finding them so future missions can do a better job of searching for them. It could in fact be that there is evidence of (former) life everywhere, but we weren't been able to find it due to lacking the proper techniques before. The only way to know is to check.
In the meantime, sure, skepticism is warranted. I'm not holding out for there being evidence of life on Mars. But I want to know, and this is an important step.
The enemies of Democracy are
1 is highly unlikely. Mars is losing its atmosphere at a rapid pace, and has no protection from bio-killing cosmic and solar radiation due to it's lack of a magnetic field. It has no magnetic field because the iron core solidified aeons ago - Mars is much smaller than Earth, and the thing simply cooled down faster.
It is far more likely that the failing magnetic field would have triggered the death of all Martian life (and it definitely would have, solar radiation in particular is very nasty), and would explain why there is no life today if there ever was once life on Mars.
2 only makes sense if 1 is true. On Earth we find life literally everywhere. Even in the most apparently barren places we have found life. They've found life in underground lakes in Antarctica that have been locked away by ice for thousands of years for god's sake! Even volcanic vents harbor life, it is literally everywhere on the planet. If Mars once had a thriving ecosystem, evidence of life should be everywhere as well. It really should not be difficult to find traces of it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller