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New Study Suggests Mars Viking Robots Found Life
techfun89 writes "New analysis of data, now 36 years old, from the Viking robots, suggests that NASA had found life on Mars. This conclusion was published by an international team of mathematicians and scientists this week. The Labeled Release experiment looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples in 1976. The general thinking was that the experiment had found geological not biological activity. However, the new study approached things differently. Researchers broke the data into sets of numbers and analyzed the results for complexity. What they found were close correlations between the Viking results' complexity and those of terrestrial biological data sets. Based on this they concluded that the Viking results were more biological in nature than just geological processes."
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
... well a local saying hello der ...
So although the data is amazing we need correlation, cross referencing, independent data gathering and
You should have been counting up, the article already contains the most relevant counter-point: "Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth so it's premature to draw any conclusions."
Of course, the writer of the article should have read the original paper and at least pointed out the control scheme utilized within the mathematical analysis.
Finally, one should ask themselves if they trust a bunch of mathematicians who turn out phrases like: "In mathematical terms, the Euclidean distance between the centroids of the two clusters was significantly larger than the intra-cluster distances between any members of either cluster." Any English major could tell you what kind of cluster that sentence is! If that's the way they write, one has to wonder about their expertise in detecting live... it takes one to know one after all. ;)
Think "Drake Equation". Some time back, someone was referencing the Drake Equation, saying that we'd better hope that the "highly filtering / most likely to fail" hurdles to intelligent life were early ones that we'd already passed. Otherwise they might well still be ahead of us.
So "early hurdles" are in our favor, meaning we've already passed them, while "late hurdles" are against us, meaning we have yet to pass.
Things we think we know...
If interstellar-capable life arises, it should be capable of covering the galaxy within a few million years - on a timescale of billions of years.
We haven't been contacted - yet. (Depending on the material your hat is made of, some would assert that the government has been suppressing the information that we have made contact.)
Therefore the Drake Equation (or rather, think "Drake Test") hasn't been successfully negotiated in the past million years or so. It appears that "early hurdles" + "late hurdles" have been impossible, at least so far.
There is no known life elsewhere in the solar system so far, making those "early hurdles" look hard, leaving some hope that the "late hurdles" might not be so bad.
But now if there is indeed life on Mars, perhaps those "early hurdles" aren't so hard - maybe the "late hurdles" - the ones we have yet to pass - are in fact the harder ones. Of course to put it into perspective, the evidence of life on Mars is not conclusive, and it's not tall, golden-eyed Martians.
And of course it's possible that any species that passes the "late hurdles" also comes up with some concept like the "Prime Directive", meaning that they will deliberately hide their presence from us. We have at least conceived of the concept of a "Prime Directive", so perhaps that would be the most comforting interpretation.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's pretty much unsurprising. I bet if you go back and look you'll find they didn't mention the weather instruments or the cameras either. Each set of instruments is going to have it's own protocols.
Because NASA was following basic scientific procedures and guarding against false positives. This was triply important for Viking when they were performing complex chemical experiments (the biological suite) with pretty much zero knowledge of the soil chemistry. There was no way of knowing in advance whether or not something in the soil might cause a false positive, so the mass spectrometer served to determine the soil chemistry in order to analyze the results of the biological experiments.
That's because they've changed the strategy for looking for life - away from "pin the tail on the donkey" (blind stabs in the dark like Viking) and towards more basic chemical research. Biological experiments are sexy, but they're meaningless without the proper foundation of knowledge to design them and to interpret their results.
(And seriously, have you been living in a cave the three plus decades? This is all pretty much common knowledge if you've been following Mars exploration for the last fifteen odd years rather than nursing a thirty year old grudge.)