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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."
to loosen up a few dollars to the space program.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Each Viking Lander had 3 biological experiments, for a total of 6.
I worked on Viking (but not on the biological experiments), and before the mission landed I received a bunch of NASA PR type hype, including the protocols for the biological experiments. These were each (at a very high level) of the same form -
- collect a soil sample
- add something to it (such as water or nutrients)
- see what happens
and, as a control, repeat this with another sample after "sterilizing" it (by heating it).
At the one bit level, a successful biological result would be something positive happens to the active sample, the same something doesn't happen to the control.
The biological experimental protocols did not mention the mass spectrometer at all.
In the actual case, each biological experiment (all 6) returned a positive result for biology "at the one bit level." The Labeled Release (LR) experiment was more or less what they were expecting, the other 2 experiments (in each case) did something, just not what was expected. In every case, the control runs had a much smaller or no reaction.
I, following this, actually expected the Viking project to announce that life had probably been found, with positive (if not fully understood) results from the 6 biological trials. Instead, they announced a negative result, based on not finding organic matter with the mass spectrometer. The conclusion was that the positive results were due to some (unknown, and still unknown) inorganic chemistry of the surface, which went over like a wet balloon.
To this day, I feel this was a violation of the pre-launch protocols for the biological experiments. If the mass spectrometer trumped all, why fly the biologicals? If the biological experiments were worth doing, why were they not worth investigating further? Gilbert Levin (the Labeled Release experiment PI), for example, has always felt that the LR experiment detected biology. Is that not worthy of a followup ?
Instead, this was announced in such a fashion as to make it as uninteresting as possible and the Mars science budget was cut to the point that, in the early 1980's, it was almost impossible for a student to get a job in the field. The JPL Mars crew was broken up, let go or reassigned (I was at JPL at the time, I saw it happen). Basically, a generation was lost (Viking Lander 1 died, from a lack of funding, in 1982; the next successful US mission to Mars was 1997).
Because of the way this was handled, this problem has never been investigated further on Mars. We have had successful 4 lander / rovers since then, but no biological tests whatsoever. I must say that, since then, I have not had a lot of respect for the "conventional wisdom" of the Mars science community. In my book, this was blown, and blown badly, with serious damage to the course of science.
They STILL have not sent a decent microscope .. you know of the kind any high school biology lab would have .. to Mars. And the next mission doesn't have one scheduled either. The previous mission (this decade) they did send a microscope but its magnification would not even have showed bacteria .. even tiny pollen type grains. And of course they didn't send any staining chemicals either.
My own suspicion, which is at least supported by events so far, is that a single inhabitable planet does not contain sufficient energy resources to allow any intelligent form of life any significant way of getting off-planet. The energy consumption needed to get to a technological civilisation may be such that by the time the necessary engineering skills exists, an energy crisis has been reached the outcome of which is either population collapse or evolution to a state more like an ant community than anything else.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."