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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."
I didn't even know vikings had robots here on earth!
I hope they plundered and/or ravished the soil samples.
to loosen up a few dollars to the space program.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
i. e. http://mmmgroup2.altervista.org/e-trees.html While I guess that these are just "dendritic structures", I wonder if there were later any better close-ups of them done by the orbiting satellites?
Somehow, I'm guessing that since this isn't a discussion of ID, we won't be hearing that "complexity" is meaningless and undefinable...
But, out of curiosity, what is the metric of complexity here? The article seems to only give synonyms, like "complicated".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Time to invoke the prime directive and leave it alone.
Seriously, if this were true, it means we should restrict visits to Mars. Not only to have a chance to study evolving life over the next aeons, but also so we won't drag back something.
.
"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
Cool, there will be chicks with three boobs soon :D :D
Yes, but unfortunately they'll look like they're made from plastic.
A little bit of googling led me to a PDF of the full published paper if anyone's interested.
My work here is dung.
I believe it should be "boob(s)"
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.
Remember the face on Mars? HaHa
The experiment was set to detect biological activity. The results were ambiguous with some physical explanations not excluded at the time of the original analysis.
Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments
Giorgio Bianciardi, Joseph D. Miller, Patricia Ann Straat and Gilbert V. Levin
The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14 C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.
Cool, there will be chicks with three boobs soon :D :D
Yes, but unfortunately they'll look like they're made from plastic.
So, no different than most two-boobed chicks here?
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. ;)
"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!
This sentence makes perfect sense. They were a little redundant when saying "intra-cluster distances between any members of either cluster", where they could have just said "intra-cluster distances".
I think there is a big difference between finding life and finding signs of life.
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.
I am glad for this study and others. We should be exploring the stars instead of trying to pound square pegs into round holes here at home, which is what politics has become.
Space exploration has never been correctly marketed. I think we should claim that we're going to explore so many planets that we'll have one for social group. A planet for liberals, a planet for conservatives. Planet legal dope. And a planet where there are no Wal-marts.
You have to get the consumers excited about this.
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.
People are always more open to believe what they *want* to believe than anything that contradicts, or even tempers, what they want to believe. And "Possible life detected on Mars" gets a lot more PR and grant money than "Inconclusive results allow for possible model in which life may possibly exist on Mars, but critics point to flaws."
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
NASA is too busy these days arguing about climate change and Muslim outreach to bother with anything as mundane as a space program.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
The sentence is fine, and makes perfect sense if you know what cluster analysis is. An English major, furthermore, would perhaps have used "detecting life" and some proper ellipses instead of "detecting live". :P
Seems to me that it is recovering from eight years of misdirection. The former administration's micromanagement made a huge mess.
Unfortunately Techno Viking stomped all said life to death in a celebratory dance.
If this is true we should start designing a rocket that can return samples from Mars.
"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!
This sentence makes perfect sense. They were a little redundant when saying "intra-cluster distances between any members of either cluster", where they could have just said "intra-cluster distances".
No. It is ambiguous. Does that mean the distances from the cluster members to the centroid of the cluster, or does that mean the distance from one cluster member to another? Does that apply to only one cluster, or to both?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't believe in this as an indication of life on Mars.
To me it looks like misunderstood chemistry. There is an oops somewhere. That is my bet.
Recall that more recent missions have analyzed the soil of Mars, and have found "interesting" chemicals like perchlorates. Chemicals which might mimic the signature of life in this experiment. We need to run a test, on Earth, using the best lifeless analogue to Martian soil we can come up with, including perchlorates, and see if the results match.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
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."
Oh no! A typo! I'll have to take the colonel's way out.
On another note, in light of the comments thus far, it appears that the winking-face emoticon doesn't mean what I think it means.
English majors have no business judging the quality of technical writing, as they are not remotely qualified to do so. The top priority in technical writing is technical clarity, which trumps everything else. That's not to say that there is no room for optimizing ease of parsing and general aesthetics -- on the contrary, good style for readability is important. But especially when describing the specifics of experimental or analysis methodology, which was the purpose of the sentence you cited, it is well worth ignoring all the good writing guidelines your high school writing professor taught you for the sake of precision, and to avoid any possible ambiguity.
weinersmith
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27720/?p1=blogs
I would expect to find life on Mars.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Q: "apply to one cluster, or to both?"
A: "any members of either cluster."
Actually this post is not has wacked as it would first appear. David Darling accuses Guillermo Gonzalez of letting his theological extremism color his scientific studies to make life appear unlikely outside of Earth. Gonzalez, Guillermo; Brownlee, Donald; Ward, Peter (2001). "The Galactic Habitable Zone: Galactic Chemical Evolution". Icarus 152: 185–200. arXiv:astro-ph/0103165. Bibcode 2001Icar..152..185G. doi:10.1006/icar.2001.6617.
When JPL's Curiousity safely lands (hopefully) in August, these questions will be put to rest.... If EDL is successful and the instruments check out, it will be an incredible tool, laser spectrometer, mass spectrometer, gas chromatagraph, etc. For a geologist, it is truly an interplanetary orgasmatron....
one should ask themselves if they trust a bunch of mathematicians who turn out phrases like
I'd rather trust a mathematician who has trouble explaining himself clearly to non-mathematicians, but knows his field and his craft, than one who writes poetry during lunchbreak, but whose record in his field is spotty.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You don't point at the sun and say "There, that is evidence the sun exists". Evidence is something which can be used as a premise in a rational argument to produce a conclusion which is a logical consequence of the premise. (In the above example conclusion and premise are the same.) FTFA their conclusion is not a logical consequence, it seems to be more of a hunch than anything in a rational sense.
"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!
That sentence is perfectly cromulent. The Euclidean distance between the averaged centers of two groups is clearly embiggened beyond the distances between individual members among each each group.
If they did find evidence of life on Mars, why was such a major discovery published in the relatively new and obscure journal of The Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences? Wouldn't such a milestone be more appropriate in a major, long-established journal?
I mean, just send there a crap load of assorted electronics, optics, RTGs and a makerbot with a ton of plastic.
And build your experiments on location on demand...
How science was done when the original results were published:
Form Hypothesis
Collect Data
Analyze Data
Determine If Data Supports Hypothesis
Publish Results
How science is done today:
Form Hypothesis
Collect Data
Reinterpret Data Until It Supports Hypothesis
Publish Results (on the evening news)
???
Profit
Lets be honest here. They designed a test to prove or disprove the existence of life on Mars. The ran the test. When the results were not to someone's liking, they came up with an excuse why the results of this multimillion dollar test were not valid. I completely expect that they will do that again.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Sounds like the old SimEarth simulations on SNES. Mars was bloody impossible. The only thing I ever got to grow there was pine trees.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
That is all well and good, but Darling in his book _Life Everywhere_ accuses Guillermo Gonzalez of taking the opposite stance. However it should be noted that just because you have an extremist religious view does not mean it will color your scientific work, and this a huge stretch from this to a government coverup of life on Mars...so huge as to be ridiculous. Was Horwitz or Drake who said, "It is good to keep an open mind, but not so much that your brains fall out"?
I am pretty sure that MSL was NOT designed to collect samples for a future Sample-Return mission. Yes, it has a sample tray, but this was only designed for examinations, not for a return mission cache. Before any S-R missions, we better be darn sure that the sample are very, very scientifically interestings...ideally with organic compounds because those rocks will become the most expensive in history.... MSL will be a pre-cursor for any pre-S-R collection missions. It will be able to survey a lot of different geological strata and hopefully zero in on the most promising for followup missions.
Well, one of the things they found with Viking and again with Phoenix is that designing and operating equipment/experiments that do anything that's at all complex in terms of handling and processing is pretty difficult. (Especially when, as was discovered by Phoenix, when the handling properties of the materials to be sampled turn out to be different than thought.) We're seriously in the stone age when it comes to doing anything much more than looking at the surface of things, and we're still crawling up a steep learning curve.
Something those who propose that robots can do more and better than people have mostly failed to notice.
Mathematicians and in general many scientists speak pure jibberish everyone on slashdot should know this well especially if they went through a traditional CS program. It's not that they mean to it's just that new highly domain specific words get introduced into their vocabulary in order to succinctly and accurately convey ideas from their particular knowledge domain, They end up using them when it's not necessary. Also I have a sneaking suspicion that humans have a tendency to generate their own language to help define their group membership and feel "special", it's evident in cults, gangs, management, and military. I'm pretty sure scientists are not immune to this either. I often see scientific papers that could be rewritten in plain business english without loss of precision or appreciable change in size, it's a huge problem.
The way he presents his work limits the audience that is capable of applying it and the audience that is capable of critiquing it. If you want to see where I'm going with this visit the academic writings of a fringe humanities subject like radical feminism or transgender studies, you'll plainly see immature academics using academic traditions to protect themselves from criticism. (specialized language, citation, appeals to authority) A. You don't know what you're talking about because if you did you'd know what I'm talking about B. I have a memorized cherry picked group of favorite authors and papers that you haven't read to counter any argument that your lay observations of the world conflict with my studied opinion. C. I've spent 10 years studying this it's almost insulting that you challenge me with a non-academic opinion. It's easy to spot in young soft subjects with small populations of experts, angry political motives, incestuous publish-cite-publish cycles that have gotten way out of control, but I'm sure we do it as well.
Premise: The Bible is God's book, flawless in the original and preserved perfectly till today.
Question: Does life exists exist on other planets -- Answer: Don't know, the Bible does not mention this at all.
Question: If life exists elsewhere, did God create it -- Answer: Don't know, Bible only explains the origin of life (at least the major forms of life) on this planet.
Seems like accommodating life on other planets will not be a severe blow to Bible believers. Now, certainly some religions that claim to be based on the Bible have drawn conclusions re: life elsewhere, but it is not because the "Bible tells them so."
The way he presents his work limits the audience that is capable of applying it and the audience that is capable of critiquing it.
It is a scientific paper. Who do you think the intended audience (for feedback/criticism) is?
If you want to see where I'm going with this visit the academic writings of a fringe humanities subject like radical feminism or transgender studies, you'll plainly see immature academics using academic traditions to protect themselves from criticism. (specialized language, citation, appeals to authority)
Though what you describe is true, it does not necessarily reflect what transpires in the hard sciences in general (or what is transpiring with this paper in particular.)
It depends. I don't think the audience qualified to comment (i.e. other mathematicians) has much trouble understanding it.
I do agree that some pseudo- and wannabe-sciences try to sound more important than they are. But with even a little bit of education, it is fairly easy to cut through the bullshit.
But that is a different thing altogether, and as such the argument does not apply.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If there can be whalers on the moon, why can't there be vikings on mars? Tell me that one, Mr. Smart Guy!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Well, I guess we'll just have to go and check that out ourselves ><
If there is microbial life on Mars, will this and should this stop us from terraforming the planet? What if there was life there, but isn't anymore?
to loosen up a few dollars to the space program.
...and this is bad because ???