Slashdot Mirror
Scientist Says Potential Signs of Ancient Life in Mars Rover Photos
mpicpp notes that a scientist named Nora Noffke says she thinks that the Curiosity rover may have found fossils on Mars. "Time and time again, as we carefully scrutinize the amazing high-resolution imagery flowing to Earth from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, we see weird things etched in Martian rocks. Most of the time our brains are playing tricks on us. At other times, however, those familiar rocky features can be interpreted as processes that also occur on Earth. Now, in a paper published in the journal Astrobiology, a geobiologist has related structures photographed by Curiosity of Martian sedimentary rock with structures on Earth that are known to be created by microbial lifeforms."
Is it me, or does NASA seem scared to get the answer to the question of is/was there life on Mars?
Viking’s results where ambiguous, so we decided – NO LIFE – no need to go back for over 20 years.
Now we keep getting a tantalizing clues, but can’t seem to summon the will to do a sample return mission. How many sample return missions could the ISS fund? How much more scientific benefit would come from it?
Of late it almost seems like they want to be just shy of proof so they can keep sending missions, getting us just a little closer each time. Call it the scientific method if you want but as Keynes once observed – “in the long run, we are all dead.” How-about we get our answers now?
How about a real microscope on one of these missions, not just a camera that can take photos of small objects -- far short of microbial dimensions – then insist on calling it a microscopic imager. Hell, why not a scanning electron microscope?
Most of the scientific instrumentation seems focused on geology. Granted Geology can be related to conditions for life and is important knowledge, but what we really want answered is “is there life on Mars”, not “is there hematite on Mars?” OK hematite on Mars is cool to know, but not as important I think as the Life question.
When we went to the moon there were far less important questions to be answered. How can the Life question on Mars be so much less a priority when it could up-end so much of scientific knowledge?
One final note to my rant – is it possible there is some drag on this quest so as to maintain the status quo and not upset a largely religious electorate that assumes we should only be concerned with our fate here on Earth as their God has decreed, or that life on Mars might raise too many uncomfortable questions.
Letter To Iran
I read a whole book on that experiment, and the long and short of it is that it was inconclusive, there are known non-organic circumstances that could be responsible, and the follow-up experiments were cut because budgets were cut and it was heavy, and most of the scientists on the teams were skeptical.
There has always been a minority at NASA making those claims in the open. I think it is clear that it is not something "obvious" that NASA "didn't want to admit," but something that some smart people passionately believe, and the majority of their equally smart peers believe is inconclusive.
Jumping more quickly to a conclusion isn't more science-y, even if you're really excited by the preliminary data and certain interpretations.