NASA May Have Killed The Martians 238
Sneakernets writes "CNN reports that NASA may have found life on Mars via the Viking space probes in 1976-77, but failed to recognize it and killed it by accident. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geology professor at Washington State University, says that Mars microbes that the space probes had found were possibly drowned and baked by accident. Other experts said the new concept is plausible, but more work is needed before they are convinced. From the article: 'A new NASA Mars mission called Phoenix is set for launch this summer, and one of the scientists involved said he is eager to test the new theory about life on Mars. However, scientists must come up with a way to do that using the mission's existing scientific instruments, said NASA astrobiologist and Phoenix co-investigator Chris McKay.'"
That would explain... (Score:5, Funny)
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Dilbert had a similar problem... (Score:5, Funny)
We come in peace!
*Adjusts lens to get a better view*
*Squish*
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Marvin will get angry (Score:5, Funny)
Kyle: Wow! That's a lot of seamen, Cartman.
Cartman: Yeah, I bought all that I could at this bank, and then I got the rest from this guy Ralph in an alley.
Stan: That's cool.
Cartman: Yeah, and the sweet thing is, the stupid asshole didn't even charge me money for it. He just made me close my eyes and suck on a hose.
I remember this (Score:3, Funny)
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"We're here to bring democracy to...oops." (Score:5, Funny)
Right?
Lenny at NASA: "I used to have a little friend, but he don't move no more."
Re:"We're here to bring democracy to...oops." (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, now come on! It's not like we intentionally sent giant tripods to another world and started vaporizing the indigenous...
WMD (Score:5, Funny)
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old video (Score:5, Interesting)
My immediate thought was Why are we deciding all life is the same here? There are different species on the earth who need different amounts of things, Just because we all need water and a regular-ish temperature doesn't make potential alien life follow that rule. This scientist seems to be agreeing with me. Which is more then my teacher did at the time.
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It's life Jim but not as we know it (Score:3, Interesting)
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the one i'm thinking of was from TNG...the thing was superintelligent, and as a result, superbored. it sort of swallowed up riker, iirc, and wanted the rest of the crew to entertain it...
Skin of Evil? That's the one where Yar died by the creature who was composed of everything bad discarded from a particular race. I think the TNG episode closest to this is the terraforming project where they had the crystalline life forms (they called humans "bags of mostly water") which existed in the water layer just below the surface.
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It's life Jim (Score:5, Informative)
The three "essential ingredients" for life now seem to be carbon, water and energy but we haven't finished searching the planet yet, let alone our solar system and beyond.
To summerize: "It's life Jim, but not as we know it".
Re:It's life Jim (Score:4, Informative)
I first realised the tree was bigger in the early 90's, a documentry explained the lifecycle of slime mold complete with timelapse sequences showing off it's plant, animal and fungal features, but still, that was only four branches in my layman's version of the tree. A few years later I read a book [amazon.com] about how "Alvin" the submersible had expanded the tree with the weird and wonderfull critters that live around deep sea vents and gave a picture similar to figure 1. I've also heard of other branches that extract energy from uranium 2km below ground and still others that live on the cooling rods of nuclear reactors.
Maybe none of this is news to you, but it was to me when I heard it so I thought I would pass it on. Speaking of passing things on, here is an animation [youtube.com] you might enjoy. It's from a group of Havard microboligists showing the workings of a single cell, the animation is set to music so it's up to you if you want to reasearch what is happening. I thought I knew a little bit about cells assembling protiens and such until I saw that video on the news and was awe struck by the sheer complexity of natures nano-machines that have somehow got together and decided to build a pile of temporarily cooperative atoms capable of contemplating it's own navel, (ie: "me").
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The planet was being terraformed, but the intelligent crystal beings that lived in the thin layer of water under the sand re-programmed the laser drill and killed at least one of them.
My favorite quote from that episode:
"Ugly bags of mostly water"
That's how the "micro-brain" referred to the humans. At my job not long after that episode aired, I was in the break room with a cow-orker and opened up the drawer to find the instant coffee packs. I held one up and sa
Re:old video (Score:5, Funny)
Rock monster? Rock monster??? Jeeeeesus!!! Every geek knows that the creatures were called "Hortas".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horta_(Star_Trek) [wikipedia.org]
This is the Star Trek episode where we got to hear McCoy complain to Capt Kirk, "Damn-it Jim, I'm a doctor not a bricklayer!" as he was patching the wounds on the Horta.
That quote is mentioned on the bottom of the Wikipedia page.
Rock monster? Please turn in your geek card at the door.
Just for grins, what is your name for the furry creatures in "The Trouble with Tribbles?"
Re:old video (Score:5, Funny)
Flatcats.
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Re:old video (Score:5, Informative)
First, there is an 'energy' definition of life. That is to say, alien life may not be carbon-based, may not use water, may not be composed of cells, and may not have DNA inside of it. However, one of the defining characteristics of life is that it uses energy. It metabolizes, grows, and reproduces. It eats something, somehow. It makes a waste product.
So, if we look at a planet's chemical composition, we can make a good guess as to whether there is life there by looking at its chemistry. If there are living things there, they will be making reactive chemicals. From outer space, we could tell that the Earth has a lot of metabolic activity in it, because the sky is mostly highly reactive oxygen that is a result of plant respiration. Mars, on the other hand, is mostly chemically inert. There is very little metabolism going on there, if there is any at all. Either life there has already eaten up the planet, or else there wasn't enough resource to really get started, or there was never life at all.
Secondly, let's talk about a scenario where life can really only happen with water and organic ( meaning carbon-containing ) compounds. What conditions are necessary for life? What conditions does life thrive in? Take the Earth as an example. Where do we find the greatest mass and biodiversity? In the oceans. Ocean water is practically alive itself, there is so much life in it. On land, the places with the greatest biomass and biodiversity are the rainforests, where they have near 100% humidity. So water as a medium seem to really grow and reproduce. What temperature range do we find the most life in? About 70-90 degrees F -- I'm talking about the *most* life. So the metabolism of life forms seems to function optimally at 70-90 F.
The point I'm trying to make is that yes, we do find life in weird places on Earth -- inside solid rock, in 200 degree sulfuric vents on the ocean floor, inside nuclear reactor cores. However, there isn't very much of it in terms of biomass, and there's not much diversity of forms. My guess is that those 'extremophiles' are descendants of creatures who lived in more hospital environments and became adapted to increasingly extreme environments. I don't think that life originated in rocks or in ocean vents. I think life originated in an environment that is most like where we find the greatest biomass and biodiversity -- water in sunlight at about 60-120 F.
If we're not talking about the above scenarios, we are getting away from materialism, and thus science. This might include "Imagine beings of pure energy" (hey, atoms are 'pure energy') or "What if the sun is conscious?" ( well, we can't measure consciousness *yet* so we can't tell scientifically ) These are fun to think about, but scientifically they are kind of a non-starter.
I understand what you're saying about thinking outside the box, expecting the unexpected, and not limiting our minds or our past experiences. But science puts some serious restraints on what we can imagine or postulate *scientifically*.
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But small amounts of methane have been detected around Mars, which is a possible result of respiration.
we do find life in weird places on Earth -- inside solid rock, in 200 degree sulfuric vents on the ocean floor, inside nuclear reactor cores. However, there isn't very much of it i
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-nB
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My guess is that those 'extremophiles' are descendants of creatures who lived in more hospital environments and became adapted to increasingly extreme environments. I don't think that life originated in rocks or in ocean vents. I think life originated in an environment that is most like where we find the greatest biomass and biodiversity -- water in sunlight at about 60-120 F.
Except that life originated in an anaerobic environment: oxygen was not a significant component of Earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years after life began. When oxygen did increase, the atmosphere became inhospitable to those early organisms.
We find a large amount of biodiversity in (now) hospitable environments because of chlorophyl: early plant-like organisms evolved a way to produce energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide. The waste product was oxygen, which still newer organisms were
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You can't take the Earth as an "example" of how life works on other planets when there isn't life on other planets. It's like saying, "all universes work this way because ours does". Or "look, I was able dodge getting shot once, I am the One!!"
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Sounds pretty plausible until you remember that life on Earth h
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This is something that's always puzzled me - by this definition, wouldn't Fire be considered a life-form?
It uses energy, in the form of wood/gasoline/other fue
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Uh ? There seems to be a non-sequitur here. Living organisms consume free energy, they do not create it (in a strict, global sens
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Actually, the "sky" or atmosphere (as scientists call it) is mostly Nitrogen. Only around 20% is oxygen. Link. [mmu.ac.uk]
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Arthur C Clarke wrote a story about that called Report on Planet Three, in which the Martians establish beyond doubt that life on Earth is impossible due to the corrosive oxygen in our atmosphere, high temperature, etc.
Re:old video (Score:5, Insightful)
Carl Sagan wrote some great material on the topic as well. I particularly like his reasoning on why it makes sense that any alien life would have developed the ability to sense a similar portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can.
Re:old video (Score:4, Interesting)
life would be different on a planet with entirely different conditions
But it's almost a pre-requisite that there must be a liquid medium available for life to exist. Chemicals in a solid can't move around enough to go through the complexity of reactions and in a gas they're too far apart.
Also the liquid almost has to be water in order to dissolve the wide variety of chemicals you need (although you could argue that organic solvents would work if life was mostly carbon based).
You also need compounds which can form large and varied molecules in order to carry enough information for a genome. Some people have suggested silicon based compounds could form large enough (and varied enough) molecules but I doubt it personally, which leaves carbon molecules as the only realistic basis for life.
We end up with carbon based life forms existing only where liquid water is available and consequently no life on mars - as experiment after experiment has found.
NASA pushes life on Mars as a possibility because it's a justification for their continued existence and their proposed (pointless) manned trips there.
Admittedly it's difficult to prove a negative and there the faint possiblity of some weird "energy based" lifeform or something like that but, in practice, (and unless some unexpected evidence shows up) Occam's Razor tells us there is no life on Mars. It's disappointing but try to be logical about it.
Ganymede (liquid water) and Titan (liquid hydrocarbons) are better bets.
The Ant Effect (Score:2)
Small consolation for the millions of affected microbes.
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That you just killed typing that message. And that you will now kill after realizing how disgusting your keyboard is.
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Well (Score:4, Funny)
Wait... (Score:3, Funny)
OMG The title is soooo misleading... (Score:5, Informative)
The title implies that NASA killed off all of the martians, while the article says that if Viking had found a few martian microbes in its sample, it would have killed those.
There's no need for the sensationalism.
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Unless all of martian life was conviniently located in just that sample, and nowhere else.
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Gotta lova articles like these!
No, I'm New Here (Score:3, Funny)
Well, (Score:5, Funny)
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Just because they're dead... (Score:2)
Obligatory Star Wars Quote (Score:5, Funny)
--
BMO
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They're midichlorians, you insensitive clod!
Obligatory.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Earth (Score:4, Funny)
Damned prime directive (Score:2)
It's a shame... (Score:2, Funny)
That way, all they have to do is run the same tests, and listen for millions of tiny little screams.
Point is we might have missed detecting life (Score:5, Interesting)
The important point is that a new possibility for the nature of life on Mars has been suggested. If there is any life in this form it would not have been detected by previous experiements. This is interesting because it keeps open the possibility of what would be the greatest discovery ever - life on another planet. The minor point that the testing process could have killed the specific bacteria it sampled is - apart from the obligatory jokes - totally irellevant.
Real Lab (Score:2)
This is basically a retread... (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the 70's the results of the "chicken soup" (gas exchange) experiment on board the Vikings were frustratingly inconclusive - the resulting single release of gas when combining martian soil with a mixture of likely nutrients could have been produced by several mechanisms: (1) a simple chemical reaction between the soil sample and the "soup", or (2) the death rattles of an organism poisoned by the "soup" or (3) the initial metabolic release of (an) organism(s) that ate itself to death like a goldfish on the nutrient "soup".
Well, that explains it (Score:5, Funny)
I seem to recall Cheney using a similar excuse when he shotgunned a hunting partner in his ass...
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That's what you get... (Score:2)
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Got a half trillion bucks laying around? Or did you blow it on a dumb war again?
Seriously, if the goal is to detect life, probes are still far cheaper. A sample return mission can relatively easily be carried out by remote control probably at about 1/5 to 1/10 the cost of a manned mission per rock.
Oblig. SouthPark (Score:2)
Dead Martians (Score:3, Funny)
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Because Rape II, Pillager 4, and Plunder 7 all failed during landing.
It's a win/win situation for Schulze-Makuch (Score:5, Insightful)
Good reporting:
The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.
Sensationatilism:
Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.
To show how full of crap it is:
Schulze-Makuch acknowledges he can't prove that Martian microbes exist, but given the Martian environment and how evolution works, "it makes sense."
So if there are microbes left, NASA was lucky, and if there are none, NASA has killed them all.
And if there are microbes, Schulze-Makuch is happy because NASA didn't kill them all and his name is in history again, while if there are none, it would be exactly how Schulze-Makuch had predicted it!
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Comedian pointed this out in the 1970's (Score:4, Interesting)
I love it when comedians get these things right ahead of time.
P.S. Another example at the Onion. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [theonion.com] saw the new Fusion with six blades coming way back in Feb 2004!
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And Saturday Night Live "commercial" back in '76 or so: "The new Triple Trak: Because you'll believe anything!"
this won't end well (Score:2)
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You know, I saw NASA killing something ... (Score:2)
30-year-old news (Score:5, Informative)
You see.... several of the biological experiments on Viking turned up positive. However, this result contradicted other components of the same experiment, which indicated that there were no organic molecules in the soil, among other factors, making the possibility of life existing in those soil samples remotely minute.
It was largely agreed upon that the experiments were inconclusive and poorly designed all the way back in the 80s. The fact that this guy is making this argument about an experiment that yielded a false-positive is somewhat absurd. The bits of the experiment that turned up negative would have hypothetically yielded the same result on a living organism as a dead one.
The ill-fated Beagle 2 [wikipedia.org] probe was supposed to repeat/confirm several of the Viking experiments.
Of course, that's not to say that we shouldn't be reproducing these experiments to figure out what went wrong, and what produced the false positive, as I'm sure there's plenty of interesting science to be explored there as well. I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of life on mars either -- as mentioned earlier, the experiments were inconclusive.
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If it's WAZZU, it's questionable (Score:2)
For those of you just tuning in, WSU is a well-known drinking school. People wear sweatshirts that say, "Our Drinking Team Has a Football Problem." And their football team has its share of problems, too: They lost to the UW Huskies when the latter was having a horrible year. This proves, of course, that the Cougars are still the Cougars.
look up close (Score:2)
There's life on Mars (Score:2, Insightful)
And given microorganisms are quite more resilient, than, say, mammals, who knows. Those probes might begin the life on Mars, if there wasn't any.
If you follow how nature works, there's only one thing to know: life will push and proliferate in incredible ways, if given the chance. The probes could've been enough of a chance.
New approach to colonisation then? (Score:2)
That'll save NASA some budget
Sound of Thunder (Score:2)
http://www.onebee.com/media/PDF/A_Sound_of_Thunde
Popular Martian Space Opera? (Score:2)
Oh... (Score:2)
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But a good working definition of life might include limiting entropy within a closed membrane (at the expense of increasing it outside).
Can't you read? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Can't you read? (Score:5, Funny)
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I see this a lot in things written in the USA - why not just use "they" instead as is used in English when the sex is indeterminate?
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Bummer to be us, though.
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On the bright side, 12,463 microbes confessed to being Al Queda members just before their death.