Might Mars Contain Life? 368
stagmeister writes "According to the BBC, the Viking probes to Mars in the 1970s "detected strange signs of activity in the Martian soil - akin to microbes giving off gas," and that while those findings were not acknowledged as proof of life then, "in 1997, reached the conclusion ... that the so-called LR (labelled release) work had detected life." At the same time, the British are launching a probe to try to find life on Mars."
Where's the Proof? (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me read this again:
Dr Levin, one of three scientists on the life detection experiments, has never given up on the idea that Viking did find living micro-organisms in the surface soil of Mars.
Beagle is looking for life He continued to experiment and study all new evidence from Mars and Earth, and, in 1997, reached the conclusion and published that the so-called LR (labelled release) work had detected life.
He says new evidence is emerging that could settle the debate, once and for all.
A crazy guy has been ranting for almost 30 years about his own personal theories and only now, shortly before we go back to mars, does the "new evidence" emerge? Please. Maybe the beeb should wait until they get hard evidence before printing paranoiac fantasies like this one.
Right now we just don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
As it stands right now, both sides can use the very same data and say either "There is!" or "There isn't!"
That's how firm and solid the information is so far.
I'll wait until we have something reliable and reproducible to go on, OK?
(Personally I think there IS and hope there is.)
--
Tomas
Sagan (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice to see the BBC article invoking Carl Sagan by repeating his famed aphorism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
No disrespect to Sagan, but does nobody see the glaring error in that statement?
Extraordinary claims require the same amount of proof that absolutely mundane claims require! If some claims required more proof, science wouldn't be very scientific, would it? Who knows how much truth has been cast aside because the evidence just wasn't extraordinary enough?
Re:Comfort (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what is scarier: that we are alone in the universe - or that we are not alone in the universe.
Re:Comfort (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sagan (Score:5, Insightful)
If I claim that I saw a fully-grown African elephant in your bedroom, you would require significantly more evidence before you would believe me.
If both claims would require the same amount of proof before they would be accepted, we would either be accepting virtually nothing or virtually everything.
The reason science works is that the proof is never 100% final.
Re:Comfort (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that but in the background through the stars are glimpses of thousands of galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions more stars.
Everywhere we look in the universe the picture is the same. Billions of galaxies, countless trillions of stars. Was the universe "created" so only one planet orbiting just one of these stars would produce life? I don't think so.
Re:Carl Sagan said no (Score:2, Insightful)
Life elsewhere (Score:5, Insightful)
My mother-in-law is that kind of person, she said one night that we are the only living planet in the universe, I had to point out how would she explain the sheer diversity of life on this planet alone? Whereever life can survive it seems to do so.
The more we look, the more we find, we've looked deep underground and found life, we've looked at cold arctic areas and found life, we have found life floating high in the atmosphere.
So, life on Mars? You bet some microbes are doing just fine there, and who knows what else.
Let's also not forget that life existed LONG before humanity ever came into being, of course some people refuse to accept that fact too.
Re:Sagan (Score:5, Insightful)
If I claim that I saw a mouse in your bedroom, you wouldn't require much evidence to believe me.
I would simply want to see the mouse, or some physical evidence like mouse tracks or mouse droppings.
If I claim that I saw a fully-grown African elephant in your bedroom, you would require significantly more evidence before you would believe me.
Once again, I'd want to see the elephant, or some physical evidence like elephant tracks or elephant droppings. This seems like the same amount of proof to me.
Saying that some claims require an extraordinary amount of proof is just a convenient way for "skeptics" to avoid dealing with things they'd rather not believe.
Re:Sagan (Score:5, Insightful)
Offender #1 gives you an ID that says "John Smith". You believe him and give him his ticket.
Offender #2 gives you an ID that says "Yahweh, creater of the universe". You don't believe that could be correct.
Other than that, the ID's look the same. The difference there is that when you make a claim of a larger magnitude, you need more evidence to back it up.
Who knows how much truth has been cast aside because the evidence just wasn't extraordinary enough?
And who knows how much crap has been swallowed whole by people who don't have open minds? Remember, the definition of an open mind is a skeptic that can be persuaded by sufficient evidence. See also, burden of proof.
Re:Comfort (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the key issues here. If we find life on Mars or Europa or Titan or elsewhere inside our own universe, then the should bolster the theory that "since we find life here, it has to be the same in the rest of the universe.
While I agree with the above statement, there will ALWAYS be those who will refuse to believe or even claim that the discoveries were false. "Oh, some scientist must have forged the data" or "They just want to destroy religion" or "There was contamination".
What I am trying to say is this. It will take more than finding microbes on a foreign planet or moon to convince the stubborn, and even then, the most stubborn will still refuse to believe, no matter what.
And to be fair, it's the same on the other side. The last line in the article in question shows this.
"If we find no evidence of life on Mars it may just mean we have looked in the wrong place."
Paraphrased: "Life DOES exist elsewhere in the universe! We just haven't found it yet!" That is, there is no way you could convince these people that there is a possibility that they might be chasing something that isn't there. The absence of proof doesn't faze them at all.
I guess we just have to wait and see what happens.
-John
Re:To Quote Contact.. (Score:1, Insightful)
moderators begone... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Dr. Levin was the second scientist funded by NASA to build a life detection instrument for planetary missions to Mars. Dr. Levin has been a co-investigator for NASA's Mariner 9 misson to Mars in 1971; a Principal Investigator for the Viking Biology Team in 1976; a JPL Mox Team co-experimenter on the Russian Mars 96 mission to Mars."
Now, I'm not sure if your own credentials surpass DR. Levins, but seems only a "crazy, paranoid" person would label this man as such.
Not to mention, he's been attempting to show people his "hard evidence" for 30 years, dumbass! I can't believe you received 5 karma points for doing NOTHING more than calling this scientist "crazy" due to your inability to comprehend the fact that it may be true.
Very sad.
Re:Contamination is not a problem - it's desirable (Score:2, Insightful)
Gets kinda sad, when you think about the fact that the US could supply enough food to stop all starvation in the world (California could feed all of the US), but there's no money in it...
Re:Contamination is not a problem - it's desirable (Score:3, Insightful)
Two problems with your argument.
First, evacuation to Mars is not practical, period. Figure out how much ten billion people weigh. Now figure out the amortized travel cost per kilogram for an earth/mars transport, bearing in mind that infrastructure is not free. Put these two numbers together, and you see why evacuation scenarios are laughed at.
Second, if the population of the earth keeps growing (as you seem to be assuming), colonizing Mars won't help. The doubling time is under a century, so you'll face exactly the same problem very soon.
The only stable scenario is one in which the population no longer grows. This seems to be happening on its own in the first world.
Who picks these missions??? (Score:2, Insightful)
There is one thing that I see that is fundamentally wrong with missions to Mars. NO LIFE EXPERIMENTS. Both of Nasa's Mars Rovers, the Beagle 2 or anything coming down the pike for that matter do not have ANY experiments to directly detect life of any form.
Should life be the primary mission? No. But cripes, at least place Dr. Levin's LR experiment on board? Whats that big deal?
This argument has been raging for decades. It's time to put it to bed and friggin move on. If there is life, no doubt its microbial. We learn about it, document it and move on.
I don't know about anyone else, but there are only so many gamma x-ray spectrometer experiments that you can subject a Mars rock to. Lets quit spending Millions on these "Fluff" missions and get down to the meat and potatos.
Re:Peroxides != life (Score:3, Insightful)
First, let me just say that, to a point, I agree with you (thus my original qualifier of "should" <G>).
That said, however, as long as a given proposition takes a phrasing similar to the one you mentioned ("Given X..."), that does not invalidate it... In fact, it makes it more valid, in that it doesn't just say "Y holds true", it makes Y conditional on X. Something can remain logically valid even with a false premise.
The key here lies in sufficiently contextualizing any statements of "fact". With enough specificity, we can make just about anything a valid statement. "If 2==3, 3+3={4,5,6}". That might not have any real-world analog, or even make sense, but it defines the context enough to validate (at least) the conclusion presented.
We get into trouble, when as you pointed out, we do begin to "assume X", unconditionally. A story I once read (perhaps about Feynman? That sounds right, though I don't recall exactly) nicely illustrated the problem. The author, as a grad student, had access to his university's particle accelerator and planned to run some experiments. Before running his own experiments, he wanted to run a few "textbook" experiments to verify certain features of them. His advisor refused to let him do so, insisting that they would have a well-known outcome and that it would just waste time to verify those results.
Which brings me to...
Are you *SURE* gravity on earth is 9.8m/s^2? When was the last time you tested it?
I last tested it in a basic physics course, perhaps 8 years ago, about 20 different ways over the semester.
And not once did I actually get 9.8m/s^2.
Though, taking every source of error I could measure into consideration, I did (usually) manage to get 9.8 within my range of error.
Hmm, so have I made a point here...
Well, yes. Science ("good" science) may include some far-fetched (or even unknown) conditionals on a given assertion. But actual faith does not enter the picture, in that it doesn't matter if I "believe" that g=9.8m/s^2, any way I measure it, I'll still come close. At the same time, that does not mean that all (or even most) of what we normally consider "science" actually refers to good science.
Re:Sagan (Score:5, Insightful)
But the key is this: a claim is plausible if most of the evidence required to prove it is already known and accepted by the skeptic. In other words, the same amount of evidence is required, but for implausible claims, more of it is lacking.
Imagine someone shows you a picture of a mouse in their backyard. The fact that mice are alive and scurry through backyards is proven. You'd be inclined to accept this man's story with a simple picture of the event. Now this person claims an alien is in their back yard. Aliens have never been proven to exist, and therefore have not been proven to have landed on Earth -- ever. If someone makes this claim, it would be an extraordinary claim.
Yes it would. But in both cases, the following evidence is required to prove the claim: evidence that
--- said creatures exist
--- said creatures scurry in backyards
--- one such creature did so at the time and place claimed.
Now for mice, a skeptic is likely to concede that the first two pieces of evidence are readily known and accepted. For aliens, the skeptic would make no such concession.
But again, in the end, the same amount of evidence is needed; but more of that evidence is lacking in the case of the alien.
Look at it this way: what if you grew up in such a way that you had never heard of a mouse? Suddenly the claimant has more work to do before you'll believe a mouse was in his backyard!
Re:Proving a Negative (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me propose the analogy of the elementary arithmetic textbook. It describes some properties of the real number system and describes how to calculate with it. Does it describe all the properties of the real number system? Does it detail other mathematical structures that have the same properties? Does it detail how to derive those properties from Peano's postulates, or how to use those properties to prove the consistency of all higher mathematics? No. There mathematical truth outside the elementary arithmetic text, but that does not invalidate the truth in the textbook. The focus for the elementary student is learning arithmetic; the other stuff makes a lot more sense when arithmetic is mastered.
Science is not antithetical to religion; it is merely irrelevant to it. Science is the study of the world you can see, touch, hear, and otherwise measure. It will be gone (from your perspective) when you die. God and the essence of you, on the other hand, are presumed by religion to last forever. So, what is the point in studying a system that will be obsolete in 100 years when you could be studying one that will be useful for eons?