geoffrobinson writes "Reuters is reporting that a scientist from Germany believes Viking probe data shows signs of life. From the article: "Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface. His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin.""
The name "Joop Houtkooper" is most likely Dutch in origin. Houtkoper means "wood buyer", the double 'o' in Houtkooper is likely an old style spelling (1600's).
If I remember right, the one that said "no" was later re-run in an Antarctic dry valley. It said "no" there, too. Basically it's lower limit of detection was too high.
Mind, my favorite way of describing the whole Viking experiment situation is:
The Viking Lander experiments were designed to answer the question, "is there life on Mars?". They landed, performed their experiments, and beamed back: "could you repeat the question?"
Didn't the viking probes reach Mars in the 70's/80's? I find it fascinating that we can still data mine and extract information from a probes dataset from 20-30 years ago. It would be interesting to see how much data (TB? EB?) that was recorded from the Viking mission.
Imagine what people might learn from data we're getting now from the two rovers on mars.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday August 23 2007, @06:41PM (#20337661)
You're kidding right? The Viking data is often held up as a prime example of data loss through format and equiment obsolecense. I'm surprised you hadn't heard that one.
Around 1999, Dr.J.Miller wanted to have a look through the data and found it couldn't be accessed anymore. Most of what he did get was reassembled from old paper printouts that other reseacher hadn't got around to throwing out yet.
Coincidentally, his research was another case of finding signs of Martian life in the old data.
Lander 1 was supposed to land on July 4, 1976, but was delayed a few weeks. Lander 2 was just a little later.
The Viking lander bit rate was low, and there was only comminucation when the Earth was above the horizon, and the radio bandwidth was only 2 MHz, so the data return was pretty tiny by modern standards (from the Landers - the orbiter data rate was consderably larger). My back of the envelope calculations says that the total Lander data return was on the order of a few hundred GB. (Also, in the extended mission, the data collection was slowed, I believe to once per week.)
Of course, these data are still being mined, and are absolutely crucial to our understanding of Mars dynamics, among other things.
If this is proven to be fact ( and i dont think this really *proves* anything. Its still theory ), how is this going to sit with the religions of the world that truly think we are the only ones 'god' created?
They'll just re-interpret the bible saying "Earth" to mean "Earth and Other planets as well" because of translation issues. Just like they did with the Genesis 7 days thing.
Extending that concept... God explicitly handed supremacy over all living things to mankind... so if 'the world' becomes interpreted as 'the universe' we are going to have a very difficult time being good neighbors.
Not that it would be a cakewalk without religious fundamentalism. There will just be one more barrier to overcome before we can hope to deal with the existence of E.T. life in a rational manner.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday August 23 2007, @07:51PM (#20338343)
Actually, 'the world' DOES mean 'the universe' in some languages. Greek happens to be one of them. The most common Greek word that is translated 'world' is kosmos, from which we get our English word cosmos which means the universe. It is translated world because that usually makes the most sense in context, and sounds the best when rendering a thought in English, but it is not necessarily restricted to 'planet earth'. I don't know about Hebrew, but I suspect it may be similar.
The Bible doesn't say anything at all about life forms on other planets. Intelligent life I might have issues with....
I'm an atheist. A few weeks ago, a Christian friend asked me, "When you look out at the night sky, across billions of light-years of interstellar space filled with billions of worlds we haven't even imagined yet, aren't you a little afraid that you might be wrong?"
Your idiotic post made me realize -- way too late, of course -- that I should've asked her the same question in reply.
I agree which you. In fact what you talk about is also true of the deistic "Dharma" philosophy.
Dharma, is the diestic philosophy, of the thestic "religions" of Bhuddism, Jainism, Siehkism, and vedism (aka Hinduism).
Dharma describes everything (of which the universe is a part of) as a single entity, that morphs and forms. This "entity" does not have a "known" personality nor anything that can be attributed to human factors, and nuances, and we are all part of it. The universe forms, disforms, destroys and rebuilds. its just a huge never ending cycle. Life cannot truely be defined, as we only can define life as what we "know".
To take your "men in black principle", there is a more readily available description of describing it. Our bodies are made of millions of individual cells. Each of them have life on their own, as well as a purpose. Some die after 2 weeks and are replaced, some live much longer, and are not replaced when they die (eg brain cells). Each individual cell may not be "aware" of the implications on each other. However, formed together, they make us. Our lives, our emotions, our being, as a singular compounded organism. With this in mind, there is nothing to say that we are not part of a bigger so called organism, its just that we don't understand it if it does exist, and maybe its not even REQUIRED to understand it.
I agree with your views of deism can itself support science. Dhramic philosophy has never discouraged the pursuit of science, unlike it appears of Abrahamic religions (such as Chistiantiy, Islam). Indeed, thousands of years ago Dharmic "scientists" (of all the main dharmic religions) worked out things such as the fact that Earth revolved around the sun, that there are other planets, and indeed other stars, and galaxys, etc, even as others still viewed the earth as flat, surrounded by a "dome". One particular assertion by Dharmism is that energy and matter are the same thing, in that energy "clumps" together to form matter. Recent works on quantum physics, have agreed somewhat to that idea, including a recent experiment at CERN, where "energy" were accelerated and then "smashed" together, and for a split second formed "matter".
Frankly i find all this rather interesting, and somewhat overwhelming. What we have is such a large concept, that is difficult to sometimes comprehend with our limited minds, and consciences. However, i woudl rather not go back to the "safe cocoon" of thestic views.
The Bible doesn't say anything at all about life forms on other planets. Intelligent life I might have issues with, but microbes? No problem there. Do you mean the Bible of the Jews and Christians or the Koran? The Tongva people's creation myth? Or what about the Hopi? And who are we to ignore the Hindu world creation epos?
I'm a geek, but I believe in supernatural things and beings greater than ourselves. I don't believe they are Gods or whatever, but I do believe there are things in -this- world we can't even understand fully yet, so I'm pretty sure there are things -out there- which I can't even start to grasp. I have no evidence for this, I have no faith for this, I just think logically the universe is way too big for there not to be other life and the way we evolved and changed won't be the same as others, so for all we k
If you read the Catechism of the Catholic church, it states that "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."
A belief in a God does not require you to contradict the Big Bang or evolution or anything else. Unless, of course, you think that it is important for a god to lie.
What this leads to is that some fairly savvy folks in the religious community primarily don't want you to try and argue that because we descended from the same stock as the Bonobo it's OK to fuck like Bonobos... but it's OK to say that we descended from the same stock as Bonobos. This, of course, gets turned by the far-less-savvy religious right into an excuse to attack evolution.
I tend to think that the whackos on the religious right has pushed the thinking person towards aethism, when a thinking person might had been a member of a fairly liberal faith or agnostic before.
Here is how I reconcile: I hold that faith applies to notions outside of the scope of scientific inquiry. I accept, on faith, that some unprovable, untestable ideas are truthful. I do not, however, consider ALL unprovable, untestable ideas to be truthful. I choose what to believe. I happen to choose to believe in a faith that is based on a long-established canon that is grounded, to some degree or another, in historical events. (This is why I believe that Christianity's claims are more credible than Pastafarianism's, for example. They are not provable, but they contain elements of documentary evidence.)
In this regard, I consider myself to be arational, but not irrational. Here is why:
When faith and reason conflict, I side with reason. I closely examine apparent conflicts between them. After I have carefully defined terms and established that the claims between the two are genuinely contradictory, I will reassess my interpretation of scripture based on what reason tells me must be true. Reason is absolute. My faith, on the other hand, is based on my ability to interpret a document that has undergone many translations and which requires a holistic understanding to grasp. I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that my capacity to interpret scriptures is woefully limited.
This does not mean, however, that I will change my faith whimsically. Give me the benefit of the doubt, at least, and accept (as some do not) that I make a genuine effort to maintain the integrity of my faith within the boundaries of reality, as I know it. My philosophy is generally that there is only one truth and that reason and faith both pursue it. Part of my faith is that I accept reason as a gift from God that I am to use to enjoy creation and to refine my faith.
And how would you go about disproving the existence of ESP? Studies have been done (I don't have references handy, but I could go find some if needed), and have failed to find evidence of ESP. These studies have been repeated. How many would you need to be convinced that ESP does not exist? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
ESP is about as likely as creationism, and the people believing in it are using the same thought processes as the made-in-seven-days crowd. Science can disprove nothing. What it can do is collect evidence and give us likelyhoods. With no reliable evidence supporting it, ESP is as likely as the tooth fairy. You can't believe something simply because you'd prefer it to be true.
'How many would you need to be convinced that ESP does not exist? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?'
None. So long as there are millions of credible reports in the field no failure to replicate the condition in a lab would prove to me that the condition can not exist. As a technician there are no shortage of conditions my customers have reported that I have been unable to replicate, that hardware manufacturers and software firms have been unable to replicate. I might like to dismiss these strays reports as mistakes but if there are enough of them I am forced to accept that the conditions are occurring and the failure is on the part of myself/firms/manufacturers.
If ESP is to be shown not to occur it will be through a more perfect understanding of how the brain DOES function. There are loonies who would have you believe we know nothing of how the brain functions, the only ones worse are the neurologists who would have you believe the scant data we have on the brain constitutes anything like a rudimentary understanding of its function.
'ESP is about as likely as creationism'
Neither are especially likely or unlikely.
'the people believing in it are using the same thought processes as the made-in-seven-days crowd'
The made in seven days crowd are beginning with an elaborate myth and assuming it is true without evidence. I would agree that those who believe in ESP fall in that category as well. The same is true of anyone who believes ESP does not exist, or has a belief in creationism or a lack thereof. The only ones who do not fall into this crowd are those who refuse to adopt a belief on a topic without substantial evidence.
'Science can disprove nothing.'
Science can in fact disprove very specific things. Objective findings can eliminate possibilities. That's is what science does, it is a process by which we gather data, form possible conclusions based upon the data and hope to disprove those conclusions by continuing to gather more data.
'What it can do is collect evidence'
Right.
'give us likelyhoods'
Wrong. Science does not give likelyhoods poor scientists do. Good scientists collect data and let the data determine what is and is not.
'With no reliable evidence supporting it, ESP is as likely as the tooth fairy.'
Reliablity of evidence does not determine likelyhood. Reality is fairly likely even when we have observed NO evidence of it yet. There is no evidence of a tooth fairy credible or otherwise. ESP has not been confirmed in the lab but there are mountains of credible eyewitness accounts (even more that are not credible and that is why closed minded fools dismiss the possibility).
The lab may not be as far away as you think either. There are ongoing experiments at MIT where individuals are able to influence robots with thought in a manner that consistently beats statistical probabilities.
The brain is a complex machine and we do not understand the technology. Until we do, only an idiot would reach conclusions about its capabilities.
So long as there are millions of credible reports in the field no failure to replicate the condition in a lab would prove to me that the condition can not exist
So, you think science is something like democracy, if enough people believe in something then it must be true?
To me, credibility is pretty much linked to repeatability. In order for something to be credible it must be either replicated or shown by a well-reasoned chain of evidence to be possible. If you report a phenomenon that (a) no one can repeat and (b) negates facts that we know both from the labs and from day-to-day experience, then you are in trouble.
Reliability of evidence does not determine likelyhood
Yes, it does. Ask any judge, any lawyer, any juror. Would you like to be convicted of a crime based solely on unreliable evidence presented by the DA?
There is no evidence of a tooth fairy credible or otherwise
Yes, there is. Millions of children have put a tooth under their pillows and found a bicycle in the porch next morning. What more evidence do you need? There's *more* evidence for the tooth fairy than for any other ESP phenomena.
"What's your point? There is substantial data supporting both and thus far no data that would rule out the possibility of either. Unlike creationism both could theoretically be disproven given continued observation. Oh wait, you must be one of those crackpots who somehow thinks science is a field for people with CLOSED minds that already believe they know the answers to the big questions." There is no known scientific evidence of ESP and "paranormal activity".
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
Newton did alchemy at a time when the modern field of chemistry didn't exist. This was a period when the concept of a chemical element was unknown, the periodic table didn't exist, nobody had ever thought of weighing their chemicals or doing any kind of quantitative measurements of reactions, there were no scientific journals of any kind, and people studying what we would now call chemistry were caught up in a tradition in which it was considered normal to keep your results secret and record them in code. Newton basically invented the modern science of physics; I think we can excuse him for not inventing the modern science of chemistry as well. If he'd lived in the 19th century, and chosen to work in the alchemical tradition rather than the newly spawned field of chemistry, then we could rightfully call him a quack, an idiot, or a charlatan.
Newton was also a closet heretic (didn't believe in the trinity), and wrote gazillions of words of theological silliness. So what? It was religion. It wasn't science, and he didn't claim that it was science.
Numerology? I call bullshit, unless you just mean something tied up with his religious ideas.
If any scientist today is a true believer in ESP, etc., then yes, it does call into question that scientist's judgment. The evidence against all that paranormal bullshit is so strong that you'd have to be an incompetent scientist to ignore it.
I am not an expert in space-related fields in any way, but I always thought, if life was discovered somewhere else in the universe, who's to say it remotely resembles anything we have here on Earth? Just as humans are a result of adaptation and evolution to Earth's atmosphere and chemical makeup, I bet the first form of life found outside of Earth is wacky and customized to its home planet's conditions.
Of course, if the alien being's stage of life is infantile upon discovery, little microbes aren't very exciting. But imagine finding some race that walks on 5 legs with two tails, that is smarter than humans, but dies upon contact with oxygen or something......
It is clear that we must promptly launch an investigation on whether this "life" believes in a democratic system of government. If not, we should immediately impose sanctions, inform the public their WMDs, and begin planning a military invasion to begin approximately 18 months from now. If the terrorists possess oil and make attempts to trade it under the Euro currency, we must accelerate this plan, using any means possible to defeat this threat to America. It is clear this life poses a terrorist threat to America. We must preemptively strike against us before they bring their War on Terror to our soil.
Actually, the cute girl from marketing made eye contact and winked so this is conclusive evidence that sex may have or will happen at some point in the fullness of time. Or not.
Sheesh, could we give the sensationalist headlines some rest?
I worked on the Viking Lander project (but not on the biology side). Before the landing, NASA published and sent around little promo phamplets describing
what a positive (biological) response would be from each of the 3 biological experiments. (Along the lines of, add nutrients to a soil sample, get CO2 out, sterilize the next soil
sample, add nutrients, get no CO2, that is evidence for life. No CO2, or CO2 with a sterlized sample, not evidence for life.) I still have mine in my basement.
Each of the two landers had 3 biological experiements. All six worked fine. All six had a positive response based on the criteria published before landing.
However, because the mass spectrometer detected no organic molecules (not one of the pre-published tests), these results were ascribed to non-biological causes.
I could never understand why one of the biological researchers didn't just say, "we have detected life, by our published criteria, but we don't understand it." However, none did.
Science doesn't always move in the nice linear fashion described in the text books...
I could never understand why one of the biological researchers didn't just say, "we have detected life, by our published criteria, but we don't understand it." However, none did.
Dr. Gilbert Levin leader of the labeled release experiment did just that:
Yes, I know he has since, but I don't remember him doing so at any of the press conferences at the time. However, he may have and I missed it. He has certainly been consistent in recent times. My point wasn't that this proved that there was life, but that they set up a scientific protocol and then violated it as soon as the results made them nervous. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that if the mass spectrometer had detected organics, they would have claimed the detection of life. If the only real t
Yes I am a analytical chemist who had just started working with GCMS systems then, at that time Professor Klaus Bieman was regarded as an almost god like figure by those of us involved in gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, the hyphenated technique he founded and he was a figure of great stature in the chemistry community overall. Dr. Gilbert Levin on the other hand was a scientist/entrepreneur little known outside the specialist area of environmental engineering where he developed the labeled release technique.
The chemists were determined to prove that if their experiment couldn't show the existence of life on Mars no-one else's experiment could and they used their considerable pull in the academic community to influence the outcome of the debate.
Also I believe Levin has suggested that there may have been fundamentalist Christians in positions of influence in NASA at the time who held deep theological opinions against the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
He certainly seemed to be fighting against heavy odds. It not only
has to be viewed as a huge strategic failure of the US space effort
but also as a failure of the science community to work in the objective manner it is supposed to.
For years Dr. Gilbert Levin, leader of the labeled release biology experiment of the Viking project. Has been arguing that the experiment produced strong evidence for life on Mars.
In 1997 he presented a paper showing that after 21 years of study of the data he felt that:
Objective application of the scientific process to 21 years of continued research and to new developments on Mars and Earth forced this conclusion. Of all the many hypotheses offered over the years to explain the LR Mars results, the only possibility fitting all the relevant data is that microbial life exists in the top layer of the Martian surface.
The main argument against Levin's conclusions was that the Viking lander's Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GCMS) experiment showed no evidence for the presence of organic compounds in the Martian soil. As an analytical chemist who has worked in the field of GCMS since before the time of the Viking probes, I have my doubts about the Viking GCMS experiment having enough sensitivity and reliability to exclude the low level presence of organic material in the Martian soil.
In 2000, Dr. Steven A. Benner published a paper concluding that the Viking GCMS was insensitive to certain organic molecules including those left behind by any microbial life that might have been on Mars. At the same time Dr Joseph Miller reanalyzed the original Viking labelled release experiment data and concluded that it showed circadian rhythms thus supporting the case for Martian life.
Now Joop Houtkooper proposes further evidence that Levin was right. I think Levin will go down in scientific history like Wigner the proposer of the continental drift theory in the 1920's, as a researcher whose ideas were scorned by large sections of the scientific community at the time, but that were eventually proved right.
There is a lot more going on with the whole "Life On Mars" thing than you will see really published anywhere. I'm not saying there are little green men on mars, but it seems like every article I read, this one included, downplays the significance of finding Life Outside Earth. That is a Big Deal.
If you're interested, there is quite a bit of background material surrounding Life on Mars and the really famous '76 Viking Lander experiments that were completely glossed over in the article.
One absolutely interesting bit of research (that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the article) has to do with circadian rhythms [wikipedia.org].
IIRC the '76 viking lander had 3 types of experiments on board that would conduct various kinds of tests to determine if there was life on mars. One of those was cell respiration.. another a test for known organic compounds or organic materials. Two of the three tests showed signs for life in at least one of the experimental runs.. but the test for "organic material" consistently failed. I met one of the folks at a conference that claimed to have worked on this and he made it very clear that NASA's usual policy was 2/3 experiments w/positive results == Strong Indications for Life. Yet for some reason NASA announced something to the effect of "No Organics, No Life" . He was very bitter about it because he was absolutely convinced there was life on Mars.
In 2000 someone thought to analyze the cell respiration study that already indicated there was life or at least a life-like biological process. SURPRISE! The cell respiration data seemed to indicate cell respiration with circadian rhythms. Could not possibly be a simple chemical reaction. The whole idea of Circadian rhytms did not even exist in 1976! But the data fits. Not only that, but the rhythm itself was tuned to a martian day! I quietly decided there was life on mars at that moment. See this [spacedaily.com] or here [harvard.edu].
This new article is interesting, but it is Yet Another Analysis of 30 year old data!! I'd love to see what would happen if NASA (or CNN. I'd take CNN) would announce, in big bold letters, "HEY! We found very conclusive signs of life on another planet! Short of going there and looking at the soil under a microscope ourselves, we're 95% sure the planet is not quite dead and has new and unique life!" Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like we should be actually doing modern experiments to compare with the '76 experiments. It seems more like a pissing contest to see which person/group/agency is right more than The Search for Truth and Knowledge. "Why do we need to search for life on mars? We already found out there isn't life, right?"
Subject applies to both the analysis and the conclusion.
Analysis at the time for one test showed negative, the other was inconclusive (not "yes"). At that point (as Sagan announced) they were cautiously hopeful, since the tests looked at different things, and some forms of life could appear negative to one and not the other. The negative test was replicated in Antarctica and showed negative there too, making that Mars analysis also inconclusive. No idea what Sagan had to say about it then.
It's unlikely life as we know it could be "based on" H2O2. It'd be far more likely to be based on water and highly tolerant of H2O2. The peroxide would come from ultraviolet from the sun hitting exposed water. I expect pretty much any exposed water (even ice, though the reaction would be slow) would have a fairly high percentage. But the water wouldn't be pure and so the peroxide would break down, keeping it at a low equilibrium. Life as we don't know it might use H2O2 for energy catalyzing it to break it down, pulling in more selectively from the environment or creating its own via an ultraviolet driven photosynthesis-like process.
To exist in H2O2 living things have to be able to break it down, such as we do using superoxide dismutase. If we didn't, the peroxide would eat (among other things) the walls off our cells because it destroys the lipids that the walls are made of. Germs don't have this mechanism, and that's why peroxide is a good antiseptic. However, with nothing like lipids or their precursors to work with, any Martian life is not likely to have lipid shells. That makes it unlikely the have any similarity to Earth life. Even the (theoretically) first living things on Earth, cyanobacteria, have lipid-based shells.
So, the news here is that someone's projecting a specific form Martian life might take based on the Viking data. The implication is that if correct, the Panspermia hypothesis probably doesn't hold. On the other hand, there can be a highly complex collection of compounds collecting ultraviolet, making and/or using H2O2, and developing more of itself via an endothremic self-organization process. Life as we don't know it might not be confined to a small, protected, self-contained module, but might be spread over large areas. It stretches the definition of life, but it's about time we do so, so we know it when we find it because "The thing about aliens is, they're alien".
I wonder if our overlords would consume rocket fuel? Are they inherently as corrosive as peroxide normally is to metals? It would be ironic to discover the beginnings of life there only to find that it would be a major barrier to visiting the planet.
Evidence isn't proof, chief. The stars alone are evidence that there could be life. The only way to prove there's life is to get a container, identify what we think is alive, and watch it reproduce. That won't happen until we actually send humans there, and probably won't really be settled until it's come back to earth for extensive testing.
Alien! (Score:5, Funny)
(Just kidding there Joop)
Re:Alien! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Alien! (Score:5, Funny)
2. 'Discover' Alien life.
3. ???
4. Profit!!
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Re:Alien! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Alien! (Score:4, Informative)
note: this information is worth less then $0.02
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Re:Alien! (Score:5, Funny)
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Hang on... (Score:5, Funny)
So the Viking probe data is ALIVE?!!!
A lot of scientists thought so at NASA, too (Score:5, Interesting)
When one experiment says yes, and one says no and you can't run them again there will be a lot of debate about what it all means.
Re:A lot of scientists thought so at NASA, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Mind, my favorite way of describing the whole Viking experiment situation is:
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Data (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine what people might learn from data we're getting now from the two rovers on mars.
Re:Data (Score:5, Informative)
Around 1999, Dr.J.Miller wanted to have a look through the data and found it couldn't be accessed anymore. Most of what he did get was reassembled from old paper printouts that other reseacher hadn't got around to throwing out yet.
Coincidentally, his research was another case of finding signs of Martian life in the old data.
Here's one version.
http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/50/502.html [deadmedia.org]
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Re:Data (Score:5, Interesting)
The Viking lander bit rate was low, and there was only comminucation when the Earth was above the horizon, and the radio bandwidth was only 2 MHz, so the data return was pretty tiny by modern standards (from the Landers - the orbiter data rate was consderably larger). My back of the envelope calculations says that the total Lander data return was on the order of a few hundred GB. (Also, in the extended mission, the data collection was slowed, I believe to once per week.)
Of course, these data are still being mined, and are absolutely crucial to our understanding of Mars dynamics, among other things.
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Tubular (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tubular (Score:5, Funny)
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IF its proven.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that it would be a cakewalk without religious fundamentalism. There will just be one more barrier to overcome before we can hope to deal with the existence of E.T. life in a rational manner.
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Re:IF its proven.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:IF its proven.. (Score:5, Funny)
No worries, if it were intelligent life it wouldn't believe in the bible either.
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Re:IF its proven.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm an atheist. A few weeks ago, a Christian friend asked me, "When you look out at the night sky, across billions of light-years of interstellar space filled with billions of worlds we haven't even imagined yet, aren't you a little afraid that you might be wrong?"
Your idiotic post made me realize -- way too late, of course -- that I should've asked her the same question in reply.
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Re:IF its proven.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dharma, is the diestic philosophy, of the thestic "religions" of Bhuddism, Jainism, Siehkism, and vedism (aka Hinduism).
Dharma describes everything (of which the universe is a part of) as a single entity, that morphs and forms. This "entity" does not have a "known" personality nor anything that can be attributed to human factors, and nuances, and we are all part of it. The universe forms, disforms, destroys and rebuilds. its just a huge never ending cycle. Life cannot truely be defined, as we only can define life as what we "know".
To take your "men in black principle", there is a more readily available description of describing it. Our bodies are made of millions of individual cells. Each of them have life on their own, as well as a purpose. Some die after 2 weeks and are replaced, some live much longer, and are not replaced when they die (eg brain cells). Each individual cell may not be "aware" of the implications on each other. However, formed together, they make us. Our lives, our emotions, our being, as a singular compounded organism. With this in mind, there is nothing to say that we are not part of a bigger so called organism, its just that we don't understand it if it does exist, and maybe its not even REQUIRED to understand it.
I agree with your views of deism can itself support science. Dhramic philosophy has never discouraged the pursuit of science, unlike it appears of Abrahamic religions (such as Chistiantiy, Islam). Indeed, thousands of years ago Dharmic "scientists" (of all the main dharmic religions) worked out things such as the fact that Earth revolved around the sun, that there are other planets, and indeed other stars, and galaxys, etc, even as others still viewed the earth as flat, surrounded by a "dome". One particular assertion by Dharmism is that energy and matter are the same thing, in that energy "clumps" together to form matter. Recent works on quantum physics, have agreed somewhat to that idea, including a recent experiment at CERN, where "energy" were accelerated and then "smashed" together, and for a split second formed "matter".
Frankly i find all this rather interesting, and somewhat overwhelming. What we have is such a large concept, that is difficult to sometimes comprehend with our limited minds, and consciences. However, i woudl rather not go back to the "safe cocoon" of thestic views.
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Which bible? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you mean the Bible of the Jews and Christians or the Koran? The Tongva people's creation myth? Or what about the Hopi? And who are we to ignore the Hindu world creation epos?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A belief in a God does not require you to contradict the Big Bang or evolution or anything else. Unless, of course, you think that it is important for a god to lie.
What this leads to is that some fairly savvy folks in the religious community primarily don't want you to try and argue that because we descended from the same stock as the Bonobo it's OK to fuck like Bonobos... but it's OK to say that we descended from the same stock as Bonobos. This, of course, gets turned by the far-less-savvy religious right into an excuse to attack evolution.
I tend to think that the whackos on the religious right has pushed the thinking person towards aethism, when a thinking person might had been a member of a fairly liberal faith or agnostic before.
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Re:IF its proven.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I hold that faith applies to notions outside of the scope of scientific inquiry. I accept, on faith, that some unprovable, untestable ideas are truthful. I do not, however, consider ALL unprovable, untestable ideas to be truthful. I choose what to believe. I happen to choose to believe in a faith that is based on a long-established canon that is grounded, to some degree or another, in historical events. (This is why I believe that Christianity's claims are more credible than Pastafarianism's, for example. They are not provable, but they contain elements of documentary evidence.)
In this regard, I consider myself to be arational, but not irrational. Here is why:
When faith and reason conflict, I side with reason. I closely examine apparent conflicts between them. After I have carefully defined terms and established that the claims between the two are genuinely contradictory, I will reassess my interpretation of scripture based on what reason tells me must be true. Reason is absolute. My faith, on the other hand, is based on my ability to interpret a document that has undergone many translations and which requires a holistic understanding to grasp. I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that my capacity to interpret scriptures is woefully limited.
This does not mean, however, that I will change my faith whimsically. Give me the benefit of the doubt, at least, and accept (as some do not) that I make a genuine effort to maintain the integrity of my faith within the boundaries of reality, as I know it. My philosophy is generally that there is only one truth and that reason and faith both pursue it. Part of my faith is that I accept reason as a gift from God that I am to use to enjoy creation and to refine my faith.
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Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:5, Insightful)
I call BS.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:5, Insightful)
ESP is about as likely as creationism, and the people believing in it are using the same thought processes as the made-in-seven-days crowd. Science can disprove nothing. What it can do is collect evidence and give us likelyhoods. With no reliable evidence supporting it, ESP is as likely as the tooth fairy. You can't believe something simply because you'd prefer it to be true.
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Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:4, Interesting)
None. So long as there are millions of credible reports in the field no failure to replicate the condition in a lab would prove to me that the condition can not exist. As a technician there are no shortage of conditions my customers have reported that I have been unable to replicate, that hardware manufacturers and software firms have been unable to replicate. I might like to dismiss these strays reports as mistakes but if there are enough of them I am forced to accept that the conditions are occurring and the failure is on the part of myself/firms/manufacturers.
If ESP is to be shown not to occur it will be through a more perfect understanding of how the brain DOES function. There are loonies who would have you believe we know nothing of how the brain functions, the only ones worse are the neurologists who would have you believe the scant data we have on the brain constitutes anything like a rudimentary understanding of its function.
'ESP is about as likely as creationism'
Neither are especially likely or unlikely.
'the people believing in it are using the same thought processes as the made-in-seven-days crowd'
The made in seven days crowd are beginning with an elaborate myth and assuming it is true without evidence. I would agree that those who believe in ESP fall in that category as well. The same is true of anyone who believes ESP does not exist, or has a belief in creationism or a lack thereof. The only ones who do not fall into this crowd are those who refuse to adopt a belief on a topic without substantial evidence.
'Science can disprove nothing.'
Science can in fact disprove very specific things. Objective findings can eliminate possibilities. That's is what science does, it is a process by which we gather data, form possible conclusions based upon the data and hope to disprove those conclusions by continuing to gather more data.
'What it can do is collect evidence'
Right.
'give us likelyhoods'
Wrong. Science does not give likelyhoods poor scientists do. Good scientists collect data and let the data determine what is and is not.
'With no reliable evidence supporting it, ESP is as likely as the tooth fairy.'
Reliablity of evidence does not determine likelyhood. Reality is fairly likely even when we have observed NO evidence of it yet. There is no evidence of a tooth fairy credible or otherwise. ESP has not been confirmed in the lab but there are mountains of credible eyewitness accounts (even more that are not credible and that is why closed minded fools dismiss the possibility).
The lab may not be as far away as you think either. There are ongoing experiments at MIT where individuals are able to influence robots with thought in a manner that consistently beats statistical probabilities.
The brain is a complex machine and we do not understand the technology. Until we do, only an idiot would reach conclusions about its capabilities.
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Define "credible" (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you think science is something like democracy, if enough people believe in something then it must be true?
To me, credibility is pretty much linked to repeatability. In order for something to be credible it must be either replicated or shown by a well-reasoned chain of evidence to be possible. If you report a phenomenon that (a) no one can repeat and (b) negates facts that we know both from the labs and from day-to-day experience, then you are in trouble.
Reliability of evidence does not determine likelyhood
Yes, it does. Ask any judge, any lawyer, any juror. Would you like to be convicted of a crime based solely on unreliable evidence presented by the DA?
There is no evidence of a tooth fairy credible or otherwise
Yes, there is. Millions of children have put a tooth under their pillows and found a bicycle in the porch next morning. What more evidence do you need? There's *more* evidence for the tooth fairy than for any other ESP phenomena.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no known scientific evidence of ESP and "paranormal activity".
If you believe you can provide scientific evidenc
Isaac Newton was a dedicated alchemist (Score:3, Interesting)
Kind Regards
Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:4, Insightful)
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
Newton did alchemy at a time when the modern field of chemistry didn't exist. This was a period when the concept of a chemical element was unknown, the periodic table didn't exist, nobody had ever thought of weighing their chemicals or doing any kind of quantitative measurements of reactions, there were no scientific journals of any kind, and people studying what we would now call chemistry were caught up in a tradition in which it was considered normal to keep your results secret and record them in code. Newton basically invented the modern science of physics; I think we can excuse him for not inventing the modern science of chemistry as well. If he'd lived in the 19th century, and chosen to work in the alchemical tradition rather than the newly spawned field of chemistry, then we could rightfully call him a quack, an idiot, or a charlatan.
Newton was also a closet heretic (didn't believe in the trinity), and wrote gazillions of words of theological silliness. So what? It was religion. It wasn't science, and he didn't claim that it was science.
Numerology? I call bullshit, unless you just mean something tied up with his religious ideas.
If any scientist today is a true believer in ESP, etc., then yes, it does call into question that scientist's judgment. The evidence against all that paranormal bullshit is so strong that you'd have to be an incompetent scientist to ignore it.
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my thoughts... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, if the alien being's stage of life is infantile upon discovery, little microbes aren't very exciting. But imagine finding some race that walks on 5 legs with two tails, that is smarter than humans, but dies upon contact with oxygen or something......
Space.com article offering counter-point (Score:5, Informative)
Democratic Life? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot User Has Awesome Sex! (Score:3, Funny)
Sheesh, could we give the sensationalist headlines some rest?
I worked on the Viking Lander project... (Score:5, Interesting)
Each of the two landers had 3 biological experiements. All six worked fine. All six had a positive response based on the criteria published before landing.
However, because the mass spectrometer detected no organic molecules (not one of the pre-published tests), these results were ascribed to non-biological causes.
I could never understand why one of the biological researchers didn't just say, "we have detected life, by our published criteria, but we don't understand it." However, none did.
Science doesn't always move in the nice linear fashion described in the text books...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dr. Gilbert Levin leader of the labeled release experiment did just that:
http://mars.spherix.com/ [spherix.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
certainly been consistent in recent times.
My point wasn't that this proved that there was life, but that they set up a scientific protocol and then violated it as soon as the results
made them nervous. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that if the mass spectrometer had detected organics, they would have claimed
the detection of life. If the only real t
Re:I worked on the Viking Lander project... (Score:5, Informative)
The chemists were determined to prove that if their experiment couldn't show the existence of life on Mars no-one else's experiment could and they used their considerable pull in the academic community to influence the outcome of the debate.
Also I believe Levin has suggested that there may have been fundamentalist Christians in positions of influence in NASA at the time who held deep theological opinions against the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
He certainly seemed to be fighting against heavy odds. It not only
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Unsung Hero (Score:5, Interesting)
http://mars.spherix.com/ [spherix.com]
In 1997 he presented a paper showing that after 21 years of study of the data he felt that:
The main argument against Levin's conclusions was that the Viking lander's Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GCMS) experiment showed no evidence for the presence of organic compounds in the Martian soil. As an analytical chemist who has worked in the field of GCMS since before the time of the Viking probes, I have my doubts about the Viking GCMS experiment having enough sensitivity and reliability to exclude the low level presence of organic material in the Martian soil.
In 2000, Dr. Steven A. Benner published a paper concluding that the Viking GCMS was insensitive to certain organic molecules including those left behind by any microbial life that might have been on Mars. At the same time Dr Joseph Miller reanalyzed the original Viking labelled release experiment data and concluded that it showed circadian rhythms thus supporting the case for Martian life.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-life-00g.html [spacedaily.com]
Now Joop Houtkooper proposes further evidence that Levin was right. I think Levin will go down in scientific history like Wigner the proposer of the continental drift theory in the 1920's, as a researcher whose ideas were scorned by large sections of the scientific community at the time, but that were eventually proved right.
Not the only Evidence: Circadian Rythms (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're interested, there is quite a bit of background material surrounding Life on Mars and the really famous '76 Viking Lander experiments that were completely glossed over in the article.
One absolutely interesting bit of research (that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the article) has to do with circadian rhythms [wikipedia.org].
IIRC the '76 viking lander had 3 types of experiments on board that would conduct various kinds of tests to determine if there was life on mars. One of those was cell respiration.. another a test for known organic compounds or organic materials. Two of the three tests showed signs for life in at least one of the experimental runs.. but the test for "organic material" consistently failed. I met one of the folks at a conference that claimed to have worked on this and he made it very clear that NASA's usual policy was 2/3 experiments w/positive results == Strong Indications for Life. Yet for some reason NASA announced something to the effect of "No Organics, No Life" . He was very bitter about it because he was absolutely convinced there was life on Mars.
In 2000 someone thought to analyze the cell respiration study that already indicated there was life or at least a life-like biological process. SURPRISE! The cell respiration data seemed to indicate cell respiration with circadian rhythms. Could not possibly be a simple chemical reaction. The whole idea of Circadian rhytms did not even exist in 1976! But the data fits. Not only that, but the rhythm itself was tuned to a martian day! I quietly decided there was life on mars at that moment. See this [spacedaily.com] or here [harvard.edu].
This new article is interesting, but it is Yet Another Analysis of 30 year old data!! I'd love to see what would happen if NASA (or CNN. I'd take CNN) would announce, in big bold letters, "HEY! We found very conclusive signs of life on another planet! Short of going there and looking at the soil under a microscope ourselves, we're 95% sure the planet is not quite dead and has new and unique life!" Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like we should be actually doing modern experiments to compare with the '76 experiments. It seems more like a pissing contest to see which person/group/agency is right more than The Search for Truth and Knowledge. "Why do we need to search for life on mars? We already found out there isn't life, right?"
The Same Only Different (Score:5, Interesting)
Analysis at the time for one test showed negative, the other was inconclusive (not "yes").
At that point (as Sagan announced) they were cautiously hopeful, since the tests looked at different things, and some forms of life could appear negative to one and not the other. The negative test was replicated in Antarctica and showed negative there too, making that Mars analysis also inconclusive. No idea what Sagan had to say about it then.
It's unlikely life as we know it could be "based on" H2O2. It'd be far more likely to be based on water and highly tolerant of H2O2. The peroxide would come from ultraviolet from the sun hitting exposed water. I expect pretty much any exposed water (even ice, though the reaction would be slow) would have a fairly high percentage. But the water wouldn't be pure and so the peroxide would break down, keeping it at a low equilibrium. Life as we don't know it might use H2O2 for energy catalyzing it to break it down, pulling in more selectively from the environment or creating its own via an ultraviolet driven photosynthesis-like process.
To exist in H2O2 living things have to be able to break it down, such as we do using superoxide dismutase. If we didn't, the peroxide would eat (among other things) the walls off our cells because it destroys the lipids that the walls are made of. Germs don't have this mechanism, and that's why peroxide is a good antiseptic. However, with nothing like lipids or their precursors to work with, any Martian life is not likely to have lipid shells. That makes it unlikely the have any similarity to Earth life. Even the (theoretically) first living things on Earth, cyanobacteria, have lipid-based shells.
So, the news here is that someone's projecting a specific form Martian life might take based on the Viking data. The implication is that if correct, the Panspermia hypothesis probably doesn't hold. On the other hand, there can be a highly complex collection of compounds collecting ultraviolet, making and/or using H2O2, and developing more of itself via an endothremic self-organization process. Life as we don't know it might not be confined to a small, protected, self-contained module, but might be spread over large areas. It stretches the definition of life, but it's about time we do so, so we know it when we find it because "The thing about aliens is, they're alien".
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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On the other hand (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if our overlords would consume rocket fuel? Are they inherently as corrosive as peroxide normally is to metals? It would be ironic to discover the beginnings of life there only to find that it would be a major barrier to visiting the planet.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)