Study: Martian Soil Has Signs of Life 382
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.""
Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:5, Insightful)
I call BS.
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:
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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......
Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Logic tells me there is some crazy stuff out there, stuff I probably don't want to mess with, but I'm not going to worship it, just going to go "oh it's possible, believe if you like but I want to meet this guy before I believe in him directly".
Re:My answer (Score:2, Insightful)
Conscious? Well, what happens to a species that goes around destroying all other examples of itself? Why, it loses diversity mister AC! And then what happens if something goes wrong? Why, that species goes and dies out, doesn't it! And so, for long term protection of similar genes, we tend to protect things that are similar to ourselves. As we have advanced as a species we have come to identify non-human animals as close to ourself, and instantly began to emphasize with them as per the above trend. And now we find ourselves aware that destroying things (even if we see them as competition) will end in a bad way... so we have more environmental awareness.
"So what is this thing? I say, it's God. Now I fervently dispute that acknowledging a God should stop scientific discovery. I feel, like many early scientists, that scientific exploration is a form of pulling back the curtain of the mind of God and should absolutely be encouraged."
Oh, so we should keep looking into the cause of the universe when we know god caused it? That seems kinda contradictory. Either he didn't cause it or we should stop looking. Now take that back a few tens of hundreds of years... the sun rises every day. God did it, no need to study it. Hense the dark ages.
Now grow some balls and question your religious mythos, and that goes for everyone.
Re:Take with a whole shaker-full of salt (Score:2, Insightful)
Why yes, he must most definitely be utterly full of BS.
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
What a crack-pot psuedo scientist, whose entire body of work should be thrown out as BS.
You sir have shown a remarkable skill in exposing your utter lack of understanding the workings of the creative mind.
Perhaps, because you are completely lacking this thing known as "creativity".
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.
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.
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:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying there's an inherent illogic of religion is like saying there's an inherent illogic of math. The opposite is in fact true. We have God-given capacity for reason which lets us perceive the truth of maxims of logic and math. These are things that all math and science are based upon, for which proof is impossible. We know them only because they are self-evident to us. We perceive them directly. This could be called "faith" or it could be called the strongest proof of all. (It is necessarily the strongest proof of all, because the next-strongest proof, mathematical proof relies upon it for all its fundamental givens.) It is the same capacity for perception of truth, for fundamental knowledge, that is the basis for the recognition of Divine Truth in its various forms, especially in the sacred scriptures of various religions. Different people are capable of perceiving different types of it, and different aspects of it is contained in different religions. Most people are receptive to at least some form of it.
However, for "geeks," we have a disadvantage in that, being clever, we also tend to have a certain pride in our own intelligence. It's a pretty high barrier to have the intellectual honesty to recognize that those I had considered idiots, and who in truth are much simpler in their thinking, were far more correct in what they believed than I was. At least for me, it was nothing short of humiliating to come to that conclusion. But my allegiance has always been, and always will be, to the pursuit of Truth.
Anyway, I don't know what inherent illogic you see in a omnipotent and omniscient God. Geeks, more than anyone, should be capable of understanding the intricacies of the meanings of those terms, and seeing beyond the confines of time-space to reconcile them with the concept of free will. If you want some good geek theology, look no further than here: http://www.theisticscience.org/books/dlw/dlw.html [theisticscience.org]
UNK (Score:2, Insightful)
Bah, humbug (Score:2, Insightful)
As for supernatural, that's bunk. If someone actually saw a real ghost, it would not be supernatural. You can see it. It's interacting with you. It is therefore following natural laws, just laws that may be unknown to us currently. It is therefore natural, not supernatural.
If the supernatural existed, we would have no way of detecting it let alone interacting with it. If it cannot be perceived, it might as well not exist to us. If it can be perceived, it is natural. It's that simple. "The supernatural" is simply a logical dodge to say that one believes in magic -- in other words, the unreal.
Re:My answer (Score:3, Insightful)
What, people that don't believe God created the universe have to somehow test their theory on how it came to be, but people who do believe in God don't have to? Talk about double standards.
You feel "wronged" because it puts you at a disadvantage; basically, it's a threat to your existence or well-being. You trusted someone, and then found out that they abused that trust. In most cases in our society that's not too dangerous as we don't wind up in life-or-death situations very often, so it may not threaten your existence as such, but when people lie it's usually to gain an advantage over you.
You also seem to be trying to claim that "lying is bad" is a universal truth that everybody feels, but that's ludicrous. Haven't you ever heard of con artists? You know, people who base their entire lives around lying and cheating other people? People who feel no sense of remorse or shame or guilt for doing this -- often completely destroying people's lives in order to get a bunch of money? What about politicians? I know they don't all lie all the time, but many of them play very fast and loose with the truth. Do you really think they actually feel "bad" for doing it?
Morality is so clearly a product of society, I can't help but think you're trolling. For example, most western societies have pretty strong views on sex with minors, but there's plenty of cultures where such things are commonplace and expected. Homophobes are another good example of people with very strong-held convictions that particular acts or behaviour are Wrong, yet other people view it completely differently. I'm actually amazed someone would attempt to make an argument that anything relating to morality and "right or wrong" are somehow ingrained in us as a universal, unchanging truth.
I don't have a problem with reconciling God and science, but some of your comments there were just too stupid to ignore. Unless you were actually trolling, please put a big more thought into it next time.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Such as?
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, since the universe apparently doesn't want me to know anything about my Creator, I'll just assume there was never a knowable Creator to begin with, at least until proven otherwise. There are no concrete questions I can ask about God, so it would be absurd to think that I already have any of the answers.
One thing I would never do is make arrogant statements about having "issues" with the potential discovery of other intelligent life forms. IMHO, to believe that no other intelligent life exists anywhere in the Universe, as the grandparent apparently does, takes more of a leap of faith than even a belief in God.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless, of course, it turns out that Zeus is the HMFIC.
If so, then all that grovelling to Jesus is going to turn out to be a career-limiting move, to say the least.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I strongly doubt the rise of rationalism/skepticism/atheism has anything to do with religious fundies. More likely it has to do with the fact that in the last century scientific inquiry continually finds materialistic explanations for what once was thought entirely mysterious or preternatural.
Design sounds nice, until supposedly irreducible is reduced. Ghost in the Machine is fine, until you drastically alter someone's personality by messing with their brain. Astral Projection is great, until you find the area of the brain responsible and induce it in a lab.
What keeps (scientifically) educated, intelligent people clinging to faith is a problem of child psychology and inordinate amounts of personal incredulity.
Honestly, if you really dig into anti-materialist arguments, you find they are painfully lacking in substance. I remember B. Allan Wallace suggesting that neurological activity and subjective mental experiences might not be necessarily and sufficiently linked because of a time lag between the events that, by golly, just happened to correspond to about how much time it takes for neurons to fire.
It amazes me, as a rather staunch materialist (but also not emotionally attached to the idea, and open-minded to evidence), how non-materialists could ever appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the universe. If the explanation for consciousness, for instance, is that "A being created an unobservable, eternal spirit", that's just plain boring. But if it's an artifact of how our brain operates, how glorious it is in its complexity. The materialist is not dumbfounded or threatened by this complexity, but awestruck by it.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:1, Insightful)
"How is it, then, that you make a special exemption for your god? How do you reconcile the inherent illogic of religion with the rest of your life?" Excuse me, but have you been watching the news recently? As a geek christian, who fits your profile- I ask you- How is it, then, that you reconcile the inherent illogic of society around you with the rest of your life? 3.2.1... Did I guess right- Did you blame it on religion? The "inherent illogic of religion" is the only thing that makes me think I'm sane in a world where George W Bush gets to be president for 2 full terms. I was an atheist before 2000. Around the time of the PATRIOT act, I blamed christians for the end of freedom and liberty and decency in my country. It was only then, that I started studying the bible, with humility, to find out WTF was going on in the world that I couldn't comprehend. You see, as a geek, using the cop-out that "those religious people are irrational", just wasn't cutting it anymore. I tell you brother (or sister)- if you keep on going through life, thinking that religious people are irrational, you are going to live a very sad and confused life. If however you suck up a little humility, and try to read the religious texts with an open mind that the people who cherish them, might _actually_ not be irrational, then you might soon discover that the world makes quite a bit more sense that you previously thought. And one thing you'll never do, is think again that the religious texts sugar-coat the harsh *reality* of human social interaction.
The claim that believers are irrational will never die because faith itself is, by definition, irrational. Do you ever wonder why various intellectually dishonest scoundrels are trying to either create a double standard whereby personal anecdote is considered fine empirical evidence, or suggest that scientific inquiry has inherent limits on what it can answer? Because believers have only what constitutes really crappy evidence for their beliefs, and if they are going to convince others about their claims, they need it to be considered, by the public, as good evidence.
Let's consider the situation of a willful non-corporeal entity that is not directly observable. If it can influence the material world, we can study these influences in a scientific fashion, so right off the bat, science can study anything that influences the world, and so something that cannot be studied by science really has absolutely zero concern for us.
Case 0: The entity never influences the material world. Influence can mean move mountains, cause seizures, or intense mental states. Since it does not influence the world at all, this entity is moot to talk about as we can never know anything about it. It's on the same level as the invisible unicorn or Celestial Teapot (and, indeed, all deities humanity has conceived).
Case 1: If this entity acts in an entirely predictable way (i.e., you explode each time you say, "Ik, ak, thuk.") then we can very easily test the extent of this entity's influence on the material world, and build a model for its behavior. Essentially, it becomes a natural law and we dispense with caring that maybe it is an conscious, caring entity. We can never actually know it is an entity, just like we could never know whether gravity is a natural force or in fact the calculated moves of an immaterial frost giant.
Case 2: The willful entity actually makes use of its willfullness, i.e., it behaves in a non-entirely-predictable fashion. Aha, you might say, science certainly could not study that! Unfortunately, this is not the case. Suppose we thought this entity caused a tsunami. We then discover that, actually, the tsunami originated at precisely the same time as a deep sea earthquake that was, to the best predictive power of our models, bound to happen in that particular area. This is very solid evidence that this tsunami is entirely the result of natural forces, and not the random, willful act of an entity.
Those same tool
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.
Re:Define "credible" (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way in which you can rationally believe in such fantasies is if you have personally witnessed something that you fail to find any other rational explanation for. This would put you in the difficult position of being surrounded by sceptics that lack your personal experience and so will tend to disbelieve you. More likely than not, however, if you have had such an experience chances are that you were deceived either by your own senses (which literally happens all the time since all your sensory input is constantly subject to interpretation, filtering and embellishment by your brain) or by your own ignorance (people get tricked by magicians all the time because they don't know how he's doing his tricks, and some even believe that it's truly by magic).
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Not signs of life. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Seems convenient that when society's moral code changes with time, reasons can be found to denounce or at least change God's words. (Maybe that is why the Bible was changed so much over the years). Or, maybe it's because our moral code never has and never will come from the Bible but from us deciding in our brains what is right and wrong.
I live what I consider a moral life not because somebody is watching. Again, I don't need to have the presence of another person, or God watching me to make me decide if I'm going to do something immoral or not. I have just figured out how much better my life is when I stick with positive actions. You might call that selfishness, since I'm doing something to make me feel good (or not bad) but how much less selfish is living a life in a way that will provide you with everlasting life in paradise.
If you want to find words to call things, you can call it Karma or whatever.. Call it Heightseiz, or Bleenjor if you want, whatever works for you... and the reason I don't kick an old lady in the neck (to unfortunately have to use my previous example) is because 1) It benefits nobody and 2) It actually harms someone. 3) It would make me feel extremely bad.. It doesn't take a Bible for me to realize I don't want to do that... and it has nothing to do with people or Gods watching.
Give me an example of an action you have done that doesn't involve selfishness on some level. I'm not saying you haven't.. I'm just saying that the only selfless act that can be done is one you were not aware that you did.
If you have been able to live a good moral life filled with happiness and joy, then I congratulate you. If you were only able to do so with religion then that is wonderful, whatever works for you. I'm just saying, please as a representative of the Christian faith especially, don't keep telling us that without God we can't live a moral life. I'm tired of hearing it. Just be happy that someone has found the way there, not what path they took to get there.
Re:IF its proven.. (Score:3, Insightful)
So if the teachings of Christ where taken literally any aliens should be considered brothers , friends, and or equals.
Just to complete your little thought experament for you.
I find the idea of none terrestrial microbes very interesting. I wonder if things like there DNA and ATP will be chemical identical or just functionally identical. Or maybe they have an entirely different function structure from terrestrial cells. Still organic mind you but different from anything we have ever seen. That is if they exists on Mars at all. I want to see what we will find on Europa.