Viking Landers Might Have Missed Martian Organics 82
Sonny Yatsen writes "A new study suggests that the Viking Landers might have found organic compounds on Mars, but failed to recognize them because of the methodology used to detect organics. The findings may suggest specific strategies that would improve on the way organic compounds are detected on the red planet."
Another New Study... (Score:3, Interesting)
... suggests that Carl Sagan said exactly the same thing over three decades ago.
Not failed. (Score:1, Interesting)
Could it be that during that time period we didn't fully understand all the chemical processes that could produce the Vikings findings?
Point is, we know more than we did then. Apply this to any old analysis and it's likely we missed something. Viking didn't fail here. We merely improved our understanding of observed data analysis.
Re:Actually, they did (Score:4, Interesting)
until there's an actual organism located and cultured the correct response is skepticism.
I, personally, think life doesn't just inhabit niches.. if there's life on Mars anywhere, there should be life on Mars everywhere.
Re:Actually, they did (Score:5, Interesting)
until there's an actual organism located and cultured the correct response is skepticism.
Not if we're just talking about organic compounds, which I and TFA are. Organic compounds have been found in all kinds of places where life is highly unlikely to exist, like Titan (which has oceans of methane) or gaseous nebulae.
I, personally, think life doesn't just inhabit niches.. if there's life on Mars anywhere, there should be life on Mars everywhere.
Eh. Everywhere there's sufficient food and energy, sure. If there's a Martian equivalent to deep-sea thermal vents, where life on earth is theorized to have started, then there might be life all around them but not on the surface where it's easy to find. Or maybe there was life on the surface while there was water there, but not it's no longer suitable.
The point of this new analysis is to see if maybe Viking really did discover organics, and also to refine techniques for finding them so future missions can do a better job of searching for them. It could in fact be that there is evidence of (former) life everywhere, but we weren't been able to find it due to lacking the proper techniques before. The only way to know is to check.
In the meantime, sure, skepticism is warranted. I'm not holding out for there being evidence of life on Mars. But I want to know, and this is an important step.
Re:Actually, they did (Score:3, Interesting)
1 is highly unlikely. Mars is losing its atmosphere at a rapid pace, and has no protection from bio-killing cosmic and solar radiation due to it's lack of a magnetic field. It has no magnetic field because the iron core solidified aeons ago - Mars is much smaller than Earth, and the thing simply cooled down faster.
It is far more likely that the failing magnetic field would have triggered the death of all Martian life (and it definitely would have, solar radiation in particular is very nasty), and would explain why there is no life today if there ever was once life on Mars.
2 only makes sense if 1 is true. On Earth we find life literally everywhere. Even in the most apparently barren places we have found life. They've found life in underground lakes in Antarctica that have been locked away by ice for thousands of years for god's sake! Even volcanic vents harbor life, it is literally everywhere on the planet. If Mars once had a thriving ecosystem, evidence of life should be everywhere as well. It really should not be difficult to find traces of it.
Re:The Universe (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not even a month old: the problem with perchlorates was known several years ago. There have been documentaries that included detailed examinations of how Viking basically bungled the biology experiments.
These documentaries are themselves old enough to be outdated because they were about the Mars rovers primarily, which are themselves old news now. Viking was tossed in mainly for "this is how it used to be" coverage.
So while YOU may have just heard about perchlorates, and The Universe may have just talked about it, that does not mean nobody else knew. It's been known for decades. What to DO about it has been the issue.
Misleading conclusion (Score:1, Interesting)
OK, here is one of my pet peeves and something I think is plaguing what we call science today (and why it is mostly pseudo-science) - that tone of the article assumes that life existed and we have just not been able to find it. What this means is *we do not know*. True, that means we may have dug it up and not know, but consider the following re-writing of the synopsis:
"A new study suggests that the Viking Landers used a flawed method to detect organic compounds. Because of the methodology used to detect organics all results would have been negative. The findings may suggest specific strategies that would improve on the way organic compounds are detected on the red planet."
and you frankly have a totally different report on the matter. The latter *is* science, the former is opinion and faith masquerading as science and our schools do *nothing whatsoever* to teach the difference. Indeed, they *encourage* the the pseudo-science. If you want to see what I think is going to eventually cause a total collapse of our society it is this - not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not Christians, not Muslims, not whatever social construct you want to pick. Those may be the final cause just as "emphysema" may go down as the report as to why a 4 pack a day cigarette smoker dies, but it isn't really the true cause. It is what allows that to occur and prevents it from being fought.
It is difficult to mount an attack on the so called "intelligent design" for that very reason. In the current state what the public face of science offers tends to simply be a thinly veiled pseudo-scientific version more based on what the person believes than what is shown to be true. As such it allows crazy ideas to flourish. If, instead, science had focused on what it *does* know, admitted that things it doesn't know could be true (even if you stated probably not), then crazy ideas like the current version of Intelligent Design would mostly drop away. As is it just becomes whose faith do you want to believe. Sadly real academic papers tend to understand this, it is when either journalists or individual scientists that can't separate their faith from their research speak (and the journalist who give them too much space to spout out their believes) that are causing it.
There is not a *single* thing in *any* evolutionary theory that has any say - positive or negative - about if there is an intelligence behind it. Once you choose one of those paths you are operating on faith. Once you choose that life exists outside of our planet you are operating on faith, not science. That it is more likely either true of false is *not* that same things as it *being* true or false, you can work based on assumptions (and often have no choice) but once it becomes such an ingrained idea that it is true by default then you are simply having faith in something despite the evidence. Once that happens it then becomes an argument of faith, not science and you compete with more popular faiths.