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Space Science

Viking Soil Data Points to Life on Mars? 131

Posted by michael from the BEM dept.
Ross Finlayson writes: "According to this upcoming news release, a University of Southern California has re-analyzed the data from the 1976 Viking Mars lander's soil experiments, and has discovered evidence (including circadian rhythms) that he concludes strengthens the case for life being present on Mars. The scientist also noted the difficulty in gathering the experiment's original data: 'The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.'"
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Viking Soil Data Points to Life on Mars? More

Viking Soil Data Points to Life on Mars?

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  • Old news.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When the viking data first came back it was argued that it pointed to the existance of life, but the evidence was not conclusive.

  • okay. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let's get this out of the way in A/C mode (note: I get no Karma): Top posts from people who haven't read the article:
    1. +3 troll, after some "funny" mods: "According to this [eurekalert.org] upcoming news release". And 'this' has in large letters at the top: "Public release date: 27-Jul-2001". [witty connection.]
    2. +3 informative: "Viking Soil Data Points to Life on Mars?" Slashdot editors are always sensationalisizing. This isn't news. So some quack re-analyzes the data once all the scientists have died. Big whoop. Nothing to see here, move right along folks.
    3. +5 funny: With a witty reply to above bemoaning the fact that we can't agree on an international American spelling and denouncing the the British spelling of sensationalisizing...
    4. +3 informative'The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.' witty statement about the author not being too old unfortunatley to confuse us with ancient Latin pluralizations of data. "The data were?" come on.
    5. +3 troll: Conspiracy theory. "'The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.'" "Died." How convenient. <rant&gt....
    6. +4 funny. First one to spot the fact that the sentence reads "a University of Southern California has re-analyzed the data from the 1976 Viking Mars lander's soil experiments". Quick! Did anyone catch the license plate? Those sneaky university of southern californias...always advancing these crackpot theories.
    7. +5 funny. First one to get to the title of the news article: "heh. did anyone notice the title 'USC neuroscientist finds signature of life on Mars in decades-old data.' Yeah. Neuroscientist. "Yes, Bones, but. Is the life. Form. Intelligent."...spock interrupts "Actually, the brain-waves do exhibit circadian rhythms."
    8. Right about here we gett some Anne'y long troll posts about whether we can truly, once we've discovered intelligent life on other planets (look for the phrase "I don't know about these circadian rhythms, but if they mean intelligent life...". Note that "Anne" hasn't read the article), then we need to re-evaluate our speciesist attitudes. How can we torture animals based solely on the fact that we're human and they're not, if there's intelligent life on other planets that might one day enslave us just as badly. Rant about vivisection. Rant turns into planet of the apes scenario. Gets mod'd out of oblivion by the time you've finished reading to the bottom.
    9. +4 redundant. (After 5 informatives) First one to get to "San Diego, July 29, 2001" after pointing out (again) "Public release date: 27-Jul-2001".
    10. First posts come streaming in from people who've read the articles. Phew!
    I think that about covers it.

  • Re:Open Formats (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The point is that if the format had been open, anyone could read it and these researchers would have instant access to all the data. As it stands now, it is taking them forever to analyze all the data in its printed paper format - they are only 30% done. If it were still readable in its digital format, they could have finished by now and subjected it to all kinds of analysis possible only with a computer and digital data. Paper printout backup is better than nothing, but paper can also be lost, can rot, burn, or decay. Try talking to a librarian about old documents! What we need is digital documentation in open, non-proprietary formats, so that the data will never be lost, just constantly duplicated to ever larger and more accessible data storage, as the technology evolves.

  • Re:Open Formats (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Holy cow, dont you guys no anything about mag tape? Sheeesh, I would think the geeky crowd at /. would have enough imagination to figure out what happened. Mag tap uses formates that are often particular to the system, remember the big-iron days. More then likely the problem was the availability of a tape drive. Any way, if the problem is with the binary files themselves, that would not be a big suprise, as the data set would have been particular to the experiment. A simple little program would have been used to read and write it. So even if it was documented, try finding it amongst 30 years of simple little programs. It sounds more like NASA just does not have the resources to deal with the situation, and a non-technical manager was trying to explain this to a non-technical scientist, "uum, the programer died, yea, we cant give you the data because the programer died." As I have personaly dealt with retrieving test data stored on ancient 9 track and 8 in floppies, scrounging up hardware, scrounging up drivers for the hardware, scrounging up the documentation for the software that wrote the data which was often on computor printouts with the ink fading to illegibility, I can sypathize with NASAs dilema. I did this 10 years ago and it was a pain. I can't imagine what it would be like now.

  • Re:physical evidence? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Religious freaks tend to believe whatever half-assed crap they "have faith in", regardless of the evidence. If the real world contradicts their viewpoint, they'll say it was "sent by god to test their faith" or some such nonsense.

  • Re:Seeing is believing (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the uk and esa are doing just that. the mars express/beagle2 mission has a microscope on board. check it out: http://www.beagle2.com/science/cameras.htm

  • CDROM will be around a long time. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Because it it is an open format and anyone can make the readers, writers, and discs without paying expen$ive royalties to anyone. Note this applies to DVD too. (Only CSS crypto and region coding require royalty payment). This is why there are so many mfgs for CDROM discs and equipment. How many companies make zip drives and disks besides Iomega? And the trend now seems to ne that new CD style (shape/size) disc formats will read older formats. e.g., DVD players do CDs. So I expect CDs to be readable for as long as 3.5in floppies have been.

  • Life Expectancy?? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:27PM (#2187297)
    'All the people that knew the format had died' So what IS the life expectancy of programmers these days?!?
  • Data formats are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of storage of data...and an upcomming catatrophy of data that is useless because we don't have either backwards compatiblity with data reading formats or documentation on how to read old formats...Imagine how much data is sitting out there, in some cases litterly rotting, that might be of use to someone, somewhere, but no one really knows how to read it anymore.

    Another problem I have is the fact that we are digitally recording music these days, and I am sorry, 16 bit 44.1 KHz is just way to small a sampling size/rate to properly perserve our classic music today. And I am talking about all Music, stuff that hundreds of years from now will be considered "classical" music...even if we call it "rock", "punk" "easylistening", etc.

    ttyl
    Farrell

  • Hmm (Score:3)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:25PM (#2187299) Homepage
    If no one had figured out their format until now they had some serious job security :P

  • Pretty low, considering what I've seen most of the programmers I know (myself included) eat, and how much exercise they get...

    --

  • Bill Weller took four Mars Pathfinder images and created an animated, 3-D stereogram of something popping out from behind a rock. (Hope you are good at crossing your eyes to resolve those "Magic-eye"-type images.)

    He nicknamed the organism the "Zolax [google.com]." (Scroll two-thirds of the way down the page to see it.) If it resembles any earth organism, I would say the tarantula -- although it seems to have a half-dozen or so "tentacles," rather than articulated legs. If you look closely at the lower-left corner of the image, you'll even see one of the tentacles in contact with the ground. The point where it's attached to the body is hidden behind the rock, and it's casting a shadow! If this is a hoax, the hoaxer showed admirable attention to detail.

    Disclaimer: the other purported anomalies on this web page are pretty dubious. (Don't you hate when some wacko points to a JPEG artifact and says "look, an artificial structure!" or "look, an organism!") I wish they weren't on the same page as the Zolax, because they hurt its credibility. Nevertheless, the Zolax looks like the real deal. It appears in both the left and right cameras simultaneously, so it can't be an image-processing artifact. It could be a hoax, but it would take a lot of effort to fake a stereo image like this.

    It would be nice if we knew the time interval between the two frames -- then we'd have an idea of how fast this critter moves.

  • Re:Open Formats (Score:3)

    by mandolin ( 7248 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @11:24PM (#2187302)
    Would have it been too hard to actually publish the formatting protocol at the time the data was recorded to tape??

    I'm sure they have a copy of those protocol docs right there on the tape. Just in case somebody forgot.

  • Now, philosophy and metaphysics: Many people of a religious bent seem to be of the notion that this planet is special and unique, that we are THE (as in, the only) children of God, and that the idea of intelligent life out there is just so much poppycock. Were life to be discovered "out there", it would become rather more difficult to hold that position.

    Considering that the Biblical creation myth had been utterly demolished by 19th century science, the Noachic flood had been disproven by the early 20th, and much of the mundane historical content of the Bible was laid waste by late 20th century archaeology, what makes you think that finding microbes on Mars will be the critical fact that makes 1.2 billion Bible-believing Christians wake up one morning, look at the paper, and say, "Well, damn! I guess it was just medieval superstition all along!"

    People believe what they want to believe. The exceptions are so rare that they are actually awarded prizes.

    --

  • Fundamentally, if you want anyone to be able to read data in the future, it needs to be recorded in some sort of text format... preferably on a media that doesn't decay too easily. Paper works for a couple hundred years, much longer if conditions are right. In comparison, I don't trust a zip disk to have my information a week later. =)
  • the original fortune cookie says:

    ''real programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN''

    GOSUB and RETURN are two reserved words in BASIC which are/were used to emulate a function call.

    sample program:

    10 HOME
    20 GOSUB 1000
    30 END
    1000 PRINT HELLO
    1010 RETURN

    i do believe the ancient art of BASIC programming has been lost forever :) hope the same happens with its evil spawn -- visual basic
  • If they had documented their work properly, someone could have figured out how to read that tape, even after they kicked the bucket.

    It probably was properly documented. The problem is that there are many ways that documentation can be lost or destroyed. Budgets get cut, contractors change, programs are cancelled, organizations are eliminated, moved or reorganized, people leave, retire or die. There are also the cost and space requirements of storing large volumes of documents for years or decades. Even if the documents still exist, you have to find someone who knows that they exist and where they can be found.

    There is a high probability that the computers, software and tape drives used to write the tapes no longer exist. When is the last time that you saw a 7-track, 556 bpi, 1/2 inch, digital tape drive? This was a common data format in the 1970s. Do you have an IBM 360 or UNIVAC computer along with the appropriate operating system and applications software?

    I was around when Skylab was reactivated in the late 1970s. NASA had a difficult time finding the needed documentation and software for the reactivation, even though Skylab had been shutdown for less than ten years. They were saved by the "pack rats" that had kept copies of obsolete software and documentation, even though the material should have been destroyed. They were also lucky that the necessary hardware still existed, as it was still in use for the support of newer spacecraft.

  • Now we just have to convince the families of the programmers who created the format the data was stored in to sue NASA when they finally do reverse engineer it. Reverse engineering is illegal now.

    On a different note, there's been a few stories about mars and life on mars popping up lately. It makes me wonder who's in the process of making a movie about mars?

  • Circadian rhythms? (Score:5)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @09:12PM (#2187308) Homepage Journal
    Speaking as someone who has done a bit of biological circadian research, I suppose that it could be bacteria or unicellular organisms, but one would have to be convinced that they did not hitch a ride on Viking from Earth to Mars. However, that said, I would be more inclined to believe that the observation of a simple change in levels of radioactivity due to addition of a "nutrient solution" (whatever solution that may be) could not prove the presence of circadian rhythms in a supposed life form. In order to prove that this was indeed a circadian rhythm possibly caused by a life form, one would have to remove the sample from the environment and any external time cues, temperature cues, magnetic cues etc... and demonstrate that whatever phenomenon you were observing persisted in the absence of those cues. This is one of the fundamental requirements for a description of a circadian rhythm. If that were to happen, then I would be VERY interested.

    Since, there were still temperature fluctuations in the Viking lander as well as possible influences from the lander itself like the addition of the "nutrient solution" that could have influenced the data, I am not inclined to buy this one. Don't get me wrong here, I am not just naysaying this, as I would love to have definitive proof that alien life exists. I just think that good science will point the way to the truth that is out there and reveal what is also not the truth.
  • As a programmer, writing documentation of your program's IO behavior and internal structure is simply not honorable because it might actually elicit your mistakes.

    A real programmer writes no documentation. Another real programmer doesn't need documentation to read the data another one's code output.

    Now send me the tape and I'll mail you back the data.
  • Well, they don't say how they are "processing" the data from the paper printouts. Maybe the 30% means that they've used OCR to convert 30% of the pages to ASCII text.
  • Holy cow, don't you remember using mag tape? There were only two common tape formats, the one-half inch reel-to-reel tapes visible in every Hollywood visualization of computers, and the DEC tape [virginia.edu] on small reels. The one-half inch tape was by far the more popular, and data was physically written in 7 and 9 track formats. Only a few tape densities were used.

    The format of the NASA tapes is not mentioned, but the physical format was probably one of the above. There are plenty of such tape drives available, some are new and most are used.

    Reading the tape should not involve any dead people, so the problem probably is with the format of the data.

  • The problem is that actually finding life on another planet would be extremely significant. The indications were not as definite as needed to be definite, so NASA is on record as not being sure.

    And this temperature-related result can be related to the increast in chemical reactions with warmer temperatures. The rule of thumb is that each degree C in rise will double a the speed of a chemical reaction. The problem with that theory is that most of the reaction should have happened quickly, with quick tapering off -- this may have a different pattern than an unknown metabolic process would. There are many unknowns.

  • Obviously this guy didn't even read the article.
  • IANAC (Cryptographer :-), but isn't this essentially like a cryptography problem ? The data in the tapes is binary data in 0s and 1s. We have a bunch of printouts with presumably contiguous segments matching presumably contiguous segments of the tape data. Surely we could take a small segment of the printouts and run it over a moving window of tape data segments till we can establish the mapping between the binary data and the printout information.

    Yes .. this is probably a stupid wacky idea .. but hey at least I entertained you.

  • Hey circadian rhythms, for a long time now, have been this whacked out area of neuro-biology that nobody could get a grip on.

    It wasn't until 1995 or so that someone got a good strong indication of a biochemical regulator of circadian rhythms, in the fruit fly.
  • 3O2 + hv <--> 2O3*

    the rate constant of that reaction and the presence of light in frequencies of energy greater than the Energy of Activation determine whether there'll be any ozone. 'Course, if it's an environment hostile to ozone ozone aint gonna hang around too long.

    I think the mars surface is highly reduced so it's not gonna hang around too long, but that just explains the "circadian rhythm" if it is being generated through the day.

    I conjecture it may gain an appreciable partial pressure in the daylight hours that is eroded come nightfall.
  • Uh, at the risk of sounding partisan, might I suggest... Linux?
  • Sheesh, I can't believe this moron got modded up.

    Look you stupid little gnome, unless you remove all chance of variability in your chosen experiment except from one source, you actually haven't created an experiment at all and you cannot draw any conclusions from it. It's useless. That's what this experiment was: useless. That guy going through that data is making claims he cannot support. The "experiment" was just "making the water turn black" (as Franky would say.)

    Take you and your faith-based science back to church where you belong.

  • Re:It sounds as if it was really bacteria (Score:3)

    by mefus ( 34481 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:57PM (#2187319) Journal
    For when this gets slashdotted, the gist of the story is that the petri dishes shows signs of activity for nine weeks, far too long to be explained by the chemical story. The bacteria's activity was cycling with the temperature, and we know today but didn't know then that that sort of cycle points to cellular activity (so say the reporters at the EurekaAlert!).

    But... remember this thing called the ozone layer, here on earth? Well it's generated in sunlight at high altitudes, and could very well be generated down on the martian surface. This is all that would be required to create the superoxide effect seen in the "circadian rhythms" activity found in those petri dishes. Careful with that axe, Eugene.

    I'm not saying the report is wrong, just that it doesn't suggest any alternative, life-negative, scenarios that are also plausible, more probable even. According to this [nasa.gov] page, oxygen makes up 0.13% of the martian atmosphere, so I think there might be an appreciable level of ozone as well.

  • Re:Life on Mars...who cares? (Score:5)

    by Fixer ( 35500 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @09:13PM (#2187320) Homepage Journal
    What's the point, you ask? Where do I begin..

    First, were life to be found on Mars, it would provide strong evidence for what is currently only a theory: That life is as common as dirt, or more properly, nebulae.

    It would lend concrete data to the Drake equation. This is the concept of attempting to guess just how many other intelligent species are in our own galaxy. Unfortunately, because of some rather gaping holes in our knowledge, it could be anywhere from 1 to 1 million. This would lend support to the one million end of the scale.

    Now, philosophy and metaphysics: Many people of a religious bent seem to be of the notion that this planet is special and unique, that we are THE (as in, the only) children of God, and that the idea of intelligent life out there is just so much poppycock. Were life to be discovered "out there", it would become rather more difficult to hold that position.

    I would like to point out a bad assumption that you've made: Just because there is life on this planet, it does NOT follow that there is life elsewhere, and the reason is that our world is so totally unlike any other in our system.
    We have liquid water, we have strong seasonal change, our cloud cover is thick enough to block some of the more destructive radiations yet still allows ample energy to reach the surface, etc, etc.

    This would be evidence that life can evolve under radically different conditions from our own, which is another thing which we only suspect but couldn't prove, until now... providing that the data is accurate, that is.

    So I would say that this is a very, very important discovery.

  • I would like to see NASA somehow extract the data from the tape (in any form) and post a huge tarball on their website.

    But if they did that, we would find out about the secret Martian cities and the CIA coverup!

  • Re:Hmm (Score:2)

    by Cylix ( 55374 )
    Proof that security through obscurity works ;)

    Damn, don't tell microsoft, they will eat us alive in the next open source debate.

    Mundie: And these examples from NASA show we were right!

    well, maybe not...

  • Dont You Remember, Fortran wasnt Y2K compatable, wow! seems like thats how long ago nasa tried to reach mars. Maybe they should try the candy. -a
  • Makes ya wonder what those programmers were thinking. Well lets see, my dad was born in the 50's and he is still alive. And the last time nasa used "fortran (or whatever language they were using)" he was still alive.

    it seems so highly unlikely they couldnt figure it out, maybe we need a rosetta stone to determine what the heck these ancient gliphs might mean,???
  • With the clusters of Oats miller built into his tape studies, Something wrong appears. Some thing.
    He didnt create Redundant Copies
  • The article gives the following explanation:
    Czeisler reckons the people in the original study were probably just leaving the lights on later at night to liven up a month of clockless cave-dwelling, and their sleep adjusted to it.
  • Yeah, that search came up with this page [abc.net.au], which thoroughly debunked the story of the 25-hour day.
  • > Yeah, DOS works pretty well, for small amounts of data at least. There are plenty of OSes, including some free ones, that can read DOS floppies.

    ...
    > Either of these formats will be much easier to read decades in the future than zip disks or other proprietary/closed formats.

    Aren't we confusing high-level formats (i.e. filesystem layout) with low-level formats here (i.e. how each single bit is represented)? The reason why I ask this is because, errmm, in most cases, Zip disks use a plain old FAT MS-DOS filesystem! The only pecularity is that for some weird reason they use partition number 4 rather than 1.

    However, what is different is the low level encoding, i.e. which magnetic patterns represent ones, and which represent zeroes. Many people are not aware of those issues, because they are handled transparently by the drive controller, whereas the OS only has to worry about high-level formatting. And those pecularities are far from trivial, even for a floppy disk or a CD-Rom.

    And this might also be the reason why they aren't just posting the tapes to a web site: they may have no way to read those tape into any digital form!

  • > That story doesn't debunk anything. The guy merely showed that with light, you can synchronize people to a 28h cycle.

    You missed the bit about the hormal cycles versus the sleep/wake pattern (third last paragraph; yes, you do have to read it to the bottom...).

    If the externally imposed cycle is sufficiently far from the "natural" 24 hours, only the sleep/wake pattern adjusts to the external stimulus, whereas the more fundamental cycle of body temperature and hormone levels ignores the external stimulus and goes to 24 hours "precisely".

    The explanation for the 25 hour cycle was that in the first tests, the subjects controlled their own lights, and accidentally imposed a 25 hour "external" cycle on themselves. This was sufficiently close to the natural cycle of 24 hours that both the sleep/wake and the temperature&hormones cycle could keep up with it.

    The point of the 28 hour cycle was to get so far away from the natural cycle that some body functions could no longer follow.

  • Look out for snakes....
  • This sounds like a movie ripe for MST3K... they get the results, only the people who record the findings are infested with a Martian thing... oh, let's call him "Eegah" who makes the people use a really silly (oh like ROT 13 let's say) scheme that no one would think of later so the true findings will go un-noticed...

  • Re:u r ignorant (Score:3)

    by jonnythan ( 79727 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:38PM (#2187332)
    As bad as they usually are, that's correct. The noun "data" can be used with a singular or plural verb. The word data is the plural of datum.

    data (dt, dt, dät)
    pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
  • opossum prolem in New Zealand

    They are actually 'possums', but you've got the right idea.

    New Zealand has had a barrel of new species introduced for many reasons, and because of the difference in climate and food chain from where it originating, things went wild.

    Here are some examples:

    • Ferrets and stoats - killed many of the flightless birds in the central South Island. The Takahe (flightless Pukeko-like bird) is nearly extinct
    • Gorse - being warmer than Scotland (or where it came from) it took off like crazy and now covers large patches of land
    • Rabbits - where'd all the grass go?
    • Possums - where'd all the trees go?

    And there is more ... eg, mutton bird population on Stewart Island, some type of robin down to the last four alive, brown kiwis getting killed by stray dogs, etc, etc.

  • One other thing springs to mind after reading this: DOCUMENT YOUR CODE! The article says: Didn't you know? This is actually the results of the 1st Annual Obfuscated Code Contest!!

  • Disproving theories of intelligent life (Score:5)

    by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @09:33PM (#2187335)
    No one documented the file format of the data? We should send out a probe to determine whether intelligent life forms exist at NASA.

  • t a r 30 years and still block-counting.......
  • Put it on the reel of my old HP mainframe I've got running HP-UX version 7 in my basement. Its got the processing power of nearly 3 pentium 100's.

  • Data From the Horse's Mouth (So To Speak) (Score:3)

    by cybrpnk ( 94636 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @03:46AM (#2187338)
    Dr. Levin, the guy behind the Viking Labeled Release Experiment, has been a lone voice in the wind the past few years about Viking discovering life, even before this latest interest. Check out his data here [biospherics.com].
  • what does the sleep patterns of dust have to do with whether there is life on Mars (black or white)?
  • ...where eventually all /. stories are about life on Mars.
    --

  • I could mod this up, but I'd prefer to add my agreement to it. Sorry, karma whores:)

    One of the things people have done a little too often in the past is assume that an exported species will be similar in activity in its new environment. Not true. Look at the opossum prolem in New Zealand: they've devastated native forests and contributed to the death of many indigenous species of flaura and fauna. Here in Australia, they're protected, I believe. Over there, they've reproduced like there's no tomorrow. They were introduced for an early fur trade which never really made it.

    Now, on Mars, if there's something alive (I doubt it) then we have a specialised organism used to living in low atmospheric density and cold. The possibilities are that it's either going to thrive in a warmer, more rewarding and oxygenated environment or it will die out. Of course, anyone that's tested for antibiotic resistance on a plate knows how fast mutations occur and how easily bacteria can evolve to suit their environs. So which is more likely? Given a large enough sample, I'm pretty sure there would be enough mutants that a population would make it through the bottleneck. And there's no telling what they might do. Remember, small organisms are not just the bottom of the food chain, they're also the base upon which everything else is founded. They also draw from the top of the chain for food.

  • When he says this:
    I don't think everyone will be content of proof of life on Mars until they land there and bring back a live sample.
    So let's go do it already.

    ____________________
  • .... Miller, who had worked for NASA in the early 1980s, studying the effects of zero gravity on circadian rhythms in squirrel monkeys...

    NASA's true goal is to discover the most strange and useless facts in the universe. Next up:
    Study the eye movements of dogs when exposed to the effects of twinkies shot out of cannons.

    Either that or the scientists just thought the idea of monkeys floating around in zero G would be really funny to watch (which would really be funny actually...)
  • "He looks like a cabbage patch Elvis!"

  • Should be plenty of UV to generate ozone, right down to the surface, I guess. And low partial pressure might mean that tri-atomic oxygen is less likely to form? Anyway, this was apparently inside the lander, so who knows what it was exposed to. If you're right, it's another good story down the tubes. Darn.
  • But who knows where they came from?

    For when this gets slashdotted, the gist of the story is that the petri dishes shows signs of activity for nine weeks, far too long to be explained by the chemical story. The bacteria's activity was cycling with the temperature, and we know today but didn't know then that that sort of cycle points to cellular activity (so say the reporters at the EurekaAlert!).

    I guess the only quibble left to be hashed out is: "Could this be earth bacteria which hitched a ride and survived the trip?" I seem to recall that NASA tried to prevent that from happening, but I was only 15 that year, and easily distracted.

    One other thing springs to mind after reading this: DOCUMENT YOUR CODE! The article says:

    It took a number of calls?and a good four months?to uncover what Miller was looking for. And when NASA found it, there was a problem. "The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died," Miller said.
    If they had documented their work properly, someone could have figured out how to read that tape, even after they kicked the bucket.

  • Because where there's life there are quite obviously lewd acts of procreation! Multi-celled and sexual or single-celled and unchristianly asexual, our children must be protected!!!

    Never mind that our godly children are results of ungodly deeds

    &ltsig&gtJerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!&lt/sig&gt
  • Considering that they now have the print-out of the actual data to cross reference, is it too hard to reverse engineer the format of the tape now?
  • I hope they're not using OCR.

    I can just see it now:

    ATTN NASA: Li8fe doscivered on the reb planrt. Noyt frine9dly. Evacuati ear..;'k

    --

  • An experiment is not useless if there are variables that haven't been eliminated. While the conclusion the experimenter draws is flawed, to a degree dependent upon the number of potential errors they miss, the conclusion still can serve as a means of basing future experiments on. In this case, if you believe that the reaction is chemical, you design an experiment, based on the flawed experiment from before, that solves the problem and allows for a more accurate conclusion.
  • Fixer conjectures:

    Many people of a religious bent seem to be of the notion that this planet is special and unique, that we are THE (as in, the only) children of God, and that the idea of intelligent life out there is just so much poppycock. Were life to be discovered "out there", it would become rather more difficult to hold that position.

    The last time slashdot carried an article about this same Viking 'life on Mars' experient [slashdot.org], it was suggested the Gilbert V. Levin (the guy who created this experient) wasn't a member of the NASA religion (cult). The accusation was that NASA scientists believe they are THE special and unique group to discover life, and Levin is an outsider to this community. Specifically, here's the quote that appeared in the Washington Post story [washingtonpost.com]:

    One of Levin's friends conjectures that Levin has suffered from not being a true member of the "life detection fraternity." "Gil's a sanitary engineer, he's not a biologist," said James S. Martin, who was the Viking project manager and who, at 80, still does some consulting work for NASA. "I've often wondered if one of his problems was that he wasn't a member of the club."

    This Washington Post story obviously takes a slant towards Levin, but there are some interesting comments from NASA... that other experiments onboard Viking failed to confirm life, problems with Levin's approach, etc.

  • Similarly, many people of an athiestic bent are also morons, blindly believing whatever the elder athiest thinkers tell them to believe.

    Ah yes, the "elder athiest thinkers" such as... hmmm... well, I suppose there must be a slew of huge athiest institutions with weekly TV programs and multimillion dollar donations around somewhere, why can't I think of any of the elder thinkers at the moment?

  • I just think I sould add my 2 cents. If you look at the people who worked at NASA at the time, many of the programmers were in there 30s and 40s when they started working at NASA in the 1950s. (the inventors of the ENIAC were in there 30s when it was made) You then figure 20 years after they started working there they would have been in their 50s the time of the viking missions. Add another 25 years to that, and vola! the origional programmers would be in their late 70s and early 80s. That is the average life expectancy of a person. (BTW most people you see in the old movies in the controll rooms were chain smokers, not too good for the ole lungs) Even now, and as pointed out during y2k many people who were called out of there retirement in their 60s to fix code they made in the 70s, and 80s. You would be quite suprised on how old the tech force in this country really is.
  • The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.

    Ha! Can't you see? This is just shameless XML propaganda by NASA. Don't believe them though, obscure binary formats that only you know are just harmless job insurence.

  • Now, philosophy and metaphysics: Many people of a religious bent seem to be of the notion that this planet is special and unique, that we are THE (as in, the only) children of God, and that the idea of intelligent life out there is just so much poppycock. Were life to be discovered "out there", it would become rather more difficult to hold that position.
    Many people of a religious bent are morons, blindly believing whatever the elder morons tell them to believe. The interesting religious people are the ones who will argue that the practice of religion does not depend on the existance of God. I.e., it doesn't matter if God exists or not, it doesn't matter if we are the only life in the universe, and it doesn't matter if a zygote has a soul or not.

    Similarly, many people of an athiestic bent are also morons, blindly believing whatever the elder athiest thinkers tell them to believe. They will refuse to acknowlege the possible existance of any kind of God whatsoever. Similar to the weird religious peoples, there are weird atheists who will argue that even if a God exists, the best thing we can do is ignore him or her and pay him no attention, because to do so would be the death of our free will.

    To me, the only sane choice is agnosticism.

    Cryptnotic

  • Nice essay, but I think my point was that it doesn't matter whether God exists or not.

    I think when I said I was agnostic, what I meant was more "apathetic", that I don't care, it doesn't matter much to me, and I'd rather not spend too much time thinking of it. Of course the default belief is that God doesn't exist any more than talking fish do.

    Also, like the question of whether talking fish exist or not, I'd rather not spend too much time thinking about whether God exists or not.

    Cryptnotic

  • publish the formatting protocol? i bet had they done so (and they probably did) it would have been the first thing to be tossed in the bin next time the cleaners came - the developers are dead damnit.

    Not only that, but it was NASA's system and NASA's tapes, there's no point publishing anything.. who'd be able to use it?

    OTOH, had they printed out the data (or spread it to media companies on film or something) then everything would be sweet. Someone might give the OK to dump a box of programmers notes, but not half a warehouse of paper, which everyone knows is The Data.
  • Slashdot is in a sad, sad situation when someone can predict the posts with this sort of accuracy. Another two months of study and slashcode could have an AI module to post to itself and completely fool the readers.
  • Hot tap water is usually not hot enough to sterilize a container intended for beverages. You really outta boil water in and around the container for at least 5 minutes. The following link has some additional information and you should be able to pick up some pamphlets from your local FEMA or FDA office.
    http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/fire/emerg_prep/oh no/emergh2o.html [vancouver.bc.ca]
  • Dont You Remember, Fortran wasnt Y2K compatable

    Heh. You don't do much computation, do you? Call us a bunch of nerds, but our hpcc group was pretty happy when SGI sent us the latest update to their f77/f90/f95 compilers about a momnth ago. "Yay, compiling with -o3 will shave an extra day off this run!"

    Fortan is still alive and works like a charm, especially for tried and true atmospheric model algorithms. Heck, the SGI Origin 3400 machine we run most of our jobs on was announced by SGI in July of 2000 and our latest CPU cards were announced in April of 2001.
  • Ppl will say same of zip disks 30 years from now.
    Proprietary disk formats are bad, mkay?

    Which "open" disk format do you prefer? MSDOS floppy?

  • Open Formats (Score:4)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:24PM (#2187362) Homepage
    *Sigh*

    Would have it been too hard to actually publish the formatting protocol at the time the data was recorded to tape?? My goodness, Viking wasn't even that long ago. I would like to see NASA somehow extract the data from the tape (in any form) and post a huge tarball on their website. Let the community try to make heads or tails of it.
  • This is a strong argument against encrypting media. Imagine if instead of saving to tape, modern NASA scientists archived to some SCM enabled drive or to DVD? Then not only would they have to figure out the data format, but encryption scheme, and key(s) as well.

    Granted, some things need to be encrypted. However, with unchecked adoption of copyprotection schemes, in another dozen years we'll have a Y2K-ish problem on our hands of going through old data, figuring out the encryptions, and decoding the format.

    Corporations don't and won't care. They are required by law to act as though they will always exist. Therefore their answer will always be: "Relax. When you need that info just give us a call! We have all that information saved."

  • I agree. I can't imagine that there wasn't ever any thought that this stuff wouldn't be looked at again in the future. Then again, maybe I'm putting too much faith in people again. Curse those chicken soup books I read while in line at Wal-Mart.
  • I get the feeling I am feeding a troll, but...

    I think the fact that we developed intelligent life on this hunk of rock is proof enough that micro-organisms can exist on other planets.

    Have you ever taken a science course? That's pure intellectual laziness. I tend to believe the same thing but I'd never say we have proof.

    Just because many of us share a collective "well, no DUH" moment doesn't mean there is proof of jack squat. Proof requires evidence. For further illumination, refer to the dictionary [dictionary.com].

  • In the end, all we have is another interesting data point. We won't know for sure until we are growing Martian bugs in culture bottles back here, and even then there are concerns of contamination.

    The only way we can really be sure is to subject said bugs to a barrage of biochemical tests. We know a great deal about earthly biochemistry, and it should be trivial to prove a new bug is an alien if we could grow enough to assay. Heck, a microscope might even be enough.

    As a half-assed biochemist myself I am dying for this to happen. Who knows what kind of weird pathways alien bugs might have evolved? How will their genetic data be encoded? This is going to be huge stuff. For biochem geeks, anyway. It's possible that the stuff will be alien enough not to be dangerous OR useful. Which would be a shame, in a way.

  • Re:It sounds as if it was really bacteria (Score:3)

    by IronChef ( 164482 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @11:05PM (#2187367)

    Though curiously the natural human circadian rhythm is 24'42". People gravitate to that when removed from external stimuli. Do a search for "circadian cave natural."
  • "Could this be earth bacteria which hitched a ride and survived the trip?"

    The alleged bacteria operated on a 24.66 hour rhythm, the period of a Martian day, not an earth day. Therefore, the bacteria would be Martian, not earthling.

  • Bah! Programmers never die, they just go sub and don't return().

    Actually, I believe we get pushed to the top of the stack.
  • This brings up an important problem, how will they be able to read our information in the future? I mean, electricity will be nothing like we know it now 1000 years from now. How can we store information so that future generations will be able to read the data?
  • Since NASA can't land jack shit on Mars these days, this must be a real kick in the groin to all the new-age, computer-assisted, high-salary engineers, seeing as a bunch of probably-dead guys with slide rules and electron lamps are still outdoing them. Ha ha.
    ----------
  • I worked for Dr Levin for 10 years in the 80's. In fact he got me started on my IS career (sys36's and 38's, PRG II - God am I that old?). He has always beleived in his experiment and that the results were positive. Just think, I may have worked directly for the first human to discover extraterrestrial life!

  • Life on Mars, that's nothing! (Score:4)

    by jpm242 ( 202316 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:30PM (#2187375) Homepage
    I have a little society that grew in a glass of milk that I left on my desk for too long. They built a little city and they almost succeeded in space travel, that is getting out of the glass. If I let them evolve, they just might reach Mars before Nasa does.
  • If the same experiment were run here on Earth, and you got the same results - would you attempt to explain it as 'ozone'?

    There is something for all of you young students of science to keep in mind:

    • Plausibility != truth
    • Truth may be implausible

    When you apply plausibility as a go - no go decision maker you run the risk of swallowing plausible lies - while rejecting implausible truth. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

    By the way, being a nay sayer - which is what you are doing here - takes absolutely nothing. Professors will pass off nay saying as being a good scientist - but the truth is what they like about nay saying is the illusion of power that comes from being destructive. For example - you didn't do the work necessary to see the correlation in the Viking data - that would have been to hard, and required you to put yourself at risk in doing so. It is much easier to come up with a half assed explanation like 'ozone' than to do all of that work - you get this swell illusion of power by being negative. It is the same illusion of power that a vandal gets when they throw point on an an existing work of art: "See I'm an artist too!".

    Being a turd is not part of science - it is a cancer on science.

    Careful work is important - and looking at possible alternatives explanations is necessary - but playing nay saying games is not science - it is just useless self deceiving time wasting.

    No nay sayer has ever advanced science and knowledge by so much as one femto-meter.

  • They didn't die. (Score:4)

    by smnolde ( 209197 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @08:40PM (#2187379) Homepage
    They didn't die. They violated some obscure NDA and a large media company *cough* RIAA *cough* had them terminated.

  • Hardly Down the Tubes... (Score:3)

    by uptownguy ( 215934 ) <UptownGuyEmail@gmail.com> on Saturday July 28, 2001 @01:55AM (#2187381)
    If you're right, it's another good story down the tubes. Darn.

    Hardly down the tubes. Good science is as much (more?) about disproving "neat" theories than about proving them...

    MORE TO THE POINT I know I'll get flamed for saying it, but I'll be glad if we find there is no other life on Mars ... cuz if there is life, what do you think we are going to do?

    We'll do what we always do:

    We'll investigate.
    We'll take "precautions"
    We'll be "careful"
    We'll bring BACK sample to analyze
    We'll see how the stuff interacts with OUR stuff

    And all this being done by an agency that can't even read its own data 25 years later? Nope, sorry folk, but if there is any sort of life that is hardy enough to survive the Martian elements, we'd be better off leaving it ON Mars... buried.

    Before it gets the chance to "interact with our stuff"

    (Ever seen a lake/river infested by an exotic species? If so, then you know what I'm talking about...)
  • I suspect ease of reading and parsing took second chair to being able to stuff as much data into very limited storage and bandwidth. Limit your storage to a couple k or less, and lets see you make it easy to read meaningful amounds of info. This was spacecraft, after all.
  • Watch out, they might build a DEBIGULATOR and then they'll debigulate you and suck you down into their city and treat you like their god and creator. It sure sux when shit like that happens......you need some kind of re-bigulator and the thought of such a thing, well, boggles the mind really.
  • data standards.

    You'd think that NASA, of all people, would store important data in a format thats easy to use later. Or at least keep a copy of the protocol specs around.

    However, if we want to keep data stored in a digital format over the long run, how do we do it? Right now, you'd say CDR. But 20 years down the line, how many people will have a CDROM drive? They've only been around about 6 years!

    Perhaps we should go back to paper???!?!?
    -MR

  • physical evidence? (Score:3)

    by hyrdra ( 260687 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @11:40PM (#2187391) Homepage Journal
    Maybe we should end the debate forever and have a mission to collect soil and bring it back to Earth for actual analysis. It would be hard to dispute physical evidence.

    Nevermind the difficulties, but in order to proove it to some people I assume we would need actual evidence, especially to those who think life is unique to Earth (e.g. religious sector).

    Otherwise, it's just going to be another debate.
  • The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.

    Bah! Programmers never die, they just go sub and don't return().
  • I'm a Mormon and I don't agree with either position. Oh wait, you said moron. Nevermind.
  • when we can read ancient mars dirt, but not magnetic tape and fortran
  • That story doesn't debunk anything. The guy merely showed that with light, you can synchronize people to a 28h cycle. Of course you can--otherwise, the 25h "natural" cycle wouldn't make sense: it gets synchronized by natural light to 24h under normal circumstances. Furthermore, it is well known that there are numerous interacting biological clocks; some take weeks to adapt even to new time zones.
  • The "formatting protocol" is probably a piece of Fortran code that used binary I/O directly to the tape device. And that was a pretty reasonable choice at the time for scientific work.

    They could have saved a self-describing character stream, a kind of "printout", on the tapes, but what would the point have been? Magnetic tapes are not an archival medium--they get unreliable after a few years on the shelf.

  • You missed the bit about the hormal cycles versus the sleep/wake pattern (third last paragraph; yes, you do have to read it to the bottom...).

    No, I didn't miss it at all.

    Czeisler reckons the people in the original study were probably just leaving the lights on later at night to liven up a month of clockless cave-dwelling, and their sleep adjusted to it.

    That doesn't alter the simple conclusion that in the absence of external input, the natural sleep-wake cycle is longer than 24h in most people.

    If the externally imposed cycle is sufficiently far from the "natural" 24 hours, only the sleep/wake pattern adjusts to the external stimulus, whereas the more fundamental cycle of body temperature and hormone levels ignores the external stimulus and goes to 24 hours "precisely".

    There is lots of evidence that there isn't a single "more fundamental" cycle, but instead lots of weakly coupled cycles, all with slightly different periods. Under normal conditions, they entrain to daylight. In caves, they work out to a little more than 24h for sleep/wake. You can get them out of sync in various interesting ways. It's hard to predict what happens when you force just the sleep wake cycle to 28h. But Czeisler's results and explanation sound too simplistic, and if his hypothesis were true, it would contradict dozens of experiments and decades of research, and it would require a lot more convincing evidence than a single experiment.

  • The data format can't be read by any of the newbies, so they need to get the old guys, who they claim to be dead, but are just retired. Not saying the plot was bad, I kinda like movies with Clint, so I tried to put it off, but anyone notice writers are never appreciated in movies or video games anymore?
  • If they want to answer this burning question, why don't they just send a probe that's equipped with a microscope? Or am I missing something here?
  • I'm a book & document conservator, and paper is _great_ for long-term storage, provided some reasonable precautions are taken in handling. (I have plenty of paper samples that are 500+ years old and look like they were made last week).

    That said, however, imagine the volume of paper necessary to contain all the data we manipulate day in and day out for just about any large scale research project these days. And the stuff isn't exactly easy to process when churning numbers...

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