Peter Smith: We built robotic missions that are kind of human-like – an arm, taste, sense of smell, touch. All of these sensors are very similar to human senses.
That’s Peter Smith, Principal Investigator of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission. Phoenix is a robotic lander that probed Mars for signs of life in 2008, and found some possible evidence in the planet’s soil.
Peter Smith: What we’re seeing is an array of chemicals that on the Earth would be considered important for life.
Phoenix explored the northern polar region of Mars, and found traces of a salt there, called ‘perchlorate.’
Peter Smith: Perchlorate is an energy source for life on the Earth. And we see a range of salts that we think of as nutrients. You know, you get them in your mineral pill in the morning. And so these are the kind of systems that we would expect on the Earth would be habitable.
In addition, Phoenix was the first spacecraft ever to touch frozen water on another planet. Smith said the kinds of minerals found by Phoenix are typically created by liquid water. There’s currently no liquid water at the Mars exploration site, so it’s possible these minerals blew in from another part of the planet. More analysis and lab work here on Earth might determine whether – as recently as a few million years ago – Mars had a wet environment, friendly to life.
Our thanks to:
Peter Smith
Principal Investigator, Phoenix Mars Mission
University of Arizona
What a comedy! Liquid water was discovered on Mars by the Viking lander in 1976! Ice was shown in images taken by the lander. We have published several papers proving liquid water on Mars. AND we claim that our Viking Labeled Release experiment detected living microorganisms on Mars. All of this is available on <gillevin.com>. Paradigm shifts are difficult, but this one has taken way too long!
Gil Levin, Experimenter Viking Labeled Release life detection experiment.
Thanks for your comments Dr. Levin — the evidence for life on Mars keeps mounting.
There is a problem with human culture. I guess we could call it hubris. Possibly religion. But, whichever way you describe it, we here on earth seem to think we are somehow unique and our little globe is all there is. Very narrowminded and scientifically unsound. ALL life on earth as we define it is controlled by DNA and RNA. Same polypeptides in a fruit fly, a fungus and a human. Different orders and different amounts, but the same stuff. We have already established that the same elements and compounds exist everywhere we have been able to look. There is petroleum on some of the moons in our little solar system. I am thinking it would be foolish indeed to believe that we are all that is.
No Sir!
The issue is that we can’t be trusted to remain scientific any longer. As I read these posts I see people seeking to prove that they are correct and that is just plain bad science. Where are the Scientists that care of the facts instead of a catalog of why they are right and all others are in the dark?
Good Science has always served best to disprove one’s own theory or hypothesis! Where have all the scientists gone? Someone said here “what a comedy,” This is the most reasonable point I see here worthy of remember in its context! We may or may not be alone in this Universe and it may be that it is not just a Universe we are in fact in.
We need good unbiased science to shed light on the things that remain obscure not some fiction story that is longed for to be true by people!
Have we in fact obtained water from Mars? Not components or precursors, without speculation have we found water and if so where is it? Let’s see some photos and videos, let’s put our brains around the task at hand and leave the guesses to the fortune tellers!
I for one would love the idea that we are not alone in this Universe or even that we are just one of many Universes. Imagine multi-verses with infinite possibilities! That would be something to behold!
Indeed it would be but note my use of the word imagine! This keeps me grounded to logic and enables me link both Logic and theory. I see the same in most of the posts here. Admirable people that have a most honorable cause for the pursuit of all knowledge! I fair the well, each and every one here!
Let us return to sanity and stop printing text books that will run their course for ten years and on the other side be retracted because we have to rethink, not what the facts were before us, but rethink what we imagined.
Some hear would say Religion and its man crafted dogmas if they were asked what the single greatest threat to Science is or has been. I say not so! It is in fact hurried erroneous Science as it has the potential to handy-cap Science for decades at a time.
But the accusation does not go full circle there either. I grieve for the student who places undue trust in his/her professor that they enter into college and four years later they graduate and by the sixth year of their journey they discover that they were taught was inadequate…I dare say too, that some never discover they have been taught something that made peer review but none the less was wrong. This Bad science now becomes viral and self replicates through Human ignorance!
I implore you all to stand and say what can be said…Which is: That there seems to be component aggregates of water on Mars yet it still remains a mystery. In the end, in our short lives, we really never have a true grasp of any given theory save that which we have tailored our findings to in supposition. This is a cheat and disingenuous at best!
In summary let’s save the assumptions and render no interpretation lest there be empirical Evidence, in this case it should be something that is understood through our five senses.
Fellows if there is not a substance upon Mars that has all the properties of water as it exists in nature and that are intact in an apparent relationship to that which is identical to the information we gather through the senses about water here on Earth then we rightly must say as of yet there has been no discovery of water on Mars.
Is it so wrong to say I do not know sometimes? Not at all! I’ll even submitt that being wrong is an integral aspect of being right.
We can do this but we need first to let our egos fall away and embrace humility in the scientific hunt instead of vain aspirations to make a name for one’s self and/or be published for personal gratifications. You may have these distractions I will cleave to the truth of things. In the end the great equalizer comes for us all and both Harvard Graduates and high School drop outs will be buried in the same ground. This thought alone says to me; it is better to be slow and consistent than to be fast random.
It only makes sense that because we are made out of what Carl Sagan calls “star stuff,†we should find the basic building blocks for life everywhere. But finding copper ore doesn’t mean that if you dig deep enough you’ll find pennies. They are of a specific design which ore, by itself, could not produce in 4.6 billion years. If by some miracle we found a number of natural formed pennies, each being mostly identical to each other, would the find yet qualify as life?
It is inevitable that someone will soon proclaim having found life on Mars. To critique the finding, shouldn’t we define the minimum attributes to be found in an organic assembly necessary to call it life? So, here’s my best shot at defining what evidentiary findings I think should be found on Mars in order to call what is found life:
1) There must be evidence of a consistent, repeating blueprint – DNA, RNA, and mtDNA come to mind but it can be of a different set of building blocks.
2) There must be evidence of a capability of replication through passing on or reconstructing its own unique pattern of design at the individual level.
3) There must be evidence that it was able to consume nutrients (of whatever kind), process them, and convert them into energy necessary to sustain the individual’s existence.
4) There must be evidence of systemic / individual function which is common to all individuals – a collection of unique but common structures and stimulus and response characteristics that governed its existence.
5) There needs to be evidence of a population built from generations of preceding individuals.
What am I overlooking?
Hank said:
“What am I overlooking?”
The images themselves, of course! Even microscope “slides” on this occasion. This image really intrigued me:
http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk83/Orpbit3/MB_Image01.jpg
so digging around the Phoenix “library” I managed to put together an anaglyph (you’ll need your red/cyan specs):
http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk83/Orpbit3/MB_Image02b.gif
Then I went colour with this one:
http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk83/Orpbit3/MB_Image_04b.jpg
I called it the “Flower of Life on Mars”!
I put these together back in September of 2008 but my speculations needed to wait for talk of brines to open up the channels into the ice we speculators already “knew” was there, and the sympagic communities which might have or still exist. How refreshing to get past that hurdle! Well, almost.
But you’re probably right. The next step means talking about finding the building blocks of polyamines and silaffins and evidence of “populations” needs to look at silicon isotopes.
I doubt the scientists can get close to those from Phoenix’s chemistry data. Perhaps MSL…..? But don’t forget about the cameras and microscopes which I hope will be more advanced if it’s not too late already. I can play with the images and “see” cosmic life in the three dimensional colours of the mind…not too much to ask is it? Not going to see it any other way!
That’s what astronomy was all about – the “seeing”. Isn’t it anymore?
I’m not claiming anything except that there is life out there. But I think I’m heading in the right direction even if I’m not right on this occasion.
“But finding copper ore doesn’t mean that if you dig deep enough you’ll find pennies. They are of a specific design which ore, by itself, could not produce in 4.6 billion years. If by some miracle we found a number of natural formed pennies, each being mostly identical to each other, would the find yet qualify as life?”
The entire universe has had more than 4.6 Billion years to order itself, keeping that in mind, you personally can’t quantify everything that occurred everywhere in the universe (let alone mars) even for those 4.6 billion years. The possibility of life being in mars or anywhere still exists.
Just because we have now (over the past hundred years) shifted our focus onto mars or any other planet in the universe, that does not mean that it suddenly came into existence. Life can have existed for millions of years other than on earth without us knowing. If life exists out there, and we can’t see it yet, it only means that we haven’t seen it yet and it does not exist to us.
And I’m sure that one wouldn’t need to worry too much about the definition of life or about the analysis of the compounds found and what interpretation is given. If the scientists are capable of creating and seeing through a complex mission such as this, I’m sure they know their periodic table as well as what one defines as life.
I noticed this in the disclaimer above:
We reserve the right to edit or delete comments.
This is general NASA policy with information release to the public.
It is best to call a soggy NASA spud a spongy old rotten potato.
Clowntime is over NASA.
Pennywise and Pound Foolish must be the names of Phoenix mission leaders.
The scientists from the Phoenix mission already know that there is life on Mars, and are kowtowing to political pressures to not tell the truth.
Call them what they really are: Cowards and disinformation stooges.
The grand patheticism of NASA using the “search for life” as a cover story to requisition funding fails when it comes down to the application of funding those LIFE searches properly. NASA inexhaustibly uses the worst and most lame equipment and methodologies possible to not find life, with “voodoo science” dictating results from lame and narrow focus in experimental models.
What kind of a mission uses a lame robotic arm that scrapes a few inches of topsoil instead of a core sampler to get down to the heart of the matter?
Any high school kid could have designed better experiments to detect life than NASA scientists did with the Phoenix mission.
The “Search for Life” by NASA is the grandest lie ever perpetrated upon the American population by the space administration.
The absolute last thing NASA wants to find on Mars is life and liquid water.
NASA predicts possibilities of life everywhere in the universe with ever new evidences emerging, but not on Mars, nonononono, can’t have that.
NASA wouldn’t want to have to start producing environmental impact statements in Mars development or colonization.
The designated “curmudgeon” of the Phoenix mission is the disinformation stooge playing out the continuance of gutless shadow science behind the Phoenix mission as the robotic probe is thumb tacked to the Martian surface scraping thin layers of topsoil like a lame duck trying to nest on a semi frozen mud puddle.
Removing the clown infestations dictating NASA mission parameters and allocations of funding would be a great step forward.
Outsource these “scientists” to the Chinese space program where they can tell lies for Chairman Fu-Moon Chu.
Chinese Taikonauts will be walking on Mars in 10 to 20 years while NASA is still trying to feed disinformation to the American public,
while wasting exploration money on the CEV development during that time.
Life is vtually EVERYWHERE in the universe.
There is so much life out there in the vast infinity of strings of galaxies, that it could only be modern science on Earth that is stalled in Dark Ages of disinformation and political religious constraints that spoon feeds us the diversions and disclaimers ad nauseum.
In the future, people will look back upon the Dark Ages of NASA disinformation and laugh at the barbarians that barbecued the Truth,
and fed the public burnt toast to nibble on.
You Sir I understand and like your ability to step back and and take a laugh!
I am in 100% agreement with you and the disinformation and NASA being the lynch pen!
I do have a question for you though- is not the search for life and order outside Earths ecosystem truly a search for providence or a guiding hand? Surely we would not even know our own faces in the mirror if we had not first had the ability to recognize order and Chaos…The opperative word here being recognize. When we gaze into Choas we see and recognize order contrasted with Chaos…I think this means Chaos pronounces Order but it does so only after order is made manifest. You suggest that you are ok with Providence so long as that providence is not a personal G-d. Everything exist wholly in the imaterial form of thought and may remain so indefinitely….It is not until Man reaches out to the Earthly Chaos and fashions..Lets say the spoon for example…a spoon may have existed for hundreds of years in the minds eye but the spoon did not become a reality until specific elements were combined….Even so the point of creation was not material it was imaterial and absolutely a singularity until the time that the singularity was made and the mass produced…It ceases to be a thought created hand is hand made beyond…with that being said all matter exists in three distincted formulas…First thought, then application and finaly used as the first creations intnet willed it to be>>>There is providence wheather it be a G-d or some other self sufficient purposful happenning>
You guys can look all you want but you ain’t gonna find anything akin to “Life” anywhere but here on good ole Earth.
Hell, it don’t take a rocket scientist to figger that out.
i cant wait if there is life on mars in going to live there
Since the discovery of “Blue & Green” Spheres on Mars
visble proof of Water and Life has been proven.
http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/indexback112.html
Rannells, “I´m still thinking that the Azurite Spheres 1. represent Life Forms though carbon replacement; 2. and ongoing oxidation with atmosphere of Mars; 3. and Natural Leaching processes occurring on Mars (and Morrison Formation; 4. and underground hydo-thermals exist on Mars; 5. and Malachite means limestone; 6. limestone means Life!”
http://www.keithlaney.net/THMF/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=554&hilit=azurite+nodules
Gilbert Levin was 100% correct
and NASA was wrong.We await NASA’s apology.