The article is good but the title is a bit too slippery a statement in my opinion. The article is saying more evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars. In astrobiology the massive problem is that geology can imitate biology. The presences of minerals formed by microbes on Earth does not prove microbes are involved in their production on Mars, it is a big jump to make.
I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.
But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]
It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.
Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".
If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.
But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?
It was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?
Tangential, but really looking forward to what Europa Clipper[0] finds in its flybys.
The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself.
I am not an astrophysicist, but I have read that the thick layer of ice is supposed to protect the miles-deep ocean against radiation, which might harbour life.
The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.
Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).
> Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing.
Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.
Our values are murderous, I wouldn't want to be visited by aliens that shared out values. A galactic version of human society would quite reasonably identify that earth couldn't fight back then special interests would have our planet liquidated for its natural resources without making headlines in space-news. Possibly colonise us, kill all the humans then offer an apology a few generations later and maybe a small local holiday to commemorate the process.
Regardless, there aren't that many possible values aliens could have. It is hard to come up with something outside basic game theory - you can see how most religions tend to converge on the same practical principles over time, like basic property rights and not causing trouble pointlessly.
I wouldn't expect it to be less murderous than the aliens themselves. That wasn't my point at all. I'd expect it to contain all their knowledge and be able to live "forever".
But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.
At most points in time resources are scarce and not all life can be supported. At those times beings with a tendency to say “them” will give way to beings who most strongly assert “us”.
The scarcity view of life is so deeply ingrained in some of us that its become an entire world view. Some folks cant even imagine a post scarcity society.
Try though. Space is mind blowingly large and anything with the ability to traverse interstellar space alteady has access to unlimited resources and energy, likely closer than us. We live in a tiny backwater of the galaxy.
We literally have nothing of value to such a civilization. Gold and diamonds a just more rocks to any serious space faring civilizations. Energy is also unlimited and free.
Unless they find us delicious our only value would likely be an exchange of knowledge.
NASA intentionally completely gave up on trying to answer the Mars life question for multiple decades and only very recently has come back around to the idea of doing life finding missions.
Italian. Maybe their browser auto translates English to Italian and expects everyone else to have a browser functioning that way (translating any to their native language)?
Viking 1 & 2 returned positive results in the seventies but these have been played down or hand waved. I think there is good evidence of microbial life in the soil or underground. We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.
Yes, that is perfectly possible. There could be some transfer, but there is a scenario where Martian microbes breed on Earth and have no natural controls. An Australia type scenario on a planetary scale.
Mineral that can be only formed by life, or under special conditions when water flows over rock, has been found on Mars, where water had been known to flow over rock.
NASA doesn't want to find life on Mars. They want to find evidence, so that the next probe can be more complex and more expensive than the previous one.
NASA will never send wet microscope to Mars, you know, the kind you used in school to show bacteria in dirty water. As that would instantly prove life on Mars and make ever more expensive probes hard to justify.
I’m curious why you seem to believe that all exploration of Mars would cease as soon as life is discovered there? It would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time and would open up a huge number of possible future missions, for the next few centuries at least. It would also make for good justification for missions to other worlds that could harbor life.
Weak evidence for life, at best. Which is why exploration continues, to search for stronger evidence. If irrefutable evidence of life were found it would open up many new avenues of exploration and research that would need funding, with strong justification - much stronger justification than currently exists.
I don't think it was weak at all. We got two positive results from the Viking landers and then tried to explain them away. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, which combined builds up a case.
The public believe we should be looking for cities and skeletons, when in fact we should be looking for extremophiles. It is possible that some of these are due to cross-contamination within the solar system (before human intervention), but that is another matter.
This is an odd comment. Any scientist or scientific organisation would love to be the first to discover life on another planet. It would catapult that organisation and individuals involved to legendary status with their discoveries being counted amongst the greatest of humankind. It would be an epoch defining moment. Funding for their work and personal riches would pour in. There would be movies made about it. Their names would be remembered thousands of years into the future.
To imply there would be a conspiracy to cover up such discoveries because you think the opposite would happen is such an odd way to think about things.
I think the opposite - unless the discovery of life was preceeded or coincidental with the discovery of some other hyper interesting thing (for example, if Martian life has some sort of utility for medicine, maybe) then I think that would be that for Mars exploration missions. Of course there would be many announcements and excited political agreements around "continuing to explore the new frontier" but I think that no more money would appear.
I suspect that NASA knows this full well, as do Mars scientists, and I suspect that they are being very careful to make sure that definitive proof does not appear until they understand all sorts of other stuff about the planet.
But why? Why would there be no money for that but there’s money now when there’s no conclusive evidence of life, past or present, on Mars? It makes no sense.
If life were found on Mars then the greatest mystery of our time would be whether life originated at least twice independently, or if we share a common origin. Both of which have significant implications, to put it mildly.
Well, Viking carried an experiment that tried to detect life. Now, the consensus is that it failed, and that the experiment was incapable of creating a useful result given the chemistry of the soil. Some people argue about that, but I am in no way qualified to take part in the debate, so I would back the consensus here.
What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
The Viking results were at worst, inconclusive and at best positive. And yet in both cases we have been led to believe they were negative. They are far from the only pointers to life on Mars either, since we've seen pictures of what look like fossilised stromatolites and algal mats, seasonal methane emissions, and discolorations in seasonal flows & ice.
Even the rusty coloured surface of Mars may be due, in part, to organic oxidisation processes.
We aren't talking about Richard Hoagland style cities here (although that Face on Mars is a lot less easy to explain away that some people claim).
You have to admire the discipline, willpower, and solidarity of all those scientists. Any one of them could prove the existence of life on Mars at any time, win a Nobel Prize, become the the most famous scientist since Einstein, put themselves on the gravy train for life... but they all hold out, keeping their decent, upper-middle class jobs, hiding one of the greatest discoveries in history, so that their colleagues don't have to find potentially slightly less lucrative or interesting jobs. That's dedication!
>>Well, Viking carried an experiment that tried to detect life. Now, the consensus is that it failed, and that the experiment was incapable of creating a useful result given the chemistry of the soil. Some people argue about that, but I am in no way qualified to take part in the debate, so I would back the consensus here.
>>What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
>>If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
>>Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
So... you tell me. Why no experiment? Not one in 50 years?
In the meantime we've learned a lot about the Martian atmosphere, it's climate, it's history, it's geology, the evolution of it's surface. I would argue that if a Viking 3 had flown with a revised kit that produced a definitive signal we wouldn't have got any of that.
Do you really think that all the scientists view NASA as a make work program? That so many people spent years in schools getting advanced degrees and there is no one there who wants to make the most significant discovery in the history of humanity? That nobody wants the instant Nobel prize?
It also doesn't make sense from any kind of financial perspective. The budget for NASA would explode for all kinds of missions. They would have free reign to go wherever and do anything.
The discovery team would instantly create brand new fields of study and career paths, and anyone on the team that discovered life would become experts in the field with unlimited investment opportunities to continue their research.
Sending a microscope is easier said than done. Many natural structures can look like bacteria, and vice versa. If there's more complex single celled life then we might see stuff swimming around but that's considered unlikely close to the surface where there's a decent amount of solar and cosmic radiation. If complex life does exist it's probably deep underground or in caves and lava tubes where we can't reach it yet.
The other reason is planetary protection. The best places to send a microscope are low lying areas where there may be brines near the surface. Those specific areas have been designated high on the list of protection sites. Earth microbes are really resilient, so even with intense sterilization procedures we can't be 100% sure. We don't want to contaminate the most valuable scientific find ever, and so we're approaching it carefully.
But I think the first reason I gave is the most significant one. It's technically pretty hard and not definitive. The surface of Mars is probably mostly sterile even if there is life. If it survives, it's probably underground.
I also disagree that NASA would not want to find life. If anything, finding life would make their budget explode. They could suddenly make a strong case for a Europa submersible, a submarine to visit Titan's methane lakes, huge space-based SETI radio telescope arrays, huge space telescopes to try to find more exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres, all kinds of things, since we'd know for a fact there's life out there.
If life emerged in two places in one solar system, we'd know that the universe is teeming with it. Maybe not complex intelligent life -- there's still reasons to think Earth may be kind of special for that. But life, certainly.
The article is good but the title is a bit too slippery a statement in my opinion. The article is saying more evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars. In astrobiology the massive problem is that geology can imitate biology. The presences of minerals formed by microbes on Earth does not prove microbes are involved in their production on Mars, it is a big jump to make.
Let's use your sentence in place of the title above. Thanks!
>..War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by benevolent Martians.
I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.
Hopefully, that was a dictation error and Bob McDonald actually said "malevolent". Either that or the CBC editors got a hold of it.
I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.
But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]
It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.
Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".
If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.
But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?
It was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?
Tangential, but really looking forward to what Europa Clipper[0] finds in its flybys.
The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself.
[0]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
Too much radiation for anything close to Jupiter. You will find life on Venus clouds and in Titan....
Everybody looking at the wrong targets. Mars is a dead, radiation cooked, burned, poisonous place. Forget about it, leave it to the trillionaires.
> Too much radiation for anything close to Jupiter.
Europa's water is an excellent radiation shield.
I am not an astrophysicist, but I have read that the thick layer of ice is supposed to protect the miles-deep ocean against radiation, which might harbour life.
Tangential to your tangential:
The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.
Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).
We need some new sci fi movies like that!
> Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing.
Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.
Our values are murderous, I wouldn't want to be visited by aliens that shared out values. A galactic version of human society would quite reasonably identify that earth couldn't fight back then special interests would have our planet liquidated for its natural resources without making headlines in space-news. Possibly colonise us, kill all the humans then offer an apology a few generations later and maybe a small local holiday to commemorate the process.
Regardless, there aren't that many possible values aliens could have. It is hard to come up with something outside basic game theory - you can see how most religions tend to converge on the same practical principles over time, like basic property rights and not causing trouble pointlessly.
I wouldn't expect it to be less murderous than the aliens themselves. That wasn't my point at all. I'd expect it to contain all their knowledge and be able to live "forever".
But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.
At most points in time resources are scarce and not all life can be supported. At those times beings with a tendency to say “them” will give way to beings who most strongly assert “us”.
The scarcity view of life is so deeply ingrained in some of us that its become an entire world view. Some folks cant even imagine a post scarcity society.
Try though. Space is mind blowingly large and anything with the ability to traverse interstellar space alteady has access to unlimited resources and energy, likely closer than us. We live in a tiny backwater of the galaxy.
We literally have nothing of value to such a civilization. Gold and diamonds a just more rocks to any serious space faring civilizations. Energy is also unlimited and free.
Unless they find us delicious our only value would likely be an exchange of knowledge.
You might like Blindsight by Peter Watts
There's a fan-made short film/trailer for Blindsight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM
Also, "just an AI probe" and "It would be amazing" in the context of Blindsight... <insert mad laughter>.
It is quite remarkable that the question of life on mars (or not) hasn't been answered conclusively despite a lot of human effort to get an answer.
NASA intentionally completely gave up on trying to answer the Mars life question for multiple decades and only very recently has come back around to the idea of doing life finding missions.
there probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.
Io credo che possa essere come dici tu ma prima servono le prove
Wrong language?
Italian. Maybe their browser auto translates English to Italian and expects everyone else to have a browser functioning that way (translating any to their native language)?
Viking 1 & 2 returned positive results in the seventies but these have been played down or hand waved. I think there is good evidence of microbial life in the soil or underground. We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.
> We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.
They could even already have invaded in the past, and we descended of them[1]. Earth as Mars ancient lifeboat[2].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23872765
[2] https://badspacecomics.com/apostles-of-mercy
Yes, that is perfectly possible. There could be some transfer, but there is a scenario where Martian microbes breed on Earth and have no natural controls. An Australia type scenario on a planetary scale.
Mineral that can be only formed by life, or under special conditions when water flows over rock, has been found on Mars, where water had been known to flow over rock.
NASA doesn't want to find life on Mars. They want to find evidence, so that the next probe can be more complex and more expensive than the previous one.
NASA will never send wet microscope to Mars, you know, the kind you used in school to show bacteria in dirty water. As that would instantly prove life on Mars and make ever more expensive probes hard to justify.
I’m curious why you seem to believe that all exploration of Mars would cease as soon as life is discovered there? It would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time and would open up a huge number of possible future missions, for the next few centuries at least. It would also make for good justification for missions to other worlds that could harbor life.
Scientists can string out things. It is a means of securing funding for long periods.
I think there has been evidence of life in the Venusian atmosphere since the 80s and on/in Mars since the 70s.
Weak evidence for life, at best. Which is why exploration continues, to search for stronger evidence. If irrefutable evidence of life were found it would open up many new avenues of exploration and research that would need funding, with strong justification - much stronger justification than currently exists.
I don't think it was weak at all. We got two positive results from the Viking landers and then tried to explain them away. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, which combined builds up a case.
The public believe we should be looking for cities and skeletons, when in fact we should be looking for extremophiles. It is possible that some of these are due to cross-contamination within the solar system (before human intervention), but that is another matter.
This is an odd comment. Any scientist or scientific organisation would love to be the first to discover life on another planet. It would catapult that organisation and individuals involved to legendary status with their discoveries being counted amongst the greatest of humankind. It would be an epoch defining moment. Funding for their work and personal riches would pour in. There would be movies made about it. Their names would be remembered thousands of years into the future.
To imply there would be a conspiracy to cover up such discoveries because you think the opposite would happen is such an odd way to think about things.
If they found actual life on Mars the NASA budget would multiply many times, so I don't understand your thinking.
I think the opposite - unless the discovery of life was preceeded or coincidental with the discovery of some other hyper interesting thing (for example, if Martian life has some sort of utility for medicine, maybe) then I think that would be that for Mars exploration missions. Of course there would be many announcements and excited political agreements around "continuing to explore the new frontier" but I think that no more money would appear.
I suspect that NASA knows this full well, as do Mars scientists, and I suspect that they are being very careful to make sure that definitive proof does not appear until they understand all sorts of other stuff about the planet.
But why? Why would there be no money for that but there’s money now when there’s no conclusive evidence of life, past or present, on Mars? It makes no sense.
Because looking for life on mars sells.
"Why are we not spending that money on more social housing?" : Because this is the greatest mystery of our time... (nods all round)
"Why are we doing science?": I don't know and I don't care, cut my taxes! (Cheering and mocking comments about nerds.)
If life were found on Mars then the greatest mystery of our time would be whether life originated at least twice independently, or if we share a common origin. Both of which have significant implications, to put it mildly.
This is where we are at on HN.
Conspiracies that NASA already found alien life and is suppressing it to continue funding.
Or you know the far more likely case:
No one has ever found any evidence of life anywhere and exaggerating tiny findings adjacent to it keep funding flowing.
No it couldn’t be that.
Well, Viking carried an experiment that tried to detect life. Now, the consensus is that it failed, and that the experiment was incapable of creating a useful result given the chemistry of the soil. Some people argue about that, but I am in no way qualified to take part in the debate, so I would back the consensus here.
What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
The Viking results were at worst, inconclusive and at best positive. And yet in both cases we have been led to believe they were negative. They are far from the only pointers to life on Mars either, since we've seen pictures of what look like fossilised stromatolites and algal mats, seasonal methane emissions, and discolorations in seasonal flows & ice.
Even the rusty coloured surface of Mars may be due, in part, to organic oxidisation processes.
We aren't talking about Richard Hoagland style cities here (although that Face on Mars is a lot less easy to explain away that some people claim).
You have to admire the discipline, willpower, and solidarity of all those scientists. Any one of them could prove the existence of life on Mars at any time, win a Nobel Prize, become the the most famous scientist since Einstein, put themselves on the gravy train for life... but they all hold out, keeping their decent, upper-middle class jobs, hiding one of the greatest discoveries in history, so that their colleagues don't have to find potentially slightly less lucrative or interesting jobs. That's dedication!
/S
>>Well, Viking carried an experiment that tried to detect life. Now, the consensus is that it failed, and that the experiment was incapable of creating a useful result given the chemistry of the soil. Some people argue about that, but I am in no way qualified to take part in the debate, so I would back the consensus here.
>>What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
>>If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
>>Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
So... you tell me. Why no experiment? Not one in 50 years?
In the meantime we've learned a lot about the Martian atmosphere, it's climate, it's history, it's geology, the evolution of it's surface. I would argue that if a Viking 3 had flown with a revised kit that produced a definitive signal we wouldn't have got any of that.
Do you really think that all the scientists view NASA as a make work program? That so many people spent years in schools getting advanced degrees and there is no one there who wants to make the most significant discovery in the history of humanity? That nobody wants the instant Nobel prize?
It also doesn't make sense from any kind of financial perspective. The budget for NASA would explode for all kinds of missions. They would have free reign to go wherever and do anything.
The discovery team would instantly create brand new fields of study and career paths, and anyone on the team that discovered life would become experts in the field with unlimited investment opportunities to continue their research.
What mineral can only be formed by life?
Plutonium?
Oklo natural uranium reactor already producted plutonium naturally.
You know what they say, sufficiently advanced geological process is indistinguishable from life.
Sending a microscope is easier said than done. Many natural structures can look like bacteria, and vice versa. If there's more complex single celled life then we might see stuff swimming around but that's considered unlikely close to the surface where there's a decent amount of solar and cosmic radiation. If complex life does exist it's probably deep underground or in caves and lava tubes where we can't reach it yet.
The other reason is planetary protection. The best places to send a microscope are low lying areas where there may be brines near the surface. Those specific areas have been designated high on the list of protection sites. Earth microbes are really resilient, so even with intense sterilization procedures we can't be 100% sure. We don't want to contaminate the most valuable scientific find ever, and so we're approaching it carefully.
But I think the first reason I gave is the most significant one. It's technically pretty hard and not definitive. The surface of Mars is probably mostly sterile even if there is life. If it survives, it's probably underground.
I also disagree that NASA would not want to find life. If anything, finding life would make their budget explode. They could suddenly make a strong case for a Europa submersible, a submarine to visit Titan's methane lakes, huge space-based SETI radio telescope arrays, huge space telescopes to try to find more exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres, all kinds of things, since we'd know for a fact there's life out there.
If life emerged in two places in one solar system, we'd know that the universe is teeming with it. Maybe not complex intelligent life -- there's still reasons to think Earth may be kind of special for that. But life, certainly.
What reasons do you think exist that lead you to believe Earth is special for having evolved complex intelligent life?
There is a lot of abrasive dust on Mars as well, which poses a problem to any microscope.
A little far-fetched..?
> NASA doesn’t want
Citation needed
> NASA will never
Citation needed