Killing the Life We Seek

Mars Life Summary (Jan 10, 2007): Researchers hypothesize that Mars is home to microbe-like organisms that use a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide as their internal fluid. Such life forms could explain the results of the Viking biology experiments -- before those experiments inadvertently killed the Martians.

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules...rder=0&thold=0

My comment: isn't there a better way to test for life than heating something & cooking it????

Suppose some aliens came along & incinerated the Earth. "Oops! we were testing for organics. Doh!"

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"I am happy to report that once again the universe is doing just great, thank you, purring with perfection, ever-changing same as always. Light is still cruising along at 186,000 miles per second, and the expanding universe shows no signs of contracting. At this rate, it won't be long before they'll have to let the photon belt out another notch."
Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

See:

Viking landers may have missed Martian life

Little Green Microbes

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Given the technology and knowledge of biology at the time, the Viking experiments were a good attempt. All we can really say is that there is the possibility of life on Mars, but we'll need new experiments and new research to test that possibility.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Even if we killed a few microbes, it's no big loss. There'll be 10^(20 or 30) more of them lying around to investigate. Think of the number of Earth microbes we kill daily---in order to survive. Some members of the biota treat other members viciously everywhere life abounds. It's the nature of life.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

Your analogy is silly -- as is the whole "Did we kill the Martians" title.

Much better analogy:

There are intelligent beings on Venus. They can not imagine anything that could live below 200 C. They know Earth is "too cold for life", but give it benefit of the doubt. They send a robotic probe. Their experiment is designed to look for Venusian life adapted to extreme cold. They provide nutrients (liquid alkali metals) and benign temperature of 250 C (still chilly, but hey, we are talking about extreme cold-adapters, right?). Their experiment finds nothing, and kills Earth bacteria in the sample, but hardly "cooks the Earth".

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Yeah, we wiped out all life on Mars with a few milliliters of water and a little Easy Bake oven. My God, what barbarians are we to come up with such deviously simple weapons of mass destruction!

Your comparative hypothetical is ludicrous, but not unexpected.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Hey hey, go easy...I know it's silly. Just dumb humor, like Far Side. The title 'did we kill the Martians" was a headline on either astrobio or msnbc.com

Yeah, I agree with your analogy about Venus.

__________________
"I am happy to report that once again the universe is doing just great, thank you, purring with perfection, ever-changing same as always. Light is still cruising along at 186,000 miles per second, and the expanding universe shows no signs of contracting. At this rate, it won't be long before they'll have to let the photon belt out another notch."
Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

Of course I didn't mean we killed ALL the Martians... .

I must have been mistaken...when I read the article I thought it mentioned a test that involved heating a Martian soil sample. I made this analogy to cooking the Earth because I wondered, is there a better way to test for life than by cooking it? Is it possible to inspect it with an electron microscope?

When I looked at the article again, I couldn't find any references to heating. Doh...

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"I am happy to report that once again the universe is doing just great, thank you, purring with perfection, ever-changing same as always. Light is still cruising along at 186,000 miles per second, and the expanding universe shows no signs of contracting. At this rate, it won't be long before they'll have to let the photon belt out another notch."
Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

That was fun to read.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

The idea was to try detecting life that may have responded to more Earthlike conditions, assuming such life would find Earthlike conditions ideal. An attempt to "wake up" potentially dormant lifeforms by introducing possible fuel sources for activity in a controlled experiment.

"Baking" to me is a bit of a misnomer for what basically amounted to putting a sunlamp on it. Similarly with the water. The intent wasn't drowning, but "watering the garden". Besides, these were experiments looking for bacteria, the assumption was that they wouldn't be necessarily harmed by the experiment, just as Earth bacteria would not be adversely harmed by saturation and heating.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Well, the pyrolytic release experiment did bake the soil, but only after exposing it to light and CO and CO2 heavy with carbon-14 for 120 hours first. The idea was to measure if there had been C14 uptake by something in the soil.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Apart from trying to find life on Mars that evolved under Martian conditions, has it ever been tried or are there any plans to test if Earth life forms can exist under Martian conditions?

I have read some ideas also of using some sort of earth bacteries (perhaps genetically adapted ones) to change the hostile environments of other planets.

For example to change the atmosphere of Venus in order for Venus to cool down, or to create a more habitable atmosphere on Mars.

I dunno... this is kind of like saying something along the lines of "Humans may have killed God by breaking wind" there is no proof there is or was life on mars... there is no proof there is or was a God...

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http://www.ryanmercer.com

Google "Mars Jars". Sagan did that back in the 70's I think.

Alright, I'll put a toe in my mouth, but not the whole sneaker. That experiment was looking for traces of life, not corpses of life.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Exactly. The baking was part of the process to look for evidence of life, and it was a pretty good idea too.

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Nice thread, but no one comments about plausibility of "hydrogen peroxide" organisms. I personally think that Vikings didn't find life because search for them in wrong place.

Can these "hydrogen peroxide" organisms live on surface or in small depth?

To greenfather: yes, these are nice, brutal ways to check if something lives here by killing it. I'm eagerly await demonstrations with labels like "Stop these endless atrocites against bacteria!". It will only reinforce my opinion about some "green" people...

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Sanity is overrated.
Butterfly.

OK, I guess I'm not a genius, because I don't understand why baking was necessary. Don't they have other ways of detecting chemicals?

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"I am happy to report that once again the universe is doing just great, thank you, purring with perfection, ever-changing same as always. Light is still cruising along at 186,000 miles per second, and the expanding universe shows no signs of contracting. At this rate, it won't be long before they'll have to let the photon belt out another notch."
Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

Sure, but they needed an experiment that was small, simple and straightforward. They had mass and size constraints, and an overl