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Wrong language?
More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
41–50 of 139 posts
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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”.
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ha…
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).
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#45I 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'.
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#46Viking 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].
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#47Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#48>..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.
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#49The 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!
Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
#50Mineral 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…
What mineral can only be formed by life?
Plutonium?