Sounds like the presentation went down very well, congrats Doug! (well worth downloading the slides too everyone, by the way...)
On a slightly different subject, wonder how many of you have come across this yet..?
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22299217-5001028,00.html
Offered without comment or opinion, just wondered if anyone had seen it... reckon it'll be all over the news tomorrow.
From the DrudgeReport, unattributed:
(sigh)...Yeah, I saw it, Stu; getting ready for a barrage of speculation/questions from co-workers & friends (maybe; microscopic life possibilities don't really seem to grab the general public's imagination).
Frankly, it looks to me like a somewhat cynical attempt to hedge bets & get on the record before Phoenix lands. Harsh critique, I know, but there it is anyhow. In the US, it looks like Associated Press picked up the buzz phrases of one phone interview & ran with it; the verbiage looks much the same elsewhere.
Here's the Space.com article - a bit less sensational:
Claim of Martian Life Called 'Bogus'
http://www.space.com/news/070823_mars_life.html
Space.com article also a little bit bogus...
'Houtkooper presented his findings at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany this week. '
Nope - he's presenting it tomorrow - 1430, 3rd presentation of session TP8 in Workshop Room 2. It's going to be my last session - in intend to deploy any and every ounce of my non existant journalistic skills to try and get somthing good out of it as a 'response' to the mass media mass hysteria interpretation of a press release.
Doug
I remember http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=3276&view=findpost&p=90792 this work a couple of months ago.
Doug,
That was a well-written report of the Joop paper.
Sometimes just one question will put a hypothesis in its proper perspective. Your question about the boiling point of H2O2 at 6 millibars was just that sort of question.
Yes. Excellent work, Doug, respectful in tone yet properly skeptical, and the boiling point question was a home run. (The MER images combined with the dust storm seem to introduce a perceptual bias in many people; easy to forget that there ain't much air up there!)
To give Joop his due: It's proper to present internally consistent hypotheses, however unlikely they may be, to try to explain ambiguous experimental results which are difficult or impossible to duplicate in a timely fashion such as those obtained from Levin's Viking instrumentation. Critical examination of such hypotheses invariably leads to more refined & often completely new questions; eventually, we'll find the right ones to ask.
Agree 100% with nprev there - Doug's question was the important one to ask but to be fair to Joop this was an inciteful and reasonable hypothesis that certainly deserved to be presented - he shouldn't be held accountable for the shoddy media sensationalism.
If there's a graph that shows the behaviour of a 60:40 Peroxide/Water mix within a cell membrane of some sort at 6mbar....that I'm sure Joop would like to see it
Doug
Remember, though, that we may be talking about really, really tiny microbes, here -- there are terrestrial analogues of very tiny cellular life (which also happen to be extremophiles). And if the formations in that AHL meteor really are fossilized bacteria, and if they represent an average size population, we could be talking truly tiny microbes, indeed.
At those sizes, you are dealing with such little fluid compared to the overall biomass that you don't need a huge amount of liquid H2O2 to sustain a subsoil biosphere.
I'd be interested in seeing a chemical analysis of the types of recognizable (or even semi-recognizable) biochemical functions that can be supported by H2O2 before I made a final judgment. And I'd want to know if you would need as much carbon to support such functions as is required by terrestrial biochemistry.
The real issue in re fossilized Martian life, of course, is that the AHL formations occur within carbonate clasts of the rock. We've had precious little luck identifying *any* carbonates on the surface of Mars, from orbit or from the surface. I get the feeling that Mars has lost or hidden most of the carbonates it once had, and thus most of its fossil record (if one exists at all) is either gone or inaccessible.
-the other Doug
Interesting speculations, oDoug.
Beginning to think that the next Flagship to Mars (after MSL) needs to be chock full o' microscopes & culture solutions, from straight optical all the way down to a miniaturized SEM. Let's settle this once and for all.
If there is Martian microbial life, and if its either extremophilic in a way that's hard for us to encourage growth and/or is significantly different from terrestrial life biochemically, then direct detection of individual bugs rather than indirect chemical analyses of candidate biological byproducts seems like the only possible strategy to avoid these "ifs".
My thinking exactly nprev. It's an interesting piece of speculation, and I'm glad to hear that the originators at least have been responsible and presented it as just that, no more or less. I'd be very interested to see if they can come up with some predictions that might be tested by pheonix. It would be a long shot, but if they found some supporting evidence who knows?
That's the thing, though. The VL results have been controversial for 31 years (!) now, and the subject of so much speculation that it's clear that no conclusion can ever be positively obtained from them. If we keep sending purely biochemically-focused life detection experiments then I don't think that we'll ever have a definitive answer to the fundamental question "Is there life on Mars?" because there will always be alternative inorganic explanations for any results obtained, or a given experiment's assumptions may be flawed, or purported microMartians don't eat & excrete in expected ways & patterns, etc., etc....it'll never end. We just don't know enough about what is and is not possible with respect to biochemistry to qualitatively analyze results from such experiments, and Joop's paper is providing some very serendipitous, extremely valuable illumination by making this point.
Apparently, the only true touchstone we have for life detection is that we know it when we see it. Let's get a mission together that can see. We can figure out the critters' biochemistry later, if they really are there.
The true evidence of some kind of living is that it shows at least some kind of movement. That would be a much better life existence evidence than analyzing its past life.
I don't like today's Space Daily's report of this under the headline "Calculating The Biomass Of Martian Soil". With regards to the report, that sounds rather <i>biased</i>.
Andy
That's not a report. When SpaceDaily say 'by Staff Writers' they actually mean the copying and pasting of a press release, in full, verbatim.
Here's the press release, as it was in my inbox on Aug 18th.
[]Subject : Calculating the Biomass of Martian Soil
Email : A new interpretation of data from NASA's Viking landers indicates that 0.1%
of the Martian soil tested could have a biological origin.
Dr Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, believes that the
subfreezing, arid Martian surface could be home to organisms whose cells are
filled with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water. In a presentation at
the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam .....[/I]
I don't think I need to carry on. Calling it reporting is like calling photocopying a work of art.
Doug
Oh, present company excepted, of course!
-the other Doug
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