QUOTE (Stu @ Mar 10 2008, 03:30 AM)
One of the Vikings had found primitive life on Mars in 1976..?
This counterfactual interlocks with the martian meteorites, although of course, they would not have been identified for some time after 1976 anyway. But if there was life there for the Vikings, would it also have been found in the meteorites when they were examined?
To me, one of the interesting issues here is that finding life on Mars may mean LESS Mars exploration than not finding life on Mars, at least over some possible future courses. If we find life on Mars, we'll be curious as hell about examining it, and there'll be protection issues, but the path forward if life is found there will involve inspecting those bugs. All of a sudden, Mars the planet will become spectacularly less interesting. We might want to survey Mars more to find possible biodiversity there, but we would stop looking to FIND life. The philosophical question would suddenly be done and gone.
As in striptease, Mars will keep our interest longer if the discovery of life there seems always right around the corner, but never arrives. If every mission leads to the conclusion "Well, we didn't find it this time, but now we have reason to believe we'll find it if we just try ONE MORE TIME." And that keeps happening.
If we find it, then Mars just becomes an Arizona that is more expensive to explore. Arizona has bacteria. Arizona has layers of rock. We don't need to spend $2 billion to explore Arizona, and if we did need to, we wouldn't. We'd just explore New Mexico instead. If Mars "Arizonaizes" itself, it stops earning the billion dollar budgets.
