Oregon geologist says Curiosity's images show Earth-like soils on Mars | Hacker News Reader

Oregon geologist says Curiosity's images show Earth-like soils on Mars

uonews.uoregon.edu

61 points3rd34 comments

Interesting. I've been hearing more and more evidence piling up towards the possibility of life on Mars. It makes you wonder if there isn't some sort of PR play at work here. Could it be possible that life has already been discovered on Mars, but they don't want to "shock" the public with a sudden announcement. They're slowly building up to it. A very conspiratorial theory, but possible, no?

The link says "The ancient soils, he said, do not prove that Mars once contained life, but they do add to growing evidence that an early wetter and warmer Mars was more habitable than the planet has been in the past 3 billion years." so it's a big stretch to conclude this is a warmup to a big reveal.

In any case, what shock would there be? We even have antecedents by which to judge this, like Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001) in the 1990s, where the researchers proposed that they had identified fossilized microbes in Martian rock samples. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Possible_biosignat... for others. Some people, like Gilbert Levin, are more confident about the data than others.

Even further back in time, Percival Lowell believed there were canals on Mars. The discovery of life now would be so much less shocking than the impact of Lowell's work, no? If only because we know that any such life can't attack us a la Wells.

Also, wouldn't "shock" more likely lead to new funding for Mars missions? What reason is there to delay and minimize that announcement?

No, I think a better hypothesis is that the information we have about Mars is growing over time ("piling up"), which allows us to make more and more definite conclusions. Since the observed events are compatible with that simpler hypothesis, I see no need to add a new wrinkle to the system.

"Shock" will come in the form of conspiracy theorists getting a bump in popularity, further distrust in government (and Netflix streaming an unseemly amount of old X-Files reruns), but mostly in disturbing thousands of years of dogmatic religious teachings that will shake the moral foundation of most of the world.

True, some microbes won't be as meaning-of-life shattering as other intelligent (or even large, multicellular) animal-like life forms, but way too many people believe God created us and only us.

Which is sad. Because looking at the current state of humanity really makes me hope God tried a few more times to get it right.

Again I point out historical announcements. Your thesis does not explain the announcement of ALH84001. Based on your thesis, how was that announcement ever permitted? It also predicts that Viking's experiments would never have been allowed, or its results covered up. Gilbert Levin, the PI of one of those experiments, and outspoken proponent that the results indicated life on Mars, has never suggested that that was the case.

What is the mechanism for "further distrust in government"?

Your conjecture that it would "shake the moral foundation of most of the world" is decidedly incorrect. For all of the religions which accept an old universe, there is no conflict. In this Christian faiths this includes, but is not limited to the Catholic Church and Pat Robertson. This also includes Muslim scholars, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_evolution . I know less about Hindu views on evolution, but I still see no essential conflict there - Brahma propagated life in the entire universe, not just on Earth.

That's over 1/2 of the population of the world right there.

Don't forget that such life could be from Earth, and migrated to Mars through meteorites. That would not require any special sense of creation, and no conflict with any religion at all.

We don't have the ability, given the limited technology we have on Mars, to be able to tell if something is Earth-based life translated to Mars, or an independent biogenesis.

Even with completely different biogenesis, Catholic Church doctrine says there was a special creation of humans, when humans received souls from God, and this special creation is different from the purely physical evolution. Obviously there's no special creation of the human soul in what little biology there may be on Mars.

Historically too, in the 1800s and the rise of modern geology, you see conjectures about there being multiple creations here on Earth, with the fossil evidence being examples of previous creations; only the most recent involved humans, and our special association with God. Which I believe you reference in your last line.

So again I believe that your hypothesis is untenable. It doesn't explain historical events, it doesn't reflect what we know about most of the world's religions and their histories, and it presumes knowledge far in advance of what we actually can have.

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