Mars is in my dreams

I can't help but speculate on the Mars news. I'm tremendously excited, more than I should be.  I'm betting on organics which could have a non-biological origin. In other words, Mars will remain both dead and tantalizingly alive in our imaginations. I'm looking forward to the announcement, but answers may not come quickly.

Speculation now rampant and completely untrustworthy seems to be leaning toward methane compounds correlated to archaea.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2012/11/23/mars-curiosity-may-have-found-something-earth-shattering/

I didn't know what archaea are until this weekend. Back in 2002, the BBC ran this story about archaea living in a Mars-like environment buried beneath Idaho.

The microbes were found living in a hot spring, 200 metres (660 feet) beneath the US state of Idaho. They get their energy not from the Sun or from consuming other organic matter, but by combining hydrogen from rocks with carbon dioxide.

Because similar sunlight and oxygen-free environments are thought to exist on the Red Planet, and even on Jupiter's moon Europa, such organisms could provide clues about searching for life on other worlds.

"It's possible this type of metabolism was the very first metabolism that evolved on the early Earth," Dr Francis Chapelle, of the US Geological Survey (USGS), told the BBC. "Because hydrogen and carbon dioxide are present on Mars and other places in the Solar System, that kind of life may in fact be what's up there."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1764716.stm

Has Curiosity found methane? There are a number of non-biological sources, so it would be exciting, but not too exciting. According to this article, methane on Mars would likely be of recent origin.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/mars-methan-nasa-curiosity-rover_n_2066796.html


Remember this? Maybe we already found life on Mars in 1996.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/marslife.html

A group of scientists led by David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center published an article in the 16 August 1996 issue of Science magazine announcing the discovery of evidence for primitive bacterial life on Mars. An examination of a meteorite found in Antarctica and believed to be from Mars shows: 1) hydrocarbons which are the same as breakdown products of dead micro-organisms on Earth, 2) mineral phases consistent with by-products of bacterial activity, and 3) tiny carbonate globules which may be microfossils of the primitive bacteria, all within a few hundred-thousandths of an inch of each other...

But let's not get too excited:

Chris McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, is a leading researcher on the possibility of life on Mars, and he, too, urges caution. "This is probably not as exciting as the internet rumors suggest," he says – as someone who is privy to what Curiosity has found.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22532-curiosity-result-could-confirm-mars-life-says-levin.html

Or may be Viking found it in 1976.

http://www.examiner.com/article/1976-life-on-mars-controversy-resurrected-new-scientific-report

A team of scientists and mathematicians analyzing data from the 1976 Viking Mission have concluded that life on Mars was detected in one of the four experiments conducted by the two robotic landers.

The abstract of the paper, published earlier this year:

Abstract : The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

http://ijass.org/PublishedPaper/topic_abstract.asp?idx=132

I don't expect we are going to have proof of life on Mars. What I can hope for with a reasonable expectation is that we will have a degree of confidence that life once existed on Mars, and a plausible story about how it exists even today. But that sort of informed speculation is a long way away (in distance and years) from proof.

Think about it, boys and girls. In our lifetimes we could see the sequencing of the human genome and the discovery of life on Mars. Wouldn't that be grand?

In closing, keep your hopes down:

http://www.space.com/18626-nasa-mars-rover-secret-discovery-speculation.html

Most scientists contacted by SPACE.com believe that Curiosity's SAM has detected organic chemical compounds. Still, some experts caution that the rover's finding may be overhyped.


"This is going to be a disappointment," said Chris McKay, a NASA space scientist at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "The press description of the


SAM results as 'earthshaking' is, in my view, an unfortunate exaggeration. We have not (yet) found anything in SAM that was not already known from previous missions: Phoenix and Viking."


But James Garvin, chief scientistat NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and a member of Curiosity's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) science team, had a different take.


"What John Grotzinger was saying as our very capable project scientist on MSL is exactly the case," Garvin said. "The analytical payload on MSL —in particular, SAM as a suite —has been making unprecedented measurements of solid material samples with incredible implications about Mars, but which require, as in all science, demonstration of reproducibility and adequacy of calibration/validation."