Mars landing may have destroyed martian life forms

POSTED BY: Siri
UPDATED: Thursday, January 11, 2007 14:01
VIEWED: 3402
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PIRATECAT

Wednesday, January 10, 2007 9:24 PM

Not to fear we have a secret weapon Its ITs called Slim Whitman's greatest hits. Yodel Leh Hey Ha. Little green men are going down. Gettem big Jim Brown. Bam.

"Battle of Serenity, Mal. Besides Zoe here, how many-" "I'm talkin at you! How many men in your platoon came out of their alive".

TRAVELER

Wednesday, January 10, 2007 11:46 PM

No Martians shall survive the wrath of Zim.

Traveler

VALERIEBEAN

Thursday, January 11, 2007 6:16 AM

Speaking as a professional astronomer, I don't think we've committed some heinous Martian crime by killing a few microbes. There's plenty more roadkill here on Earth. Also, if the is life on Mars, it is not likely that it was confined to the single location of the Mars landing... consider if an alien spacecraft crashed in the middle of the Saharah desert and, after finding nothing the first few miles, assumed there was no life in the desert (and no water). Life in the vicinity may simply not be detected because we don't have time to search the whole planet. But if you wander the Sahara long enough, you're bound to get bitten by something unpleasant.

Our greatest challenge in discovering other life will most certainly be our ability to recognize it. Our first test is usually carbon and water because we see those as building blocks. How broad should our view of life be? It gets tricky. I don't know if you played this experiment in high school biology, but fire meets the five basic criteria of life, yet we don't consider it alive... so if we find something that meets our "life" criteria, will we ever really know?

The other fun fact to consider is that it is possible to form amino acids on comets (I was surprised when I heard it too), so it could be possible that the building blocks of life began in the Black anyway! But then, an amino acid is not considered "life" either. It is simply a building block.

A colleague of mine took a survey of astronomers and non-astronomers about life in the universe... I thought it might be interesting to share:
http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~skane/survey/

Just as a disclaimer, my specialty is black holes, not missions to Mars, but if you have more astronomy questions, just ask! :)

valeriebean

"Just like handgrenades, you don't want to run into a horseshoe stake in the dark." -Gouda, FFF.net

SIRI

Thursday, January 11, 2007 2:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by valeriebean:
Speaking as a professional astronomer, I don't think we've committed some heinous Martian crime by killing a few microbes. There's plenty more roadkill here on Earth......

Our greatest challenge in discovering other life will most certainly be our ability to recognize it......

Interesting comments - BTW in my original post, I wasn't necessarily saying that we had "committed some heinous Martian crime..." but rather the discovery that perhaps we didn't know what we were looking for which is useful for future endeavors of this nature. It's something that sci fi folks have frequently used as part of their storylines, i.e., life might look different in different parts of the 'verse - not Joss' verse but other writers.

I'm going to check out the site you listed.

"We're very much alone out here."

Siri

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