More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
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cbc.ca
I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.
That bar is pretty low. I am not hard to convince.
We don't have a baseline by which to contextualize the situation statistically. There is no p-value we can meaningfully satisfy. Worse than that, evidence required for a belief derives from the risk of being wrong.
Is there a discussion of what evidence WOULD be enough for the scientific community to say loudly "There was life on mars". Because right now it seems all risk and no utility, so the evidence bar would be really high.
For a discovery of the magnitude of life outside our planet the scientific community would probably need something like: a real and well-characterised signal, multiple independent lines of evidence, strong geological context, replication by independent teams, and a serious failure of plausible alternate explanations. Until then, “potential biosignature” is probably the right phrase.
To be clear, I think like you that there probably was life at some point on Mars. I am pretty convinced. But, you and I being pretty convinced does not come close to the threshold of a scientific discovery.
For the same reason, the existence of ancient life on Mars would not show that life is likely to arise on Earth-like worlds, since one could not conclude it was an independent event.
By what mechanism is an impact giving some debris on Mars enough delta-V to reach Earth, without obliterating Mars and also sterilizing the debris due to heat and plasma?
The evidence for life on mars is based on carbon nodules in rock, and things like CO² and methane gas,and some other chemistry and mineralology. The main one are the carbon nodules, which are ubiquitous in many sedimentary rocks on earth, though in the samples that I have of earth rocks, there are very often macro fossils that are naked eye identifiable There are countless miles of cliff here where everything has a fossil, but complete specimins, and soft tissue fossils remain rare, here, so the chances of such a thing making it to earth from mars, schould it exist in the first place are almost zero, though the martian ice caps could concievably hold meteors with earth life fossils that are naked eye visible and identifiable.
Impact spallation.
When the strong shock wave generated in rock by an impact hits a rock/atmosphere (or rock/vacuum) surface, it is reflected, producing strong tensile stress. This causes very large acceleration while not subjecting the spalled layer to extreme temperature or pressure.
This is the same process that HESH (High Explosive Squash Head) antitank rounds use to defeat tank armor without penetration. The explosive squashes against the armor before detonating, launching a shock through it causing material to spall off the inner surface at high speed. The shock here is weaker than in the impact case, however.
any would-be hitchhikers would need to be able to survive extinction-ish level impacts on Mars, survive through the vacuum (e.g. months), and then survive atmospheric re-entry and landing.
and then be able to survive in the new ecosystem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by1xpy8ob8E (starting around 5:50).
The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself.
Everybody looking at the wrong targets. Mars is a dead, radiation cooked, burned, poisonous place. Forget about it, leave it to the trillionaires.
Europa's water is an excellent radiation shield.
The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.
Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).
We need some new sci fi movies like that!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM
Also, "just an AI probe" and "It would be amazing" in the context of Blindsight... <insert mad laughter>.
Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.
But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.
Try though. Space is mind blowingly large and anything with the ability to traverse interstellar space alteady has access to unlimited resources and energy, likely closer than us. We live in a tiny backwater of the galaxy.
We literally have nothing of value to such a civilization. Gold and diamonds a just more rocks to any serious space faring civilizations. Energy is also unlimited and free.
Unless they find us delicious our only value would likely be an exchange of knowledge.
Wood however... You're not gonna find a lot of wood in space.
Brains will be uploaded to machines, or human descended AI's will will be built and tasked with exploring the places it's unsafe or too time consuming for us to visit directly. The square jawed men with laser guns will have to stay at home and watch. Maybe those AI's will be built to start cloning humans once they find a good spot or something, but it's never going to make sense to ship squishy meat sacks and the metric tons of accoutrements required to keep them alive all over unless/until we find a way around the speed of light or perfect hibernation.
They might want the wood though, and they might not know how to grow it. From there we can see 2 scenarios. The likelier one hopefully being trade: we could probably teach them to grow wood, and also provide them with seeds, perhaps on exchange for some of their space-faring tech.
Alternatively there's the pessimist scenario, where they're not interested in trading for it, we're not willing to give it freely, and so war ensues.
Personally I'd just give them a few pine-cones and explain basic horticulture as a gesture of good faith, I guess the end result is rather contingent on which human they talk to.
Of course this is putting aside any ideas of deciphering our books or tapping into the internet. Not much we'd be able to do to species that can travel the stars.
I think he modeled his habitats as large ecosystems as well in the novel. That's not strictly necessary and would simplify the design a lot.
Also, it was a fictional story so not the best source for information. Which is kind of proving my point about sci-fi messing up everyone's conception of what the future could hold.
Killing/enslavement just as a side effect. You have to tell it explicitly to NOT kill/enslave covering any edge cases. Even if they do we can turn out to be sufficiently different that the probe doesn't consider us relevant from aliens' standpoint.
That question makes no sense. It presumes that they are at all interested in, or even notice, us. We're special, from our PoV. That doesn't mean we are special.
Did you notice how many ants you drove over on your last car trip? Did you even care?
To a space-faring species, we are probably just as interesting as ants. After all, you are assuming that they'll send their brightest minds to visit us, but it is equally likely that we are "discovered" by their equivalent of joy-riding teens.
Regardless, there aren't that many possible values aliens could have. It is hard to come up with something outside basic game theory - you can see how most religions tend to converge on the same practical principles over time, like basic property rights and not causing trouble pointlessly.
A race of aquatic arthropods could be mostly solitary, cannibalistic and regard age and size as primary dominance characteristics and their notion of property rights might depend entirely on whether they can eat the owner of said property, though sublimated through some complex set of social rules and protocols. Maybe the CEO of a company only has to offer a single leg to be eaten during a hostile takeover.
Humans are not naturally prone to bouts of violence like other species and human societies do not tolerate impulsive violence in adults. Instead, the vast majority of human-on-human violence is deliberate: people plan, carefully and rationally, the killing of their fellow human beings in order to achieve their goals. This is known as 'war'. This is very rare among species, and more violent species cannot form complex societies at scale, despite being also quite smart in some cases (chimps, octopuses).
We even unconsciously internalized this idea to some degree, since most people are comfortable with the idea of militaries existing and being necessary but also agree that solitary murderous psychopaths should be put in prison.
That... does not check out. There are plenty of violent people, I've met many.
We need to have some baseline for what we consider as "intelligent species" in this context and most intelligent species will need to have a system where they can pool their resources together towards something in a sustained social manner. This rules out a lot of social patterns such as beings that are solitary, canibalisitc and hell bent of eating each other.
Damn, I really enjoyed that book. Best of the series so far, in my opinion.
I read a sci-fi story where the probe lands on Earth, and then teaches us enough science to get our own ships together, and tells us where to go to meet the probe makers. So they don't have to go anywhere and can sit comfortable at home and wait for the aliens to come to them.
This is a likely scenario of misinterpretation between species haha.
But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]
It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.
FWIW, I think @mapontosevenths is wrong to say that @gojomo's mention of the honorary degrees and being an OOC was "like they're a bad thing" ... their "But it's hard ..." indicates a conflict between those "credentials" and the typo that gojomo makes way too much a deal of.
> I think readers should take this as an illustrative example of how often people/institutions draped in such quasi-credentials are carelessly wrong on basic things.
and
> how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?
I, OTOH, sent them a note and they quickly fixed the article. Errors like this "persist for months" simply because no one takes the time for such a simple action when they encounter an error ... I'm the only person among those who commented here who did so. And no, of course no one at the CBC or anywhere else spends their time rereading their months-old articles to see if some error made its way in.
Even if some typo of 'malevolent' becoming 'benevolent' was how this error initially created – & I have my doubts! – how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?
If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.
But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?
Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.
They could even already have invaded in the past, and we descended of them[1]. Earth as Mars ancient lifeboat[2].
NASA doesn't want to find life on Mars. They want to find evidence, so that the next probe can be more complex and more expensive than the previous one.
NASA will never send wet microscope to Mars, you know, the kind you used in school to show bacteria in dirty water. As that would instantly prove life on Mars and make ever more expensive probes hard to justify.
The other reason is planetary protection. The best places to send a microscope are low lying areas where there may be brines near the surface. Those specific areas have been designated high on the list of protection sites. Earth microbes are really resilient, so even with intense sterilization procedures we can't be 100% sure. We don't want to contaminate the most valuable scientific find ever, and so we're approaching it carefully.
But I think the first reason I gave is the most significant one. It's technically pretty hard and not definitive. The surface of Mars is probably mostly sterile even if there is life. If it survives, it's probably underground.
I also disagree that NASA would not want to find life. If anything, finding life would make their budget explode. They could suddenly make a strong case for a Europa submersible, a submarine to visit Titan's methane lakes, huge space-based SETI radio telescope arrays, huge space telescopes to try to find more exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres, all kinds of things, since we'd know for a fact there's life out there.
If life emerged in two places in one solar system, we'd know that the universe is teeming with it. Maybe not complex intelligent life -- there's still reasons to think Earth may be kind of special for that. But life, certainly.
I suspect that NASA knows this full well, as do Mars scientists, and I suspect that they are being very careful to make sure that definitive proof does not appear until they understand all sorts of other stuff about the planet.
"Why are we not spending that money on more social housing?" : Because this is the greatest mystery of our time... (nods all round)
"Why are we doing science?": I don't know and I don't care, cut my taxes! (Cheering and mocking comments about nerds.)
Conspiracies that NASA already found alien life and is suppressing it to continue funding.
Or you know the far more likely case:
No one has ever found any evidence of life anywhere and exaggerating tiny findings adjacent to it keep funding flowing.
No it couldn’t be that.
What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
Even the rusty coloured surface of Mars may be due, in part, to organic oxidisation processes.
We aren't talking about Richard Hoagland style cities here (although that Face on Mars is a lot less easy to explain away that some people claim).
I've always found it an extremely weird formation. I suppose it has been explained by frost shattering and ancient floods. If an ancient race were to leave sculpture behind, millions of years would obliterate most of it. Some people have said that probes should be sent to Cydonia. I hope they send some kind of flying probes round there, since the geology alone makes it of interest, and landers/orbiters may not get it.
As for the Old Man of Hoy, that is something different. Old Man (or Bodach in Gaelic speaking areas) was used for a lot of natural pillars and stacks, standing stones and phallic formations. Occasionally for mountains. Old Man/Bodach is/was a euphemism for the Devil who was said to have created many of these things, and that goes way back before the Old Man of Hoy.
In Gaelic, it takes on a phallic quality: "Bod" means "penis" and "bodach" means "old man". Orkney was never Gaelic speaking as such, but in Gaelic the euphemism is more obvious. This usage carried over there and the Old Man of Hoy probably gets that name because it is tall and thin. Maybe the Picts had such notions too.
/S
>>What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
>>If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
>>Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
So... you tell me. Why no experiment? Not one in 50 years?
In the meantime we've learned a lot about the Martian atmosphere, it's climate, it's history, it's geology, the evolution of it's surface. I would argue that if a Viking 3 had flown with a revised kit that produced a definitive signal we wouldn't have got any of that.
To imply there would be a conspiracy to cover up such discoveries because you think the opposite would happen is such an odd way to think about things.
Citation needed
> NASA will never
Citation needed
I think there has been evidence of life in the Venusian atmosphere since the 80s and on/in Mars since the 70s.
The public believe we should be looking for cities and skeletons, when in fact we should be looking for extremophiles. It is possible that some of these are due to cross-contamination within the solar system (before human intervention), but that is another matter.
However, I think the bulk of life on Mars – if it exists – is probably underground. Conditions there are much less hostile than the immediate surface. Since Viking, we continue to find Earth life in extreme environments including high altitudes and deep underground. Microbes can be much tougher than animals.
However, we have found life in some very hostile environments on Earth, notably high up in the atmosphere. Planococcus halocryophilus can exist on Earth at -20' C, well within Martian surface temperature ranges, and is tolerant of very salty water. Microbes need a fraction of the resources we do, and some can exist in very small numbers for long periods before better conditions come along. Surface temperatures on Mars have been observed to go over 20' C during the day in some places which may allow for some warmth to penetrate rock and dust. A very hostile environment, to be sure.
It also doesn't make sense from any kind of financial perspective. The budget for NASA would explode for all kinds of missions. They would have free reign to go wherever and do anything.
The discovery team would instantly create brand new fields of study and career paths, and anyone on the team that discovered life would become experts in the field with unlimited investment opportunities to continue their research.