

 Oregon geologist says Curiosity's images show Earth-like soils on Mars - 3rd3
http://uonews.uoregon.edu/archive/news-release/2014/7/oregon-geologist-says-curiositys-images-show-earth-soils-mars

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sixQuarks
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?

~~~
dalke
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Possible_biosignatures)
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.

~~~
themartorana
"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.

~~~
dalke
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](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.

