Life on Mars found – in 1976 The USA’s Viking mission found life on Mars, says a new paper that has re-analysed data collected by the two probes. Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments (PDF), published yesterday in the International Journal of Aeronautic and Space Sciences, asserts that a test designed to detect microbial life did …
The presence of pink noise is not a proof of life. Many physical processes (including life, in my book at least) produce forms of pink noise. If a white noise random source is effectively filtered by some damping process you will typically get similar effects.
If they were really sure of their results, would they not submit this to Nature or Science? I will read the article more carefully, but I have my doubts.
All physical processes produce pink noise, in fact - perfectly flat all-spectrum white noise doesn't exist. Presumably this is some specific shape of pink noise that requires life to produce. I didn't read the paper yet.
Still, the results of the original experiment have perhaps been unfairly discredited. The device gave a positive result as designed - it detected life on Mars. It's only because the other two failed that the announcement was made that no life was detected on Mars. It's good that they're going back to try to get more data from the original signals; maybe they can finally resolve it one way or another.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistical analysis.
It does smack a bit of wanting to find a particular answer and finding a way to arrive at that answer. You could probably apply the same techniques to stock market data and prove the LSE is sentient.
Oh, I think you will find that that system/the stock market system is brain dead and relies for artificial survival on dodgy quants and mickey mouse, pie in the sky algorithms which are divorced from any physical reality….. which is why they are collapsing in uncovered ponzi trading scandals and wanton malpractices, Arkasha. Those masters of the universe who were touted as being in control of everything …… well, they have been proven to be cheap fraudsters and snake oil salesmen of the first degree.
And can you imagine the breadth of all the tools who were fooled by them, proving beyond shadow of any doubt, that intelligence in wider fields and attendant systems is also missing to a crippling degree.
All of which does make IT a very fertile ground for stealthy zeroday vulnerability exploitation by smarter beings with Super IntelAIgent Systems of Creative Communication.
And it is a proven and indisputeable fact that even whenever the evidence is presented in simple writing before ones very eyes, does the more primitive human brain fail to register the significance of the ESPecially provided in plain text information/instruction/edutainment/knowledge/intelligence, and thus is Man overtaken and taken over by Future Events and Foreign Entities which are surely clearly alien to them.
Isn't that correct, El Reg?
Re: amanfrommars 1
Arthur C Clarke's 1961 "Dial F For Frankenstein", about the world wide network of telephone exchanges achieving conciousness.
Alfred Bester's 1975 novel The Computer Connection, A.K.A. Extro. Same sorta thing, but with computer networks. And time travel and immortals, bizarrely.
William Gibson's Neuromancer. Ditto. But with Rastafarians in space (to keep the Babylon away from their hydroponics)
Ghost in the Shell, feature-length anime. Ditto. But with walking tanks and invisibility cloaks.
Iain M Bank's Feersum Enjinn, though the construct appears designed, rather than emergent. Contains steam locomotives and talking ants.
..."blah blah blah".
I am reminded of the complaint against parapsychologists: they never design simple experiments that will conclusively prove the existence of mind reading or whatever. It is always intentionally overcomplicated experiments that leave open other interpretations.
On the side of alien life on Mars, we have this waffle. On the other hand, we have the fact that there is no other evidence of life on Mars whatsoever.
<blockquote>There's lIfe on Mars!?
And what did we do?
We sent a Viking as a representative! .... Winkypop Posted Friday 13th April 2012 08:54 GMT </blockquote>
And with a virtually full set of danegeld instructions too*, to facilitate and ameliorate quite radical change in exchanges that require no troubles that cannot be handled by any regular and conventional means and traditional memes, was it in one sense a most expensive folly and/or in another sense, a most welcome extraterrestrial union/fleeting liaison, with far-reaching out of this world consequences/possibilities/opportunities, which you cannot say have not been diligently El Registered in preparation for AI and a quantum leap advance with fabulous revelations about the true nature of virtual reality with IT and media programs supporting and realising its myriad metadatamorphs ...... Global Picture Shows.
* .... http://www.ur2die4.com/?p=2046 .... Trick or Treat?
As far as I remember from some documentary (BBC The Planets series, REALLY good) they ran various experiments and were able to show that the reactions were not biological in nature. Now some group 're-analyse' the data and come to a different conclusion backed up by a load of waffle? Colour me unimpressed.
I have no doubt though that life of some form or other did exist on Mars millions of years ago and it is perfectly possible that some microbial life still exists (extremeophiles sp?) but we genuinely won't know that for sure until a human geologist goes there and looks.
I have a similar hazy memory of a Horizon (I think) sometime in the 80's, where the guy who designed at least one of those experiments on Viking stated they were mostly useless: the sample size was tiny, only touched the surface and assumed that all life was similar to that found here on the surface of earth.
Heck, it was only made unavailable a couple of days ago, but the BBC Horizon Guide to Mars (a clip show assembled from Horizon Mars episodes of the decades) was on iPlayer last week. Probably on a well known video site, if your scruples will allow you to watch it.
Whilst you're there, check out "To Mars by A Bomb", a BBC doc about the Orion Project (or even better, buy the book). What happens when you take some ex-Manhattan Project physicists and a former Czech resistance fighter come plastic-explosives expert, with a view to blasting a sodding big ship into orbit by dropping nuclear bombs behind it - at a rate of four every second. Freeman Dyson concludes that public perception of mad scientists might have grain of truth.
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So these microbes made it to Mars while LOHAN is still stuck on the launchpad. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Disappointing.
I personally think we can save us some money by waiting for aliens to visit us instead of us visiting them (like the Martians are doing it now). That way we can confirm the existence of ET's without leaving the comfort of our armchairs.
They have found evidence that there may be life on Mars. This is akin to the difference between finding an elephant and finding something that looks for all the world like elephant footprints.
Personally, I think it is plausible and possibly likely that there is residual bacterial life on Mars. Given that chunks get blasted off both Mars and Earth by meteoritic impacts and land on the other (cf. martian meteorites found in the Antarctic), and that certain microbes can survive hard vacuum and/or radiation, it seems quite feasible that microbes from Earth could have, at some point, been transferred naturally to Mars and survived. I doubt that they would thrive so well, but they could tick over. Life fills every niche on this planet, if it could reach it, and there is a niche for it, it will be there on Mars too, and indeed, other places in the solar system. The key points are, of course, the niche and the means of reaching it.
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