26May/0811
Phoenix
The NASA Phoenix Mars lander, aiming for a polar landing with probably the best chance so far of detecting Martian life, is about to hit reentry in the next half hour. I'm watching live on NASA TV.
I love living in the future.
Edit: And it landed just fine.
May 26th, 2008 - 18:12
Looks like a low maintenance place.
June 3rd, 2008 - 14:08
I offer you a 1000 Dollars for 1 cell of Martian life.
June 3rd, 2008 - 17:49
Watching NASA TV! How come none of these guys look like Forrest?
June 3rd, 2008 - 18:03
“Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far”………Some day!…….Thanks for the Link.
June 3rd, 2008 - 19:16
“I offer you a 1000 Dollars for 1 cell of Martian life. ”
I think NASA would consider a genuine Martian cell to be worth a fair bit more than that; probably in the low billions of US$. Not trillions; only the Iraq war has that kind of money to toss around. But the NASA budget would run to billions, at about $100 million or so – the cost of a medium-size blockbuster movie – for each cheap probe. Finding proof of extraterrestrial organic life would pretty much in a stroke justify the whole robotic probe program from Mariner/Viking on and assure a lot of future funding (especially from the bioscience industry looking for gene patents).
Scientists are kind of divided as to exactly what the odds of finding alien life are, really. We only have one data point so far: Earth. Hard to extrapolate from that to ‘every planet has life’ or ‘Earth is absolutely alone in the physical universe’. Either is a big claim and you could make valid scientific and religious arguments for either.
At the moment, as nothing but an interested bystander, I think there are probably three possible broad outcomes for Phoenix:
1. Phoenix finds no proof of organic life either in viable forms or fossils or skeletons or byproducts. This is probably the most likely scenario: Phoenix is a non-movable probe, not a rover, so it can only drill in one tiny spot. If life on Mars exists but is rare, then the odds are that we won’t find it for a while.
The fact that Mars does not appear at first glance to be teeming with wildlife or vegetation and that it doesn’t have much of an atmosphere or hydrosphere suggests that the isn’t much of a biosphere there right now. However, if life did exist in the past, it might have been prolific – life tends to spread, after all – so maybe chances are good that there are frozen bacteria or spores all through the ice fields where Phoenix is.
(And initial photos suggest that Phoenix might be sitting right on top of a big chunk of ice – if so, that’s great. Where there’s water, there might be frozen critters.)
If Phoenix doesn’t find anything at all over the course of its mission, it could be that Mars has no life at all, which would be very sad for Mars, but better news for future space colonists who won’t have to worry about protecting the native wildlife when they mine for water. But it will probably be way too soon to make the judgement call ‘okay, you can start polluting Mars with Earth bacteria now’ for several years.
2. Phoenix finds Earth-like life: that is, carbon-based, cellular critters based on DNA compatible with ours. That would be a huge find; it would suggest that all planets in this universe are connected and that life is everywhere much the same. The next thing would be to DNA-sequence that critter and be exceedingly careful about how we handle future sample-return missions, because who knows what ancient fauna could be lurking in Martian soil that might like Earth conditions just fine.
3. Phoenix finds something life-like (feeding, reacting, replicating) but not based on DNA as we know it. Most likely carbon-based since that’s probably what its experiments are calibrated for (we have no examples of silicon-based life though it’s been theorised as maybe-possible). This would also be huge because, yay, whole new form of life! We’d also want to be darn careful about the place, but maybe not quite as careful as if we found DNA-based life, because maybe it won’t be able to infect us directly. However, maybe it could react in unpredictable ways, so I’d expect at least initially our quarantine procedures to be just as strict.
I’d really love there to be life, but I’m kind of expecting a null result to be the most likely one, since it’s what we’ve seen all the way so far.
June 3rd, 2008 - 21:33
I did not want to buy it. I’d be grateful if they left up there whatever they find.
June 3rd, 2008 - 22:09
Trying to be Christianly correct I attempted to avoid the word “bet”.
June 4th, 2008 - 09:59
I hope Mars will get over its sadness!……..But what religious arguments are there for life anywhere besides earth?
June 6th, 2008 - 15:22
It is amazing that 1.8 kms can be further away than 18.000
June 21st, 2008 - 01:09
“But what religious arguments are there for life anywhere besides earth?”
1. God is a Creator
2. The universe is big.
There are an awful lot of stars out there, and for all of them to be sterile and empty seems like a contradiction of God’s creative nature as we understand it from the Jewish and Christian traditions.
3. ‘Heaven’ is full of life, not empty, and non-human beings such as ‘angels’ exist
This is a little more problematic. While ‘heaven’ and ‘the sky’ are literally equivalent, the Jewish/Christian idea of ‘heaven’ also has overtones more like a different realm of being than the mere extent of physical space. So it is conceivable that if life does exist in the vastness of the heavens that it is not necessarily physical life as we understand it.
The major non-religious scientific argument, which possibly Jewish/Christian religion might not accept, is:
3. The Earth is not special in any way; therefore conditions that caused life here should cause life in many other star systems.
The ‘we are not special’ assumption – on which Newtonian and insteinian physics is based (also known as the ‘principle of relativity’) could be considered to be denied by the Genesis 1 account of creation (assuming that it’s entirely literal and talking about the Earth as a physical planet, though obviously the reference to ‘days’ cannot be talking about the rotation of the Earth before the Earth is created). It could also be considered to be denied by the doctrine of the Incarnation: if the Son of God is a human from Earth, and there’s only one of him, then humans and Earth are in fact special.
‘Special’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘alone’, however.
(And there are perhaps other theological points of view, compatible with orthodox Christianity, about exactly what ‘specialness’ means given an infinite Father who loves all his creations infinitely.)
June 22nd, 2008 - 18:00
My argument against would be: If acc. to John 1:3 “all things came into being through Him….”He would have known what was created through Him, but He did not mention a word about (physical) life outside of Earth. I’m sure people then were wondering about that subject as much as they are now and would have asked……..God is a very creative Creator, but His period of creativity lasted for only 6 days (however long these days were). On the 7th He rested and has not created anything since. So He is not compulsively creating. Next time we see Him do something creative, it will be a touch up on what has been done already, if I understand things correctly.