Viking found life on Mars! (well, maybe)

It is still a very premature finding, and the technique which was used is unproven; but still, this is interesting.

Basically, they took the results of the old Viking experiment (the one which measured CO 2 production after adding water to Martian soil) and reexamined them with new statistical techniques, looking for signs of regularity of the sort which is associated to biological life on Earth (no, I am not entirely sure of what that means. The article can be found here, if you are interested, but I have not read it yet).

It's way early to know if this result is valid, and even in the most optimistic interpretation it would not be certain proof, I think; but still, that's cool.

edited 13th Apr '12 9:00:36 AM by Carciofus

This is the crux of their conclusion (from page 15):

"We now report a new methodological approach to these data, complexity analysis. Due to the high order present in biological systems [11] , time series of biological variables, with their short- and long-range correlations, scale-invariance, complex periodic cycles, quasi-periodicities, positive and inverse “memory” and the like, exhibit behaviours that are different from the complete unpredictability of pure random physical processes (white noise). Moreover, they are also distinguishable from the trivially smooth landscape of a completely predictable deterministic process, often manifesting themselves with flicker (pink) noise (temporal scale statistical invariance) [12, 13]. We have now found that a set of complexity measures (appendix#1 for definition) unambiguously distinguishes the active LR experiments, or portions thereof, from various abiotic controls (p<0.001). These measures very strongly suggest, in agreement with terrestrial analyses, that the active LR experiments in all likelihood detected microbial life on Mars."

Here are the sources they are relying on for their claim that biological processes can be distinguised from non-biological ones using complexity:

[11] Ross, J., and Arkin, A.P., “ Complex systems: from chemistry to system biology”, Proceedings National Academy Of Science, Vol. 106, 2009, pp. 6433-6434.

[12] Mosconi, F., Julou, T., Desprat, N., Sinha, D.K., Allemand, J.F., Croquette, V., and Bensimon, D., “Some nonlinear challenges in biology”, Nonlinearity, Vol. 21, 2008, T131-T147.

[13] Gisiger, T., “Scale invariance in biology: coincidence or footprint of a universal mechanism?”, Biological Reviews, Vol. 76, 2001, pp. 161-209.

Unfortunately, without reading the sources, it is impossible to evaluate their claim.

The problem is with the (well, maybe). I don't think this is the first time a (well, maybe) has occurred, so I'm reserving excitement for the (yes, definitely!)

I am skeptical about anyone talking about "biological complexity" as that sends up warning flags of intelligent design in my head.

Can we use this thread as a source?

SPACE VIKINGS FOUND ON MARS; EARTH IS NEXT TARGET FOR THEIR UNSTOPPABLE CONQUEST!

How so?

A couple of their catchphrases ('irreducible complexity', 'biological information', 'organizing principles') sound very similar.

You can relax about that, this is light-years from any sort of intelligent design. This is more likely to be more along the lines of the "scientist" character in Jurassic Park- "Chaos Theory! Chaos Theory!" although I'm not really competent enough to pass judgement.

I don't think it's as out-there as either; the TL,DR version is pretty much "There's too much of a pattern for it to be coincidence, but not enough of a pattern for it to be a simple chemical reaction", isn't it?

edited 13th Apr '12 6:55:47 PM by RTaco

That's right, they compared it to known non-biological processes and found that the Viking data is statistically more similar to a biological one.

Based on the quote in the OP, I think the reasoning and the conclusion sound ... well, sound.

I have the impression that the idea that life on Earth originated from Mars or spread to Mars at some point has recently been growing in prominence among astrologists. If that's true, this finding is just part of that pattern, probably. I think it's more likely that Martian life would be related to us than that life emerged twice in the same star system.

As for Intelligent Design, this has none of that. First of all, most Intelligent Design proponents are closet (or open) Creationists, and almost invariably they turn out to support the idea that the Earth was designed for humans and that there is no life elsewhere. (Watch some ID debates in You Tube and they'll usually let this stuff slip towards the end, when they hope the other side won't remark on it.)

The ID crowds are always going on about how complex life is, but no sane biologist would ever try to deny that. The dispute is about whether or not life is too complex to have arisen from natural processes. The claim that life tends to be more complex than non-life is not at all controversial; it's just that scientists know what makes it possible for these complex systems to emerge despite the general trend of the universe being towards chaos.

(If you're wondering why life can create complexity, it's because life gets energy from the sun, and besides, life doesn't prevent entropy from growing, it just slows it down a bit because it adds steps to the process by which the energy from the sun is lost. Go forward a few billion years and it will not have mattered at all, as all the energy that was ever caught by plant matter will have been lost along with the Earth.)

ID proponents tend to argue that if entropy must grow, then any system that increases complexity is a violation of the laws of nature and thus a miracle and thus we're all God's sheep. This is based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but ID proponents don't realise that the Second Law applies to closed systems, which the Earth is not because it gets stuff (most notably energy) from outside.

I think you mean "astronomers". Astrologists are the guys who write horoscopes.

Yes, the ones is a respectable group of scientists, the others just waste money. Like with NASA.

edited 14th Apr '12 4:17:05 AM by Octo

It's like if you had two guys standing next to each other, shooting at two other guys 200 yards away. There's one guy shooting with a pistol with six rounds and another guy with an assault rifle with 30 rounds and you're saying "Well, if the guy with the pistol was able to shoot his target then I think it's more likely that the guy with the pistol hit both targets rather than the guy with the assault rifle was also able to hit his target." To really evaluate it, there are several unsupported assumptions in your statement about the probabilities of certain events that really we just don't know. I could probably extend the analogy to actually make those assumptions fit points about the scenario but I don't think we want to here an overextended metaphor about cowboys.

Astrologists... I can't believe I made that mistake!

You guys familiar with the concept of "brain fart?" ...Yeah.

EDIT: So I went and actually looked up that term and it doesn't mean exactly this kind of brain failure, but is instead used to refer to a failure to complete a task that is usually routine or a very bad error in judgement. What happened to me was just some general type of brain failure.

Often when I tell people I'm into astronomy the first reaction is "you really believe that the positions of constellations determine your destiny?" and I of course correct them and point out that astronomy is a science, while astrology is woo woo.

And then I go and make that mistake myself.

Shame.

edited 14th Apr '12 4:53:06 PM by BestOf

Is it that common? I'd have guessed that people who know astrology's place tend to be smart enough not to mistake it for astronomy and vice versa.

Please tell me I'm not the only one to read the title of the thread as

Well the words are similar.

I sometimes mistake one actor for another if they have a similar name. The same goes for singers and bands and whatnot. I'm fairly sure that this is very common.

Mura, I admit that my mind wandered in that direction when I first saw the thread title in the OTC index. Maybe we'll have Space Pirates too, one day.

(Because pirates are Viking 2.0. )

BestOf: No, that's an early warning sign of a brain tumor. If it's been going on for a long time, though, it has probably already metastasized.

edited 14th Apr '12 8:56:32 PM by Muramasan13

Actually, back in the day, "astrology" used to mean both, with the sensible kind being natural astrology and the less sensible kind being something like predictive astrology. The term astronomy only started showing up to distinguish the two in the late 1500s and didn't totally eclipse natural astronomy until the 1800s.

"And Knowing Is Half the Battle."

</dictionary_recitation_mode>

Yeah. Tycho Brahe worked as the royal astrologist for the Holy Roman Emperor. Mostly, he used that as an excuse to get paid to chart the heavens; but still, he did have to prepare horoscopes and so on (I'm unclear if he personally believed in that stuff, though).

edited 15th Apr '12 1:13:03 AM by Carciofus

I am fairly certain that he did, most people did at the time and being a scientist didn't really make much of a difference. I've heard it claimed that the main reason he did the precise observations of the sky was to get better horoscopes, but the source on that doesn't seem that well-founded. Anyways, perhaps ironically, almost all the big names of the renaissance and early science were also big on astrology, alchemy and esotericism .

As for the actual topic, that's pretty cool. The statistical comparison method sounds kind of interesting too.

edited 15th Apr '12 5:56:31 AM by Mathias

Mura: No you're not. Which would be cool. And odd considering there's no oceans or seas on Mars. Maybe they would be Land Vikings like the Riders of Rohan.

Luckily the Moon has seas.