The article is good but the title is a bit too slippery a statement in my opinion. The article is saying more evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars. In astrobiology the massive problem is that geology can imitate biology. The presences of minerals formed by microbes on Earth does not prove microbes are involved in their production on Mars, it is a big jump to make.
We have long passed at least my owner personal "threshold of evidence" to assume that Mars had life.
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.
The bar for scientific discoveries is generally incredibly high and rightly so. In particle physics for example for a discovery to be confirmed it must be independently verified by a second experiment and both the discovering experiment and confirming experiment must be within five standard deviations (or a roughly 1 in 3.5 million) chance of not being a discovery. Its not a perfect comparison because astrobiology is messier but it is useful to see how high the bar is.
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.
Mineral that can be only formed by life, or under special conditions when water flows over rock, has been found on Mars, where water had been known to flow over rock.
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.
Tangential, but really looking forward to what Europa Clipper[0] finds in its flybys.
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.
Viking 1 & 2 returned positive results in the seventies but these have been played down or hand waved. I think there is good evidence of microbial life in the soil or underground. We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.
It's a touchy subject because scientists are afraid of looking like cranks. Just like cognition in other nonhuman species was historically dismissed because no one wants to be seen as someone who think plants talk to each other
I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.
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'.
It was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?
Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".
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?
I got so caught up in that phrase I went rereading the plot summary of WOTW to check my memory. After than I had no interest in the article, assuming it had been written by AI.
It's hard to take seriously someone who dismisses the (factually correct) content of a popular science article just because of a typo that has no bearing on that content.
It would not be surprising if ancient life did exist on Mars, since impacts would likely have sent life back and forth between Earth and Mars (and possibly Venus).
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.
We all came from Mars, don't you know it? There was a series of "extreme weather events" and we had to escape. Now there is some guy dreaming to get back home. /s
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] threadThat 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.
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 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.
[0]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/
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'.
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.
I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.
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.