As we all know, now that the trivial and relatively uninteresting business of mere engineering has cleared a hurdle, Mars Curiosity can get to work on the important stuff: finding evidence of biology on Mars. This is where it’s also going to get peculiarly controversial, because some creationists are feeling a bit threatened: there is a subset of creationists (definitely not all of them!) who are convinced that there can be no other life elsewhere in the universe. There’s also a weird subset that believes there may be intelligent life elsewhere, but it must believe in the Christian god, and these alien worlds must have been visited by an incarnation of Jesus…but let’s not get that deep in the bizarre yet.
Because this is bizarre enough. Faye Flam got an angry letter from a creationist who is upset at all the money wasted on Mars Curiosity, because it’s absurd to consider the idea that life may have arisen somewhere where a god didn’t put it.
Her answer is excellent, you should go read it. Although, sad to say, it’s not true that her correspondent is from some strange dimension…he’s pretty typically from our tiny corner of this galaxy.
Indeed, why do any science, or even engineering, with the unfathomable whims of God interfering in earthly business? Seriously, what reason could magic believers have for doing science?
Oh, except that no one has ever seen such intervention, thus it doesn’t happen now in all but the most extraordinary circumstances–yet in the past it was wholesale and overwhelming. Because that’s what magic texts say.
How is that not a sensible “worldview”?
Glen Davidson
A cartoonist named Tom Tomorrow (real name Dan Perkins) once wrote of similar arguments: “You just can’t argue with logic like that.” Good thing that Faye Flam didn’t try. Any straight answer would have taken the bait.
I just heard a slightly nervous JPL worker interviewed on “The Bottom Line” on a Christian radio station as he explained that Curiosity was an exciting investigation into the possibility of life on another planet and whether we were alone in the universe. Since the hosts of this particular program are more interested in current affairs and politics (though from a “Biblical Worldview,” of course) rather than direct evangelization, they were content to go “ooh” and “ahh.” I’m sure that most Christian broadcasters will instead be whining about all those heathen scientists. And blathering about God’s “miraculous” creation.
How else could Curiosity have do this?
seemingly miraculously it worked.
5 minute video
Curiosity’s 7 Minutes Of Terror
sorry, I didn’t know the actual video would show.
Tried just linking.
And I’m comforted to know that billions are being spent building new mega-churches. The number of churches being built within a few miles of my house is mind-numbing. Every day I drive past a new mega-church going up that must be costing tens of millions of dollars. I’m sure God appreciates that you will be able to worship him with a spanking new bowling alley and state of the art sound system instead of spending money on scientific research that might benefit everyone.
The entire endeavor was predicated upon the absolute absence of miracles. Every one of 100,000 minute course adjustments had to proceed according to the exact equations created decades ago and experimintally confirmed millions of times since. Masses of objects had to be the same, coefficients of friction, electrical potentials of semiconductor materials, thermal transmissivity of various elements, ballistic orbital paths…
If some interfering supernatural entity had started monkeying around with the laws of physics in even the most subtle ways, the entire plan would have come apart. Fortunately, nope, the laws of physics just went ahead and worked exactly as they always do. If there were a god, we’d owe it our thanks for not trying to lend a hand.
I’m even more curious now…
I don’t know if this is a case of life coming close to imitating art, but I recall reading a SF short story as a kid (1960s!) of a group of space explorers who landed on an inhabited planet just after Jesus had done his resurrection bit. They were all bummed that they’d missed it. The moral of the story, assuming there was one, was that they’d already had their turn at the trough and they couldn’t have seconds. Of course, they took off determine to catch the show on the next planet. It seems god had a schedule to keep. I wish I could remember the author, but it was a long time ago.
And then there’s the very real possibility that if we ever did meet advanced aliens there would be those among us who would wave bibles under their noses (gills? probosci? mandibles? suckers?) and attempt to convert them. That would be worth seeing. How would that conversation go? I kind of hope they are telepathic. Do telepathic aliens laugh?
joed: The ‘miracle’ of long, hard, methodological work and attention to detail?
But yeah, you have to wonder how on earth the sky crane design won over the more obvious rover-on-top-of-descent-stage design.
Ah, Myers, without the ‘…uninteresting business of mere engineering…..’ there would be no ‘finding evidence of biology on Mars.’ or any other extraterrestrial body, nor any future potential for avoidance of catastrophic asteroid/comet collision, potential distant future colonization of planets, asteroid mining, terraforming, etc., etc.
Please don’t demean the creative sibling of pure science as bothersome necessity or mere backround noise.
Rasmus,
They didn’t want the rocket motors kicking up a huge dust storm. They were concerned this would get grit into some critical joint or seam and damage the rover at the last second. Hence, they went with a design that kept the rockets at a relatively disturbance-free minimum altitude.
Even scarier thought for them: What if we find aliens on another planet who never munched on that apple? No Fall. No Original Sin. No alien Jesus. No missionaries needed.
Though I doubt that the fundies would ever accept that. They would never believe that any intelligent life exists that is not in need of their god bothering…
Personally, I doubt life exists on Mars. But I wouldn’t mind being proved wrong. You never know, there may be some ancient Earthling lithotrophs.
That being said, I still see no reason why we can’t study the geology and climatology of the little red guy.
I know, I saw the video. But there are other ways to protect stuff from dust… The sky crane must have been the best solution for this particular configuration.
When people say it cost 2.5 billion, doesn’t that money mean a lot of good jobs for a lot of people? That money can’t just vanish to never be seen again, right?
Curiosity will explore the geological layers of Mount Sharp, which were deposited by Noah’s Flood a few thousand years ago. (/snark)
This picture of Mount Sharp is impressive, for those who haven’t seen it.
I’m not sure that the whole sky crane landing is the most impressive aspect, rather the tight landing oval could be the greatest gain in landing capabilities. They’d thought of putting an earlier rover (Spirit or Opportunity) at Gale Crater (it appears very interesting geologically, possibly biologically), but they couldn’t count on it not “landing” on the side of Mount Sharp, presumably to roll down spectacularly, if uselessly and without anyone able to see.
Glen Davidson
I was wondering what epic level of anti-curiosity you must have to proclaim that there’s nothing interesting – or life – off the surface of the earth. The bible certainly doesn’t make any such claim! No matter how you read that creepy old tome.
Extrapolating from the Earth’s biota is tricky, but one can use physical and chemical considerations to speculate on what ET organisms are likely to have.
I’ve found an interesting paper: How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the or… [Bioessays. 2010] – PubMed – NCBI
Its author proposes that the Last Universal Common Ancestor’s energy source was not fermentation, but something that’s actually simpler: electron transfer or redox reactions, like from hydrogen to CO2. Electron-transfer energy metabolism is very common in present-day organisms, and there’s evidence that it’s ancestral: The redox protein construction kit: pre-last universal common ancestor evolution of energy-conserving enzymes.
The chemiosmotic mechanism also very common. It is pumping hydrogen ions outward across the cell membrane and then letting them return through ATP synthase complexes, where they assemble ATP molecules.
ScienceDirect.com – Trends in Biochemical Sciences – Was nitric oxide the first deep electron sink?
ScienceDirect.com – Advances in Microbial Physiology – Respiratory Transformation of Nitrous Oxide (N2O) to Dinitrogen by Bacteria and Archaea – it seems to be ancestral
There’s similar evidence for sulfur and arsenic energy metabolism also being ancestral.
This is plausible in a broader evolutionary sense, I think, because the simplest energy sources for chemistry-dependent metabolism are chemical ones, and readily-available chemical ones at that.
Curiosity is the motivation for the effort to understand.
Engineering is the means by which discoveries are made possible.
Discoveries inform and enlighten.
Enlightenment is insight into fundamental processes.
So enlightened, we can diddle and manipulate, shaping nature according to our whims.
It’s what humans do. Always have. Flint knapping, anyone? Fire making? Hide tanning? Spinning, weaving, sewing? Food preservation? Plant and animal husbandry? All required the kind of thinking that defines an engineer. Oh, yes, guys who drive trains, too.
Mega hat tips to the engineers of the Mars Science Lander! (please, do some more)
When creobots bring up this issue I always refer to the arguments of Stanislaw Lem in his final novel, Fiasco.
1. Having a zillion habitable worlds out here without life (including intelligent life) seems a wasteful way of designing a universe.
2. If you allow intelligent aliens, will they be forced to hell because Jeebus did not save them?
3. If you let Jeebus show up in person, you get another absurdity: A million Pilates clones wahing their hands, a forest of crucified saviours and so on.
And the virgin birth is no big deal for species that in emergencies produce offspring without sexual reproduction (like several terrestrial species do).
And to bring up my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard:
What happens if Jesus shows up 65 million years early? “Chomp, chomp, (buuuurp)”.
I never understood why creationidiots refuse to even consider the idea that their imaginary friend may have made life elsewhere than here. Is there some definitive statement in the bible ? I don’t recall any.
Awesome response from Faye. What universe are creationists living in, indeed.
Serpentinization as a source of energy at the ori… [Geobiology. 2010] – PubMed – NCBI — the origin of life. That’s the reaction
2FeO + H2O -> Fe2O3 + H2
involving Fe++ to Fe+++. It requires heat, water, and crust with lots of Fe++. It happens on the Earth, and it likely happened on Mars, as its big volcanoes suggest. It’s a possible mechanism for production of methane on Mars without the involvement of organisms: Have olivine, will gas: Serpentinization and the abiogenic production of methane on Mars
One may have to go further, and test for isotope selectivity. How might nonbiological vs. biological CO2-to-methane reactions differ in C-13 or H-2 fractionation? (page on methane metabolism; includes how methanogens make methane) Some of Curiosity’s instruments are capable of detecting evidence of different isotopes – it has a gas chromatograph and mass spectrometers. So we may be able to get some clue about that.
*Sob*
*valiantly fends off temptation to press the “DELETE ALL ENGINEERING” key*
Yeah, I’m hoping it’s sarcasm, but with PZ, you never know …
lpetrich@26,
Interesting: I was arguing in an earlier “Curiosity” thread that Mars probably never had life, as there’s no clear evidence it ever had plate tectonics which, along with serpentinization, is important in the abiogenesis theory of Russell and Martin, two of the authors of the first paper you link to.
Or if Jesus Christ showed up in the late Paleozoic, he’d discover that the plants back then didn’t make fruits, and judging from his reaction to a certain fig tree, he’d be absolutely furious at them.
Let me guess – the planet Kolob is going to get farther away from Earth, and may have to move to avoid exploratory vehicles in decades and centuries to come.
dantelevel9 @ 9:
It sounds similar to, though not exactly like, the short story “The Man”, from Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man.
The anger seems misplaced. It’s my understanding that Curiosity is not designed to detect life on Mars, only to determine from the geology if life, as it exists on this planet, would have been able to exist at some time in the deep, dark past of Mars.
Does anybody know why NASA decided not to test for bacterial life? By all accounts, Curiosity is quite smart and chock full of instrumentation for various kinds of analyses.
KG@29,
That was a short story by Stanislaw Lem.
*Smacks forehead*. So THAT’S where that meddling asteroid came from! It ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
It is my understanding that NASA has judged that we do not yet know enough about what likely forms of life might be on Mars to be able to properly test for it – ie, we could test for some kinds of life, but if it turns out to be the wrong sort of life that we tested for, we might get a false negative test. And a false negative test, especially one that was hyped up before hand as a “test for life on Mars” might dampen political enthusiasm for further tests.
It is similar to the situation with the tests for life on the Viking missions. Just getting negative results form those tests resulted in a long period where the interest in even looking for life on Mars seriously waned and funding supplies dried up, even though we now know the Viking tests were not sufficiently specific to have been reliable tests.
The problem with this hypothesis is that the flowering and fruiting plants evolved in the late Jurassic/Early Cretaceous, and became actually quite common, even dominant, by the mid to late Cretaceous, so the divine retribution it seems arrived several tens of millions years late!
(Also, the asteroid hits at the end-Mesozoic, not the late-Paleozoic, unless you subscribe to the currently discredited hypothesis that another even bigger asteroid smashed in at the Permain-Triassic boundary).
Of course this degree of imprecision is rather par for the course for divine aim….
Panspermia from earth!
But it would actually be incredibly interesting to find Martian life, arising from a separate abiogenesis mechanism from that on earth (assuming Russell and Martin are on the right track). One also must consider if something similar to serpentinization (in terms of its favorability to abiogenesis) is possible with volcanic activity not directly related to plate tectonics, as Mars certainly had plenty of volcanoes.
We engineers are modest shy retiring sorts of people. We just design and build the kit, from microscopes to Large Hadron Colliders that make it possible for you scientist people to make your amazing discoveries. We’re not jealous, just buy us a beer when you win your Nobel prize.
KG @29 –
That was “The Streets of Ashkelon,” by Harry Harrison. That story always depresses me.
Harrison also wrote another one involving a UFO crash-landing in a rural area (in Russia, I think). The badly-wounded alien is accidentally poisoned–and dissolves into goo–when the locals bind its wounds with medicine-impregnated bandages. And the single artifact that survives the crash is seized and thrown into a fire by the local priest who is convinced that the alien is demonic.
Harrison’s stuff is definitely on board with the idea that religion isn’t helpful.
Serpentinization need not require continental drift to happen – it could happen with volcanoes anywhere and hot rocks in general, like what heated the water in hot springs. A good example is the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park — it’s due to the volcanism there, volcanism caused by a mantle plume that’s far from a plate boundary.
Mars has had volcanism over much of its history, if not most of it, and some of its volcanoes are remarkably lacking in impact craters, suggesting that they could have been active a few hundred million years ago.
So could Mars have subsurface hot springs? Could they be making hydrogen or methane? If they are making hydrogen, could they be supporting colonies of hydrogen-using microbes?
Stealth search (purported) for life by Curiosity’s instruments.
There are isotopic tests that Curiosity will do that should at least prove to be consistent with life, perhaps more consistent than with abiogenetic processes. Certainly it’s going to be looking for any possible carbon layers that life has produced on earth, although such layers would likely not be considered to be conclusive if found.
It is sort of looking for life, for indications of life. What isn’t certain is that any of its observations could be considered to settle the matter, but they’d hardly mind simply raising the public’s sense that life could be the cause of certain signals. And, as advanced as MSL is, it really is kind of on a scouting mission, looking for clues that other probes might (if funding allows) look into far more specifically and closely.
Glen Davidson
One of the commenters to Faye’s response nailed the letter-writer.
Curiosity also has microscopes and whatnot, so it’s not like they’re going blind. If a soil sample turns out to have weird shapes in it, we’ll look more closely. It’s just that we don’t have any specific test that would say ‘there is life!’ or ‘there can’t be life!’ since life so far is so highly variable.
Of course, I’m stating the obvious. Yet someone asked. x-x
Another thing to consider is that NASA may well be considering that the likelihood of finding actual living bacteria in the surface and near-surface samples to be low – ie they may be working with the hypothesis that the surface of Mars is sterile, with only traces of past life available to be found, if any, and any extant life on Mars would be found buried deep where current technology cannot yet reach.
Since space of instruments and experiments is a premium on these space missions, they simply decided that the chance of success was not high enough to warrant making the effort of including it this time.
Thanks to all who answered my question.
So one can expect some chemoautotrophic organisms on Mars, if any organisms are alive there now or had ever existed on that planet.
Photoautotrophic ones – photosynthesizers – have the problem of needing light to metabolize and grow, and that requires being at the surface. Mars’s surface is now too hostile for photosynthesizers, though there may have been some in the past.
On our planet, photosynthesis evolved at least twice.
Bacteriorhodopsin photosynthesis is used by some Archaea, notably Halobacteria. It works by pumping hydrogen ions out of the cell across the cell membrane. It’s an energy source only.
Chlorophyll photosynthesis is used by some Eubacteria, notably Cyanobacteria. Eukaryote chloroplasts / plastids are endosymbiotic cyanobacteria. Chlorophyll antenna complexes energize electrons, and these then go through components of the electron-transfer metabolic system that many other organisms have. Its energizing of electrons can feed them into biosynthesis reactions, like carbon-fixation ones, and it can also run electrons in loops, running chemiosmotic energy production.
So both systems are built on top of earlier energy-metabolism systems.
This suggests that photosynthesizers may have an easy time evolving on other planets, at least if they have habitable surfaces.