Author Topic: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?  (Read 12635 times)

Offline Mr. Scott

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« Last Edit: 04/02/2023 07:23 am by Mr. Scott »

Offline JH

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #1 on: 04/01/2015 11:50 pm »
Whoa, boy!

Organics != Life
« Last Edit: 04/02/2015 12:04 am by JH »

Offline gosnold

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #2 on: 04/02/2015 06:24 pm »
Well perhaps... however, it is necessary and sufficient that one needs organics to have life.  I
It is certainly not sufficient, and we do no know if it is necessary.

Offline NovaSilisko

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #3 on: 04/02/2015 06:58 pm »
Once again, "Organic" materials means stuff that's carbon-based. Not anything alive. The word has unfortunate terrestrial connotations though that make people get a bit excited.

Offline JasonAW3

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #4 on: 04/02/2015 07:44 pm »
     Actually, "Organics" indicates the chemical signatures of organic chemistry, but not necesscerily "Life" itself.  With that in mind, some of the chemistry from Io could be classified as "organics" as well.
My God!  It's full of universes!

Offline Robert Thompson

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Offline high road

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #6 on: 04/03/2015 08:20 am »
He's asking about the basics about the search of life...

The first thing you need to know that theory is always miles ahead of practice. The general idea is to look for organics, but we still have to do much of the basic research. There are models of alternative forms of biochemistry, but as far as I know, these haven't been translated into proposals of instruments to detect those life forms with. There are ideas about non-chemical based forms of life, but those remain in the realm of metaphysics and scifi until they are translated into models and measurable variables.

Second: the search for life covers a lot of completely different research projects. The search for life on Mars requires a completely different approach than the search for life in the moons of the gas giants. And figuring out the variables of the Drake equation requires yet another approach. There is no one central goal or roadmap to find life. Each project has to get funding individually.

Offline Robert Thompson

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #7 on: 04/03/2015 08:41 pm »
Goddard:
Carbonaceous meteorites contain a wide range of extraterrestrial nucleobases
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/34/13995.short

Ames:
Mechanisms of Amino Acid Formation in Interstellar Ice Analogs
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/660/1/911

Ames:
Meteoritic Sugar Derivatives: Enantiomer Excesses and Laboratory Attempts at Duplication
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015LPI....46.2993C

(Harvard:
Rotational Spectra of Nucleobases
http://www.isa.au.dk/meetings/alma06/talks/Wednesday/session9/Br%C3%BCnken.pdf

General questions:
What's the complete inventory of organic molecules available in the AGB dust envelope, planetary nebula, ISM, molecular clouds, ice grains, or circumstellar disks so that earth laboratories and supercomputers can synthesize or model nucleobases and amino acids in greater than chemical equilibrium quantities.
How did earth biology come to adopt left handed amino acids and right handed sugars.
Are there abiogenic causes to amino acid homochirality.)

Offline hop

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #8 on: 04/04/2015 05:01 am »
Ok.  In other words... Any claim that life has been discovered in space will obviously be scrutinized and vetted beyond any possibility of it being substantiated.  The burden of proof is too significant for a small branch of NASA to be able to communicate with much credibility from the larger academic community.  no sensor data will ever be sufficient even if it was produced by a manned crew on any object in the solar system.
This is a really bizarre statement. The acceptance of a particular result would depend on the specific data obtained. If they did find something that looked like life but wasn't completely convincing, followup missions would be designed specifically to fill resolve the open questions.
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So if NASAs purpose is to find life, why not solely focus on archeological data on Earth rather than wasting time and treasure on Mars, asteroids, moons of Jupiter etc.?
???
This doesn't make any sense. NASA's "purpose" encompass much more than the search for life, and the study of ancient life on earth doesn't tell us what happened on other planets.

(and to be pedantic: Archeology is a totally different subject, you probably mean paleontology)

Offline ChrisWilson68

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #9 on: 04/04/2015 08:27 am »
So let's apply a lean six sigma approach to ensure that NASA has a 99.99966% chance of success with all of its priorities/objectives.  This way they wiil only fail 3.4 times out of 1 million attempts.

The universe doesn't work that way.  There are only certain problems that its possible to get arbitrarily close to 100% chance of success with.  You can't six-sigma your way to a time machine or faster-than-light travel, and you can't six-sigma your way to a high chance to discovering extraterrestrial life.

Offline Oli

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #10 on: 04/04/2015 12:21 pm »
It is certainly possible to detect microorganisms, at least when they are alive, and apparently also when they are dead.
« Last Edit: 04/04/2015 12:23 pm by Oli »

Offline hop

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #11 on: 04/04/2015 08:30 pm »
See chemistry is mostly a steady state condition.  Much of what is detected by NASA is only a data point at one point in time (either remotely or on a surface somewhere).  Water and organics in the solar system is just 'nice'.  Detecting life is much much harder.
Water and organics point you to places where more detailed investigations might be warranted, and the details of the environment inform what kind of investigations you can carry out.

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Life is something intrinsic to cells and molecules and is likely only apparent at a microscopic level.  NASA is just only able to measure extrinsic conditions (methane evolving from a soil sample, fossilized remains of an inconclusive looking fossil, etc.).
I really don't get what your point is in all this.

To the best of my knowledge, NASA is not currently operating any dedicated life detection missions. Viking was perhaps the closest they ever did. Mars 2020 will be more life focused than Curiosity, but more on identifying likely samples than providing slam dunk evidence by itself. All of these have many other science goals, unrelated to life.

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This type of science doesn't get you anywhere if one is attempting to discover life.
This isn't correct. It is possible that Curiosity will round a corner and discover the martian equivalent of the Burgess shale. It's possible that there are some traces that will hint at possible life but require much more sophisticated investigations. It is also possible that there was never any life on Mars.

We don't know until we look, but it is clearly possible that there is past or present life in the solar system we could definitively identify.

If you are interested in how this actually happens in science, reading about investigation of early life on earth may be helpful. It generally isn't a binary yes or no, there's a spectrum from widely accepted to highly disputed and these positions evolve over time as more data is gathered.

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So my thinking is that just looking for life and its intrinsic conditions may only be possible on Earth.
That's a strange assumption. Even if you don't believe it can be done with remote sensing or in-situ instruments, sample return is clearly possible from many of the most interesting locations.

Offline Oli

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #12 on: 04/05/2015 03:21 am »

There are also chemistry-free methods for detecting life.


However, NASA pulled all the budget away from ExoMars.

It is funded and will launch in 2018.
« Last Edit: 04/05/2015 03:21 am by Oli »

Offline hop

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #13 on: 04/06/2015 06:40 am »
An AFM will only show structure of something. In order to detect life, you need to see chemistry, structure and functionality of a cell/organism.  This would require watching the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) occurring in a cell while on another planet/object in the solar system.
1) Not all possible scenarios require that kind of observation. As I said before, you might find something that was quite obvious in simple observations.
2) A non-definitive experiment can strongly suggest whether further investigation is warranted, and what kinds of investigations are most likely to produce definite results.
3) If a definitive detection really only can be done in an Earth based lab, you bring a sample back.

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It is too slow and too incremental.
AKA actual science. Spending a bunch of money on ultra specific life detection experiments or sample return doesn't make sense unless you've identified promising targets and shown they have at least a possibility of producing interesting results.

Offline hop

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #14 on: 04/06/2015 08:58 pm »
Let's assume I could immediately hand you about 100 samples of Mars rocks today that are on Earth.  How would you determine (with > 99% confidence) if there is something alive in them?
This is not a meaningful question. The actual experiments would depend on the details of the samples, and the result wouldn't be a general "life / no life" to some specific confidence level. The experiments you would do on rocks suspected of hosting billion year old microbial fossils would be totally different from the ones you would do on soil suspected of containing current life.

The results of early experiments would guide the subsequent ones. You might end up with something definitive like "yes, we definitely see little critters reproducing under a microscope, and they don't use the same amino acids as earth life!" or it might end up being ambiguous "these structures look like micro-fossils in ancient earth rocks and there are traces of organics, but we can't rule out non-biological sources"

Real science isn't like Star Trek where you point a scanner at some material and it says "life detected, 99% certain."

Offline SVBarnard

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #15 on: 04/29/2015 05:08 pm »
Im not an expert here but why is it so hard to put an automated microscope on Mars and take a look at a soil sample and settle this debate once and for all?

Offline SVBarnard

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #16 on: 04/30/2015 08:49 pm »
Im not an expert here but why is it so hard to put an automated microscope on Mars and take a look at a soil sample and settle this debate once and for all?

I would've thought someone would have answered this by now. Ok so how did we discover microbes in the first place? We saw them in a microscope, so someone plz explain to me why there hasn't been a microscope on Mars yet? Is it impossible to create an automated micrscope that can be operated without a human? Surely not with today's technology.

Offline ChrisWilson68

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #17 on: 04/30/2015 10:34 pm »
Im not an expert here but why is it so hard to put an automated microscope on Mars and take a look at a soil sample and settle this debate once and for all?

I would've thought someone would have answered this by now. Ok so how did we discover microbes in the first place? We saw them in a microscope, so someone plz explain to me why there hasn't been a microscope on Mars yet? Is it impossible to create an automated micrscope that can be operated without a human? Surely not with today's technology.

Putting an automated microscope on Mars and taking a soil sample does not settle the debate once and for all unless it happens to find something it can see in the sample it looks at.

It's like saying "lets settle the debate about whether the purple speckled woodpecker is extinct by taking a picture in one particular tree at one particular time".  Sure, if there happens to be a purple speckled woodpecker there right when you happen to take the picture, you've settled the debate.  But if the woodpecker is rare, it might not be there when you take the picture.  If you don't spot it in your picture, you don't know if the woodpecker is extinct.

It's also like saying, "Lets see if dinosaurs ever existed by digging in my back yard.  If I find a dinosaur fossil, then they did exist, otherwise they didn't".  Dinosaur fossils are rare.  The chances of happening to find one digging in your backyard are low.  It doesn't mean they didn't exist.

Trying to find out if life ever existed on Mars is like trying to find out if dinosaurs ever existed on Earth by sending a handful of rovers and orbiters to Earth.  Actually, it's even harder than that, because microbes on Mars might leave traces that are even harder to find.  Or they might leave traces that are easier to find.  We just don't know.

So, we look for the easier-to-find evidence first.  If we find it, we have settled the debate.  If not, we look for the next-easiest-to-find evidence.   And so on.  If we ever find the evidence, the debate is settled.  Otherwise, we keep looking for harder and harder to find evidence.

Offline ChrisWilson68

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #18 on: 04/30/2015 10:44 pm »
Well wouldn't you agree that having conclusive results from research are preferred versus those that are low confidence, and are inconclusive and inaccurate?

Some questions have experiments that can give very high confidence results.  Other questions do not.  That doesn't mean it's not worth studying the question just because it's hard to get high-confidence answers.  We can start with getting lower-confidence answers and do more experiments over time to get more confidence, based on the answers we get from the earlier experiments.

But I think you are right in one part of what you're saying. I think six sigma lean approaches/expectations for science at this level are a bit much.  I do.  Expecting accuracy of results to 3.4 errors in a million samples is unrealistic and simply not affordable.

And my loose target of having 99% confidence with 100 samples (already available) seems to be too much to ask for and might not reasonable (the science is trivial, has no result to show life exists and is too affordable).

However, asking for all the money in the world (to go to Mars) to conclude nothing is also a flawed strategy as well.

Nobody is asking for "all the money in the world".  Yes, a Mars rover is a lot of money, but the questions it is investigating are very interesting.  Just because it doesn't give a conclusive answer about whether life exists or existed on Mars doesn't mean it's flawed.

So someone from this GE six sigma camp has begun a new wave of thinking called Disciplined Experiments.  The theory is described in a book by a Dartmouth professor titled The Other Side of Innovation:  Solving the Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble

I will summarize the concept here in steps:
1.  First you define the ultimate objective (but actually the objective you come up with is bigger than the one that you likely assumed you'd start with).  The important idea is to just swing for the wall.

2.  List all of your unknowns.  Go bananas listing what you don't know.  Then rank them with higher scores if you are very uncertain and also with higher scores if the unknown is critical to your objective.  No list is too long in this regard.

3. then you define a large number of little experiments.  Don't think lean and simple.  Define tests that are quickly performed, but the sum total of them could be perceived as greater than if you'd performed this plan normally.

4. Give yourself the pleasure of doing all of this research with 1/10th or 1/100th the budget of a normal project (or whatever you thought a project was worth).  The disciplined experiment methodology will enable achievements that will feel like climbing Mt. Everest, except without having food, supplies, resources or even knowledge of what you are doing.

Once you reach the peak of the mountain having only achieved one minuscule goal out of the multiple you listed, then you get to receive the joy as someone tells you that "less is more!"  It's like having feelings of accomplishment, with toppings of ultimate ambiguity, alongside the frustration of having your leg stuck in a crevasse, wrapped around endless action item lists that have a scent of bacon! 

The only escape from this experience is to willingly eat your leg off.

That's a cute story, and that's fine for a mass audience.  But it's really not helpful for professional scientists.

Your story is really about helping non-scientists address the fact that they really have no idea what experiments to do.  They might think they do, but they're probably wrong, so this advice helps them fix that mistake.

Professional scientists don't have that problem.  They know what they're doing, and they have good reason for choosing the experiments they do.

... But I digress.  What is wrong with setting realistic objectives and doing meaningful research?

Just because you can't be sure to get a definitive answer on an important question doesn't mean an experiment that gives some data on the question is not realistic.  And it doesn't mean that experiment is not meaningful research.  It gives a piece of a puzzle.  Some questions are complex enough that they need more than a single experiment, they need many experiments giving many pieces over years or decades.

Offline StarryKnight

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #19 on: 05/02/2015 03:48 pm »
Im not an expert here but why is it so hard to put an automated microscope on Mars and take a look at a soil sample and settle this debate once and for all?

I would've thought someone would have answered this by now. Ok so how did we discover microbes in the first place? We saw them in a microscope, so someone plz explain to me why there hasn't been a microscope on Mars yet? Is it impossible to create an automated micrscope that can be operated without a human? Surely not with today's technology.

Curiosity has an instrument, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), that can image something in color with a resolution of 12.5 microns (smaller than the width of a human hair). Microscopes can get down to a finer resolution, but this is the closest to what you're asking for that has been launched so far. It's primary purpose is geological studies. But I'm sure if the investigators see a dust mite they would let someone know.  ;)

But as Chris Wilson said, as you go higher in magnification your field of view shrinks. So you need something to select promising samples and so far, even on the scale of MAHLI's resolution, nothing has been seen as a promising sample. Plus you may have to search below the surface anywhere from a few inches to meters to find what you're looking for so then the problem becomes how do you know where do you start digging. That said, having a "spacecraft" that can reach a subsurface ocean might be a useful mission to have a microscope.

Here's some links to information about MAHLI: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/cameras/mahli/
http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/MAHLI/
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Offline tea monster

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #20 on: 05/03/2015 12:02 pm »
I think that the best way of exploring for fossil life on Mars is to send some archaeologists to turn over rocks, dig up sediments and clamber around caves. Acknowledging that Congress is never going to pay for this, how likely is it to send some kind of device to the Red Planet that can scan underground for fossils, sort of like the device seen working in the film Jurassic Park?

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #21 on: 05/03/2015 04:00 pm »
I think that the best way of exploring for fossil life on Mars is to send some archaeologists to turn over rocks, dig up sediments and clamber around caves. Acknowledging that Congress is never going to pay for this, how likely is it to send some kind of device to the Red Planet that can scan underground for fossils, sort of like the device seen working in the film Jurassic Park?

The Mars 2020 rover is going to have a ground penetrating radar. However, I suspect that this is a bad way to look for evidence of past life.

There is a lot of effort and discussion about life detection instruments for Mars and other missions (like Europa), but it is some really complex stuff. It involves searching for certain chemical signatures. I'm not a microbiologist, so I don't know anything about it. You might go to the MEPAG website and look up the presentations from their most recent meeting. Chris McKay talked about this, I think. And I also think it came up at the recent OPAG meeting during a discussion of Enceladus and Europa plumes. There was even a proposal for an Enceladus Life Finder mission, although I don't think that has much in specifics.
« Last Edit: 05/03/2015 04:07 pm by Blackstar »

Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #22 on: 05/03/2015 09:07 pm »
In re microscopes on Mars, the absolutely highest resolution instrument ever landed on Mars was the atomic force microscope in the Phoenix instrument suite.  (It also had a 6X optical microscope.)

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/science_micro.php
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Implications of Water, Organics and Life Everywhere?
« Reply #23 on: 05/14/2015 08:56 pm »
I think that the best way of exploring for fossil life on Mars is to send some archaeologists to turn over rocks, dig up sediments and clamber around caves. Acknowledging that Congress is never going to pay for this, how likely is it to send some kind of device to the Red Planet that can scan underground for fossils, sort of like the device seen working in the film Jurassic Park?

The Mars 2020 rover is going to have a ground penetrating radar. However, I suspect that this is a bad way to look for evidence of past life.


Found a photo I took a few weeks ago at a presentation by the PI for the radar that will be included in the Mars 2020 rover mission.

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