NASA: Mars is good habitat for Terry Pratchett dragons In a development which may untwist a few knickers around the internet, NASA scientists have now explained just what their Phoenix robot lander has found in the soil of Mars - and what the implications are for possible discovery of life on the Red Planet. Following news that the White House had received secret briefings in …
"The chance that we are following this correctly is roughly equivalent to that of a man with no arms throwing a handful of jelly through a falling doughnut at fifty yards without touching the sides."
Have you tested this out? If so I want to see the video, purely for scientific authenticity you understand and not for the sole purpose of laughing my arse off.
Granted, in very small quantities and handled carefully, they are ok, but perchlorates mixed with organic substances (such as petrol, alcohol, etc.) are quite likely to go explode, hence their use in rocket fuel. A perchlorate is ClO4 (negative charge), and wants to oxidise most things it comes in contact with.
Never mind that they can also be shock sensitive, this is just bad science coming out of NASA, and I agree with the comment about finding perchlorates near where they landed. seems a bit odd.
Don't you know that million-to-one chances come up nine times out of ten?
I'm all about science, mind, and drawing conclusions, but suspect CharleyBoy's comment isn't far off the mark.
In any case, the only conclusion NASA seems to be making is 'there are perchlorates on Mars'.
Behind the scenes, people deep inside NASA are no doubt wondering why they upped the hype so high, when the only conclusions that could reasonably have lived up to the hype (life definitely does / can not exist on Mars) are the least likely by far...
Here's some stuff from yesterday's Slashdot discussion on this topic, paraphrased for additional inaccuracy:
* Lithium perchlorate liberates oxygen when heated. Perchlorates may be useful for creating oxygen on Mars.
* Other perchlorates are useful as a rocket fuel. Perchlorates may be useful for getting craft off of Mars.
* The perchlorates they have found are probably not contaminants. AFAICT it's like finding diesel under the car when it runs on petrol. Of course contamination can't be completely ruled out this quickly. It's a preliminery result.
* Which perchlorate have they found? It does make a difference!
But basically the gist I got was that perchlorates might be a very useful thing to find on a planet you might want to visit, stay awhile on, and then return from.
"The chance that we are following this correctly is roughly equivalent to that of a man with no arms throwing a handful of jelly through a falling doughnut at fifty yards without touching the sides."
Now If NASA used an Infinite Improbability Drive they could use the jelly throwing man to power their ships...
**btw is that US jelly, as in fruit based preserve, or UK jelly, as in the stuff fed to hyperactive kids at birthday parties**
had NASA not got their own knickers in a twist by dint of underestimating the public's ability to comprehend such mind-fucking concepts as "We might have found something, but we're not sure yet, can we get back to you on that?" and then running scared from the Interweb conspiracy bearpit, this would have just been an entry in the (very informative) Phoenix blog, rather than a headless chicken exercise
*sigh*
While I'm on, the perchlorate used Phoenix's rocketry was only a part of the Delta launch vehicle, not the lander itself. There was no contamination detected on landing, and the scoop was scraped clean on other soil samples: any perchlorate in these samples hasn't come from Earth.
Of course another thing perchlorates are good for is getting things whiter than white - at least when hot enough, say around 60 degrees [0] , that they decompose into lots of lovely stuff like hydrogen peroxide.
Soooo i've got this straight, you've got lots of water and bits of washing powder...
Old Martian lauderette, got to be. Stands treason (as they say down here)
[0] you ever wonder why the temperatures on washing machines are the values they are, or what the 'Per' in Persil refers to ?
Aye, and if hollywood is believed, nine times out of ten they bloody well turn up in california, where they're beaten off by the pretty dude, the sassy woman, the geek and the dog.
To be serious for a moment, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the polar lander drop down on a parachute for the final part of its landing? With an airbag? No rockets involved...
And now, I've just realised what some of the mysterious "box shaped" objects in the earlier photographs actually were... the supposed "machinery on mars" as, I think a Mr Hoagland had it, is actually The Luggage!
Your title reminded me of "The Game of Rat and Dragon" an excellent short story by Cordwainer Smith. Humans and cats, partnered up to fight aliens, which the humans see as dragons, but the cats see as rats.
As for politicians - just feed them to a giant kitten, perhaps a lion or a Bengal tiger...
'The chances of anything coming from Mars, is a million to one they claimed.'
But still they came?
Secret presidential briefings, oh noes! You wouldn't imagine that the upper echelons of the US government might get informed before the regular peons on something like extra planetary exploration would you?
The Viking missions were the first successful landers designed to look for signs of life. They found carbon dioxide was released when Martian soil was wetted and nutrients added. The initial suspicion was that microbes had been found in the soil and had been incubated, but later tests showed that biological reactions were unlikely and that the soil must contain a powerful oxidising agent.
The big question for the last thirty years has been to try and work out what it is in the soil. Peroxides have been a favourite, but it looks like perchlorate ions are the guilty parties.
Now it'd be nice to know what sort of concentrations we're looking at - high quantities would pretty much remove any possibility of life at this site since perchlorate reacts strongly with organic molecules.
Where there's rocket fuel, there's life, for sure. Presumably NASA pointed a finger at the lander engine maker, who then said "It wasn't us, guv, honest". Ergo, it must be life on Mars.
Whatever NASA, ESA, and other rocket-propelled boffins get up to, it's not "science". Science requires (a) honesty in regard to facts (to tell apart truth and falsehood), (b) possession and use of a faculty of logical thinking (to deduce correctly from facts). Tendentious and tedious, but essential now that science has gone postmodern and scientists rely on the fiat dollar. Teaching science is not about making sure everyone sings from the same hymn sheet. "Scientists" like that need a Zen master with a big stick, to hasten the return to sense should anyone point a finger into space and shout out "The Moon!"
So, at the same time NASA find Perchlorate on Mars, an Dutch research group published a paper that basically says, we've solved the structure of the microbial enzyme responsible for perchlorate metabolism in terrestrial bacteria.... can it really be a coincidence?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18678943
"i'm a little disappointed the AMFM script hasn't run against this story yet..." .... By ryan Posted Wednesday 6th August 2008 11:00 GMT
Maybe it is, ryan, Slowly and Surely and Stealthily ....... Tempting Providence 42 Save Face Mitigating Program Meltdown. However, at Critical Mass do Shared Offering of Controls become Obsolete and Transfer to Enigmatic Proxies.
Proper Preparation and Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance Permitting AI a Sane DisRegard of Haste. ...... but ITs Tide and Time waits for No Man and certainly Never Ever for Fools on a Hill.
http://tinyurl.com/yuqh8p ......... Are you Properly Prepared? You cannot say you were not Warned and/or Advised, can you?
Isn't that one of Terry Pratchett's laws of Narative Causality? Now if they'd found narrativium on Mars...
By the way, @Michael O'Malley, I always thought Persil was so called as it is French for parsley. Next you will be telling me Fairy Liquid doesn't come from fairies.
Mr Chief of Staff, shall we go public with the discovery of Autobots on Mars?
No!
But they know we're excited, I wet myself on my way here and left a great big smelly puddle!
Just tell them you found some weird chemical on Mars and it might be important but it might not!
Oh, ok then.
That everything us mortals read about the mission is the result of long discussions as to WHAT can be released and then is passed thru and partially digested by a press officer. So, for the time being don't make too much of anything in the press releases.
That said, I keep getting a mental picture of somebody standing/lying/slithering behind the cameras, laughing it's self into a puddle wondering what spurious evidence it can present next to the silly earthling's lander. Don't be surprised if the next remarkable chemical to be found on Mars chemically resembles urine !
Still, I guess perchlorate is a good source for liberating oxygen though? Ammonium perchlorate might be the best form, having nitrogen and hydrogen.
I hope they are now doing tests on the earth based rover model, to see what responses it has, and if they might have detected it at the other locations. Before they performed this analysis, I believe they performed a baseline analysis to see what contaminants were present.
I trust they will name this sample location Errol!
on those Martian pix that were floating around a while back, my peridolia sensor observed that Mars was actually Tatooine, to wit, Obi-Wan Kenobi on a Krayt Dragon pretending to be the Little Mermaid, with at least *two* clearly distinguishable Jawa Sandcrawlers as well as loads of other stuff that I can see (oddly no-one else can, must be an alien conspirancy!)
So where are they now? All b*ggered off since they realised the silly Earth people were up to mischief, we saw all this coming during the Clangers. Earth people come with space podules, aliens hide under the ground, humans walk around for a bit and leave some junk behind, then go home, aliens come back out, steal the space junk and build hot-water central heating out of it!
I'm onto you, aManFromMars; you just want a free boiler. Can't say I blame you, with gas prices the way they are....
Perchlorates.
Hmm.
So Mars is made up of powedered hyper-bleach and this is a positive indicator for life?
No wonder my swimming pool was such a mess last year. So much for Ultra-Shokkk, Slo-Dissolve ChloroKleen, Sluj-B-Gon and the rest of the useless perchlorate-crazed swimming pool chemical industry.
Bah. I'm filling the thing with sand next year. Maybe I can breed one of those giant, hallucinogen-metabolising worms from Dune in it and recoup the thousands of dollars it's cost me to date.
There was one on the Mars Polar Lander which went foom, so they didn't get any results from it. There _is_ a mic on board Phoenix, attached to the landing camera that was never used as a bug was found that meant if it transferred an image at the wrong time during descent, Phoenix would also go foom. Turning this mic on hasn't been ruled out at a later point in the mission, though there's no word on the roaming charges.
No sound has been recorded from the surface of Mars yet, but not for a lack of trying
A small and dedicated band bas maintained for years that Viking detected life, even though the results could be well explained by the presence of oxidising agents. NASA seems to have had something like an arms-length alliance with this group, which feeds the minds of many with extravagant ideas.
Wild pseudoscience and speculation in part powers the PR operation that is needed to fund the race for space, and the nukes in space lobby that piggybacks on it. Water having been found on Mars, it can't but cause concern in some quarters that other aspects of its environment are shown to be distinctly inhospitable.
Watch out for 'yes, but there could still be life deeper underground' stories (possibly using radioactivity as an energy source).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
