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- Hacker News
- 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.by nephihaha
- > We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.
They could even already have invaded in the past, and we descended of them[1]. Earth as Mars ancient lifeboat[2].
by Qem - Io credo che possa essere come dici tu ma prima servono le proveby remopulcini
- Wrong language?by medvidek
- 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'.
by gojomo - 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.by jibal
- 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?
by weemonger - 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.by burnte
- Someone should look into the author and/or editor.
Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.
by jpease - 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?
- 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. /sby pbgcp2026
- lolzby rimworld
- It is quite remarkable that the question of life on mars (or not) hasn't been answered conclusively despite a lot of human effort to get an answer.
- It's because the more important question of "how can I personally profit from this?" usually takes precedence.by bregma
- 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
- there probably never was any there for a meaningful amount of time, but it's incredibly hard to prove a negative.by skulk
- NASA intentionally completely gave up on trying to answer the Mars life question for multiple decades and only very recently has come back around to the idea of doing life finding missions.by thegrim33
- What I like about Mars stories like this is that they are a good antidote to both extremes: "we found life!" and "there is nothing interesting here"by eleveriven
- 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.
- Tangential to your tangential:
The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.
Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).
We need some new sci fi movies like that!
by timmg - Too much radiation for anything close to Jupiter. You will find life on Venus clouds and in Titan....
Everybody looking at the wrong targets. Mars is a dead, radiation cooked, burned, poisonous place. Forget about it, leave it to the trillionaires.
by root-parent - 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.
by pfdietz - In some ways the more interesting question might become whether Martian life, if found, shares the same basic biochemistry as Earth lifeby eleveriven
- >impacts would likely have sent life back and forth between Earth and Mars
By what mechanism is an impact giving some debris on Mars enough delta-V to reach Earth, without obliterating Mars and also sterilizing the debris due to heat and plasma?
by stackghost - 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.by raychis
- 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.
by blamestross - Let's use your sentence in place of the title above. Thanks!by dang
- >..War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by benevolent Martians.
I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.
by didgetmaster - Did AI write it? If so that is concerning...by Ccecil
- Maybe benevolent in the same way a heat-ray is a form of urban renewalby eleveriven