Life on Mars? We've Been Wrong Before

13.04.2012
Thirty-six years ago, the Viking 2 Lander picked up some dirt and did some donuts on the surface of Mars. According to the computational data recorded then (and the fact that no one came out and kicked the lander off of their lawn), the red planet was stamped with a big "nothing to see here" sign; no life was found. Re-evaluation of the data is changing all of that, according to a newly published paper at .

So where's the life? Well, that's a complicated answer.

Scientists came to the original verdict after running tests on the soil samples that the Viking 2 returned with. The tests looked for microbial metabolism in soil--that is, evidence that something once lived there and left figurative wrappers and whatnot lying around when it left. It seemed pretty conclusive at the time that the evidence pointed to a pristine Martian landscape, untouched by skateboarding hipster microbes or bacteria.

But wait! An international team of mathematicians and scientists took a fresh and quirky look at the data, and came out with a different opinion. "On the basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99 percent sure there's life there," Joseph Miller, a researcher with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, .

What'd they do, then?

The teams looked for complexity. A purely physical process--that is, your normal geological events like earthquake, wind, and so on--are not that complex. However, biological processes tend towards very high complexity data sets. They found the data correlated pretty well with existing examples of biological data sets here on Earth. While not bulletproof, the science of it is pretty compelling, especially to someone who's seen about a billion times.

So what does that mean for us? As of right now, not a whole lot. More experiments need to be run, more evidence catalogued, and maybe another Mars mission or two need to be completed. I'm of the feeling that we'll eventually find that life on Earth had a lot to do with life on Mars long ago, and the whole cosmic soup of a galaxy is rife with old life just being flung around with wild abandon.

After all, who doesn't want to believe?

You can .

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Jason Kennedy is actually terrified of the idea of there being or having been life on Mars. There's enough here on Earth that's crawling, slithering or skittering towards him with the intent to poison, maim or kill. We don't need an entire other planet of life to fear, do we? You can keep up with him via and .