"Extreme interest..."?!?!

I'm stuck on the far side of a picky firewall and am dealing with blown up databases in any case...anyone able to update or summarize? Gracias!

--N

First question from Craig Covault... nice sign there are no hard feelings?

Oh, I don't know about that, those comments right before the Q&A had me going "Snap!"

I think it was very generous... I was half expecting a "Craig - " bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt... "Sorry, we appear to have lost that caller. Next, please..?"

I think they were VERY generous to Craig. No "Thanks for setting off that stink-bomb at our party" or nothin'. This is a beautiful experience listening to these guys and the questions. I'm verklempt...

OMG, they found chocolate covered strawberries on Mars!

Edit: This will now be my standard answer whenever I hear a Mars rumor...

Now on slashdot!

Cowing asked why NASA is always surprised by the Internet and can't keep up after all these years dealing with the speed of things today. How could NASA have done this better? They go from Friday through the weekend to Tuesday with a full-blown presser with backups and everything! The crazy stuff happened on Sunday? Two days. Pretty good!

The teleconference was a little hard for me to follow. What were the most interesting points, in your opinion?

Just found this on the Phoenix site... they were there all along...

Click to view attachment

Maybe some organisms coexist with or even eat perchlorate, but they are extremophiles. One could as well say the presence of sulphuric acid has no bearing on habitability, as some extremophile organism in some cave thrives on it.

Dang it...I evidently was too far down the line to get my questions onto the call

--Emily

That's odd; I was under the impressing the soil was alkaline. Strawberries grow in Ph 5-6.5 so is this a new species of strawberries?

Nice quick reaction Stu

@jmknapp: Yes, but how do you proceed from no life whatsoever in that extreme environment to extremophiles that feed on it? The fact we find all kinds of extremophiles on Earth doesn't say much as life probably didn't evolve in such harsh conditions in the first place. That fact seems to be neglected all too often I think.

Should somebody start a new thread? Something like "Post - the great press conference of 2008"? I'm being silly because I can't think for being so happy about it.

On Earth they are extremophiles. On Mars (IF there were organisms on Mars) they might be considered run-of-the-mill. (Actually, on Earth organisms that are called extremophiles are looking more and more to be run-of-the-mill.)

I don't know about that. It's possible that nothing living today could survive in whatever conditions life originated in. We don't know what those conditions were in any case.

It was a very interesting briefing, but I was having some software issues at the start, and didn't hear the first 10 minutes or so. One of the things I really wanted to learn was the concentration of the ClO4^-. Did anyone mention the concentration, or did anyone even ask what it was?

Actually it could have been the other way around. Anaerobic extremophiles were king and queen for half of Earth history until us nasty oxygen breathers poisoned them all into niche environments near the surface. Most of Earths biomass is under ground and considered extrmophiles.

Craig

I think there is still a lot of discussion about what conditions were like when live evolved (or came in on a rock) here on earth. Many evolutionary biologists think conditions were fairly extreme (near 100 C) and extremophiles were the early norm.

It was asked a couple times.... no answer yet. More data and/or analysis required.

True, but the sentiments of ugordan's post ring true. We should be cautious about using the range of conditions that life exists on Earth today to predict whether there is life in the extreme environments seen elsewhere in the solar system. Evolution is a powerful process.

In case someone wants to hear the telecon before the audio is posted on the JPL website, here's an MP3 I made (thx Audacity):

Phoenix telecon, Aug. 8, 2008 (14MB mp3 file)

Outstanding, thank you!

The Earth is our only source of comparison - we're grasping at straws in exobiology, so we may as well as well grasp at the most familiar straws.




Very useful, thank you.

@jmknapp: you are awesome. My voice recorder's batteries died about 10 minutes in to the conference.

Here's one of my two questions that I didn't get to ask, responded to very very quickly via email (thanks Sara!) -- I thought this would be of interest to you all.



--Emily

I wonder what would happen to NASA's Mars exploration program if a test on a current or future mission definitively and positively ruled out life ever having existed there.

Don't think there is any single test that could say that. We are talking an entire world here, as much land area as Earth and all that underground territory.

Craig

I don't think that scenario could ever develop, to be honest. Mars is a huge place, with many, many different environments to check for forms of life. It wouldn't be possible to ever declare "No life here!" unless they'd looked under or inside every rock, checked beneath all the ice layers, searched every low-lying valley, etc. Life could exist in aquifers deep underground, or inside volcanic vents, or countless other places, in theory.

But if Mars was ever declared officially dead then maybe it would actually spur on exploration and exploitation; with no native life to protect, it would be a case of unload the bulldozers and get digging guys..!

I actually have a shovel...

... yeah, and you'd just dig and dig and dig with it until you'd finally MADE an abyss...!

A perchlorate-free abyss I presume...

Yes, evolution would be a powerful process anywhere, and if life had ever existed on Mars it could well have evolved to keep pace with changing conditions.

...or the conditions were radically different chemically at the start even from Earth's primordial environment in the first place, and anything that still might be living on Mars would find the current environment just peachy-keen. It's a complete data hole. We have no idea whatsoever even what the grossest constraints on the origin of life might be, except for the fact that it does seem that liquid water is needed for a time. Any other general assumption just doesn't seem supportable; there are too many possibilities.

Stu is right. It'll take 1000 years or more of detailed exploration to answer the very basic question of yes or no to life on Mars if we don't get exceedingly lucky. We haven't gotten exceedingly lucky in this regard yet. Carl Sagan's famous principle "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" has never been more true then it is for this issue.

Yes, but evolution needs time to adapt. If Mars had conditions that were marginally sufficient for life to arise (whether extremophiles for our standards or Something Completely Different ™ ), but never achieve a firm foothold, changing environment might have "extinguished" it.

Consider a wildfire analogy if you'd like - a small flame is easy to put out, but once it spreads out all hell breaks loose. Some terrains are suitable for wildfires - you can surely expect one in densely forested areas, but not rocky terrain. I'm suggesting Earth might have always had more of the "forest" factor than Mars ever did. This is why falling back to extremophiles on Mars always seemed like grasping at straws. To me at least.

Based on the current narrative (warmer, wetter, wilder), seems like it would be a game changer. As in, something to brief the science advisor about.

Interesting that Covault's story is verified in several important respects. I.e., the MECA team was working with an extremely important, undisclosed result directly related to habitability--contrary to speculation, tending towards less habitability than more, but whatever.

Regarding contamination, a very important point made several times during the press conference is that perchlorate was seen in both MECA samples, but not in the calibration step where they measure the water prior to stirring in the soil. That would seem to rule out contamination. So yes, the big news is that they have Martian perchlorate, and enough to give them a very strong signal. They didn't quantify it, but made the observation that the particular sensor was strongly specific for perchlorate but weakly specific for nitrate. So if they had a weak signal they wouldn't know if it was due to a little perchlorate or a lot of nitrate. But they had a strong enough signal to rule out nitrate.

Well...looks like there's motive for MECA to party...
But...hey!...I have just returned to town...

I didn't hear that in the press conference -- the consensus seemed to be no impact on habitability, with Peter Smith saying that in some ways it slightly increases the possibility of Martian life since we know of microbes on Earth that feed on perchlorates.

Thing is, "extremophiles" is a very broad term indeed which encompasses a huge range of potential habitats. Heck, you could probably even call dinosaurs extremophiles by one standard since the Earth's atmosphere was much richer in oxygen during their time than it is now (something on the order of 30% vs. today's 21% in some eras IIRC). The poor dinosaurs in Jurrasic Park would have probably been gasping for breath.

Goofy example, but illustrative of the basic principle. Our standard, consciously or not, is what we think of as the normal terrestrial environment: the surface of the Earth and, to some degree, the oceans. We tend to regard environments different from these as hostile because our type of life & those that we are familiar with can't survive there. I don't think we know enough yet to rule almost anything out in terms of conditions for "habitability", really, and that word may ultimately have a true definition just as broad as that of "extremophile".

I thought it was the other way around. The most fundamental metabolic pathways (measured by how widespread they are in all branches of Bacterial and Archeaobacterial life) seem to indicate the the earliest forms of life were indeed extremophiles. Indeed, the current oxygen-breathing life-forms are in many ways the most extremophile. (Which is most difficult to survive and grow in: strong acids, high salt concentrations, high temperatures or high oxygen levels? They are all challenging, but I would vote for high oxygen levels.)

Am I the only person who is not altogether happy about this? I am sure that the team has considered the pros and cons, but systematically ignoring potential data in favour of looking only for what you expect to find seems risky. If during most of the sample heating process, they are only looking at the masses that were decided beforehand are of interest, who knows what surprises are being missed?

Have to agree with Mongo here... interesting perpsective on what aerobes did to the anaerobes, read Larry Niven's short story "The Green Marauder" (part of his Draco Tavern collection). Food for thought.

This is what makes planetary exploration so fascinating.... partial answers to some of the big questions may come in our lifetimes.... and the universe is big enough to never run out of adventure and questions.

Craig

I had very similar thoughts, Bill. The rationale for not examining broad-spectrum data doesn't seem sufficient if you're thinking in terms of a comprehensive chemical survey of a sample.

On the other hand, if you're looking for specific compounds (carbon & nitrogen species, for example), this might make sense. It would declutter the data considerably.

I agree Mongo..... how can you find the unexpected when you only look for the expected. Perhaps we are both misunderstanding the explanation. Does not seem right.

Craig

Each branch of extremephiles have evolved and specialized to their specific environment over time. It's easy to forget that even though we (humans) used our 3.4 billion years of evolution away from the common ancestor to become 'complicated', bacteria and archaea have been evolving for 3.4 billion years too! We may have more complexity, but are no more or less 'evolved' than anything else that is currently extant.

Good point. Physiological complexity does not equate to evolutionary advancement at the core level. Bacteria are remarkably adept at adaptation to changing environmental conditions, arguably much more so then so-called higher forms of life. (Producing a new generation from survivors of a change every 15 minutes or so helps a lot...)

I hope that we are misunderstanding what the plan is. I have read on many occasions how some groundbreaking discovery could have been made so-and-so many years earlier than it eventually was, but the data that could have pointed the way was discarded before analysis, or never recorded despite being within reach. The chances are that nothing of huge importance is being missed, but you never know.

This is very true. However, if a given metabolic pathway is present in groups of organisms that are widely divergent, it is likely to have been present in their last common ancestor -- although "lateral evolution" does happen, where genetic information is passed between unrelated organisms.

Best take on this whole mess yet here. Part of the headline reads "we're not sure what we've got."

Probably the best postscript for this conceivable.