[meteorite-list] Mars life concerns

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jul 19 02:58:57 2005
Message-ID: <15.48f5d33c.300dfeab_at_aol.com>

Mark F. wrote:

>First off, the microbes on the Surveyor camera were most likely
>introduced by the astronauts themselves during handling.
 
Mark, Where were you when the damage was supposedly done in Nov. 1969? You
speak quite authoritatively, as if you were sitting there in the supervisor's
chair watching the analysis being mucked up. I don't think you were the
"unnamed member of Jaffe's staff", though, because you say you are a
post-doctoral student now...It's possible there was a breach, but your concept of
probability ("most likely") simply and in your own words I borrowed: "is bunk."
 
1 to 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376.
 
The above number represents the probability of a coin being flipped 100
times and yielding 100 tails in a row. Maybe I missed a factor of two, but that
is really not important. (and for 50 times it is still on the order of
Avogadros's number). The point being, the probability of getting 100 organisms of
all the same species from the zoo that lives in, on and around humans is much
worse than these odds, due to competition. So maybe double the amount of
digits to the left of the decimal point? Or maybe with some dependence they
improve...that's would be quite an improvement...to "most likely".
 
Sure the experiment could have gone wrong, sure there are as many possibly
explanations as an active imagination will conjure...and sure I will embrace
completely Ron's evidence to the extent it is scientific (unfortunately not
much of it is, though it is good to know), enough to form a question mark here.
 But your personal bias really is about as invalid as your unscientific
thoughts on panspermia.
 
And I still am unclear why the 1998 NASA page, illustrated with cultures and
paraphenalia, I cited outlining the history of the bugs is on the NASA
website with no mention of breaches of sterilization nor subsequent contamination,
if this is so obvious to some of you?
 
Note: "No other life forms were found in soil samples retrieved by the
Apollo missions or by two Soviet unmanned sampling missions, although amino acids
- not necessarily of biological origin - were found in soil retrieved by the
Apollo astronauts.)", So: why in the camera, inside what has been described a
virgin insulation material on its interior??? Were hundreds of pounds of
Moon rocks treated differently from the camera, or do we have a reasonable
control of "sorts"? Surely other rocks and soil would have come back positive,
or is one of the astronauts playing a dirty joke against all odds?
 
All the more power to you for your opinions, opinions are like eyeballs,
everyone has a couple...as these are only mine - and I stand behind them.
Hopefully opinions will not be too a-frothing for the palate in this hot weather.

Saludos, Doug
Received on Tue 19 Jul 2005 02:58:51 AM PDT