[meteorite-list] Mars life concerns

From: Marc Fries <m.fries_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jul 19 10:18:12 2005
Message-ID: <1136.69.251.197.11.1121782687.squirrel_at_webmail.ciw.edu>

Howdy

    "Unscientific", eh? (--truly vile response deleted---)
    No, I wasn't there when the samples were analyzed. Hell, I wasn't
even born yet. Luckily for me that's not a prerequisite for owning a
fully functioning iota of horse sense. None of the other samples, either
from the lunar samples or from the Surveyor, turned up a
positive signal. This is actually evidence that the solitary positive
signal is a fluke; an anomaly; an outlier. A truly believable
measurement would be -=repeatable=-. Where measurements are
concerned, and especially microbial measurements where some level of
contamination is almost a certainty, once is an accident. Twice is a
coincidence. As a rule of thumb, only when you can repeat your
measurement at least three times does it begin to gain respectibility.
   Your numbers show some skill in mathematics but utterly fail in logic.
The presence of 100 microbes does not require a coin flip to decide if
each one will exist. The presence of 100 microbes of the same type means
that someone sneezed on the desktop. (See? Logic has a place here.) Even
the presence of the same single type of bacteria is
pointless - the flower of 1960's microbiology measurement technology was
culturing, a notoriously inaccurate and contamination-prone technique.
Even today, in the modern microbiology lab I work in, we routinely turn up
contaminated cultures. Often all it takes is a single contaminating
microbe to ruin a culture plate or liquid culture, and the only real way
around it is to repeat the efforts and discard the flukes, anomalies, and
outliers. Culturing also automatically excludes 90-95% of all the
possible critters that you're trying to detect, so in all likelihood there
were other microbes along with S. mitis, they just went undetected.
   There is a non-zero probability that the S. mitis were actually
retrieved from Surveyor. The likelihood is FAR, FAR GREATER, however,
that the microbes were introduced during non-sterile storage in the
confined space of the Apollo spacecraft with three astronauts who had
gone without showering for many days, or during subsequent handling on
Earth. It would be "nonscientific" to ignore these facts in favor of a
pet theory.

   That's kinda like panspermia, actually. Sure, there's a non-zero
probability that microbes can survive being severely shocked repeatedly,
frozen, vacuum dessicated, irradiated, and then dropped into an alien
environment and surviving. There's also a non-zero probability that
gravity will reverse, time will speed up suddenly, evolution will cease,
and that monkeys will fly out of my butt.

Done.
MDF

> 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
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-- 
Marc Fries
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Carnegie Institution of Washington
Geophysical Laboratory
5251 Broad Branch Rd. NW
Washington, DC 20015
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FAX: 202 478 8901
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Received on Tue 19 Jul 2005 10:18:07 AM PDT