All Bets are now ON - Page 2

Hi All

Since posting my reply #12 above where I intimated that the phoenix wet chemistry results that reportedly did not find evidence of superoxides was letting back on the table the possibility that Viking did find life, I have seen some papers and discussions that are saying strongly that "Phoenix confirms Viking did not find life"

I think those reports are gross exaggerations and that in no way has the phoenix results, as reported, confirm that Viking did not find life. Even the Mission Scientists did not make that claim.

What the reported partial Phoenix results have suggested is that, If Biology was not responsible for the positive Viking results, then there is a possibility from Earth simulation experiments that the pH observed in the Phoenix wet chemistry lab might explain the viking results.

To put it another way; If one presupposes that there is no life there the viking results can be explained by the pH of the soil if they match in most respects the composition of a test martian anologue on Earth.

They are straining at gnats!

No superoxides have been found so far by Phoenix; No Ferrate ions; The pH of one small sample is at the upper end of the range at which they got results on an earth anologue soil that suggested that pH could be responsible for the Viking results and they are declaring that "Phoenix confirms Viking did not find life"

Hogwash!

Phoenix can only add some data points that support that conclusion if;

TEGA works and it finds no organics over a wide range of samples.

The OM and AFM show only clear inorganic mineral structures in a wide range of samples

The WCL finds evidence of high content of superoxides, perhaps including ferrates, throughout the soils sampled

The WCL continues to find pH's in the same range in its future tests.

In the meantime, the soil in my garden is in the same range as the phoenix soil and it supports lots of life.

Winston

Hi LWS,
The alkaline Ph finding is just one more data point that supports the 'superoxide explanation' for the Viking results. Agreed it is not definitive, but if the soil had been acidic then the superoxide explanation would have been problematic. The superoxide explanation initially raised by John Oro on the Viking team and expanded by Vance Oyama and others explains the full Viking outcomes whereas biological causes did not. And I think that is the key point. The team only went looking for alternative explanations when the results did not fit the biological cause.

Hi Winston.
You won't get a straight report about the findings of Martian experiments when they relate to possible biology.

For instance, here's some information which was at http://www.resa.net/nasa/mars_life_viking.htm for a very long time, and was still there just a couple of days ago, but it isn't there now (you can still find it in the archives at web.archive.org, the "wayback machine").

"The Gas Chromatograph -- Mass Spectrometer Experiment (GCMS) also heated a soil sample and ***revealed an unexpected amount of water*** but failed to detect organic compounds". (my emphasis).
....
"At a NASA conference to discuss these results, the following sums up what was then the general consensus:

"Viking not only found no life on Mars, it showed why there is no life there.... the ***extreme dryness***, the ..."
(again, my emphasis).

What kind of conference takes results which reveal an unexpected(ly high) quantity of water, and summarises them using the words "extreme dryness"??

The same deleted article also contains a very revealing table:

Results expected from sample if earth-like life present:
GEX - Oxygen or CO2 emitted
LR - labeled gas emitted
PR - carbon detected
Results expected if biology was absent from Mars:
GEX - none
LR - none
PR - none
Actual result:
GEX - Oxygen emitted
LR - labeled gas emitted
PR - carbon detected
In short, ALL THREE of the experiments aimed at detecting life (as opposed to just detecting organic compounds) gave results that were in line with life being present, and at odds with the expectation of what would happen if life were absent.

It's only because the heat-sterilized control sample also gave some positive indications, and the GCMS experiment failed to detect organic compounds, these overwhelmingly positive results get ignored. But everything that happens has to have some explanation. The obvious one is that the heat sterilizer broke down, or was inadequate in some way, so the supposedly heat sterilized sample wasn't. And the GCMS only heated samples up to 500 degrees c., and it's recently been admitted that a lot of organic compounds become tar-like on heating, and won't evaporate until they get close to 1000 degrees c. And Mass spectrometers can only detect ions anyway, so if organic material is present but breaks down into CO2 and other non-ions, it won't be detected.

In short, mostly-positive results, combined with inconclusive results, were presented as negative results with some odd features which required an oddball explanation - "superoxides". And an unexpected high quantity of water was presented as "extreme dryness". Given that track record, you can expect Phoenix to "confirm" that Viking didn't detect life, regardless of what the actual experimental results might be, and even though Phoenix doesn't have a single experiment designed to detect life, only to determine if conditions are or have been suitable.

Brian

The Alkaline pH finding is the ONLY indirect data point that so far offers some hard, non-theoretical, but minimal support for the "superoxide" explanation of the Viking results. It in no way confirms that Viking did not find life.

Absent any clear indication or negation of life by microscopic or other examination, the superoxide explanation would need some other data points such as; Clear identification of significant levels of superoxides in the martian atmosphere and perhaps soil as well; and Clear identification of significant levels of ferrate ions in the soil by the WCL to rise to that level.

The marginal alkalinity of the soil found so far in one sample at the phoenix site cannot validate the superoxide explanation. The WCL will have to prove that such pH levels or greater are reasonably standard over the site.

It is my understanding that the Levin viking results fully fitted a biological cause as defined in the pre-mission protocols and that the alternative superoxide explanations came afterwards.

The superoxide explanations have continued to be purely theoretical and speculative despite all the remote sensing that has been carried out over the past 3 decades.

Where are the superoxides? Why try to suggest that in the absence of superoxides a marginally high pH would do the trick and reproduce the Viking results as well as sterilize the soil of all traces of organics.

The deficiencies in the GCMS instrument can by itself explain the lack of organics returned by Viking tests. And, indeed, the suggested absence of organics was the reason why Oro et al went looking for speculative theoretical models to explain the Levin results not because those results did not fit a biological cause.

Winston

Martin

Your points are well taken. I did not have my references to hand so I did not respond to Brian in the way you did.

It appears that in the eyes of the establishment the most trivial arguments can be used to demolish the saganesque extraordinary claim that there might be microbial life existing near the surface of Mars.

Winston

Martin, as you imply to reduce the chance of false positives, the biology experiments not only had to detect life in a soil sample, they had to fail to detect it in another soil sample that had been heat-sterilized (control). Had terrestrial life been tested with the Viking biology instrument, the following results would have been expected:

response for response for
sample control
GEX oxygen or CO2 emitted none
LR labeled gas emitted none
PR carbon detected none

If life was completely absent from Mars the should results from the biology experiments would be:

response for response for
sample control
GEX none none
LR none none
PR none none

These were the actual results from Mars:

response for response for
sample control
GEX oxygen emitted oxygen emitted
LR labeled gas emitted none
PR carbon detected carbon detected

The fact that both the GEX and PR experiments produced positive results even with the control sample indicates that non-biological processes are at work. This was substantiated by the Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer which found no traces of organic compounds. The GCMS was not deficient as it actually identified minute traces of the cleaning solvents used for sterilization prior to launch. So the bottom line is that the results did not in fact reflect a biological cause. The concept that both the control and the GCMS gave an erroneous indication of a false positive seems pretty far fetched. Still, let us await the results of the Phoenix tests.

LWS, the actual results for Viking are available through:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/datasetSearch.do?spacecraft=Viking%201%20Lander&experiment=Biology%20(GEX/LR/PR)

Hi Brian,
In order to achieve an undisputed positive result, the experiment had to be positive on the soil sample, and negative on the sterilized control. But the unexpected result on the control doesn't mean that Viking reported an absence of life. At most, it indicates that the positive results Viking gave were flawed in some way, and so must be taken with a grain of salt.

An analogy, to explain what a negative result would have meant: You think you accidentally lost a penny while walking home one night. You search for it under the street lamp, even though you doubt that you lost it there, because it might have rolled that far, and everywhere else it's too dark to look. You don't find it. Does this negative result mean that there's no penny, or that you didn't lose it in the first place? No. All it means is you were looking in the wrong place. Or MAYBE you didn't lose a penny in the first place.

An analogy, to explain the actual Viking result: You search for the penny under the street lamp, and this time you find it. But then, like a true scientist, you devise a control experiment. You look under the lamp in the next street, and you find another penny. Does this prove that the first penny you found isn't actually yours? No. All it does is suggest that possibility.

The fact that the GCMS identified minute traces of cleaning solvents shows only that it was good at identifying cleaning solvents. It doesn't even prove that there were persistent traces of cleaning solvents from Earth. Maybe there are cleaning solvents all over Mars. Or maybe "cleaning solvents" were a retrofitted explanation, invoked to explain an otherwise inexplicable blip in the graph.

The link shows only online results for the Labeled Release experiment. The results for the other experiments are only available on microfilm.

Could the sterilizer which treated the control sample have been faulty? If the temperature it heated the sample to had actually been monitored, then that would be data, and I haven't seen any mention of such a data point in the description of the data. Have you? Don't you think the simplest explanation of a positive result on a supposedly sterilized sample is that the sample wasn't actually properly sterilized?

Actually I've just found a good article on the sterilization procedures employed on the control samples.
http://mars.spherix.com/lifemars/lifemars.htm
by Gilbert Levin and Patricia Ann Straat. It explains how the first control samples were heated to 160 degrees C, and later controls were heated to lower temperatures in an attempt to explain the "anomalous" LR results.

It's interesting reading, and the conclusion it arrives at is "The life question remains open".

Er, I don't get it.

How does alkaline soil argue for super-oxides in the soil?

It's been 50 years since my HS Chemisty, but I seem to remember that if you add an acid to an alkaline solution, they react and pfffft - no acid?

Perhaps I am misremembering, but wasn't the leading candidate for the super-oxide H2O2 -- and hydrogen peroxide is, well, acidic.

So HOW could there be H2O2 or any other acidic super-oxide in the Viking soil ( assuming The Viking soil is alkaline like the Phoenix soil -- which may not be true in any case ) to explain the "life" results?

Other strong oxidizers ( like, well, nitric acid ) are acidic too?

I don't actually know what else might "do the job" on Mars and still be compatible with an alkaline soil )

As an aside, why hasn't the Martian super-oxidezer eaten away the MER rovers after 4.5 years of continuous exposure?

Hort

I am a bit perplexed myself. However, It looks as if they are basing their theories on something like this or later developments from that line of reasoning. here

But it really does'nt follow. They had no indication of the pH of the Viking soil nor the exact ratios of its mineral and other constituents that would give some believable basis for developing analogues of martian soil that could be tested on Earth.

Winston

Winston, interesting abstract. So, 15 years ago a couple of dudes argued if A then B.

( IF the Martian soil is alkiline then the results of life experiment once done on Mars can be reproduced on Earth - with a whole bunch of other assumptions about the soil on Mars. )

So really the logic is quite simple:

A. Therefore not C.

( The Martian soil is alkiline in one place and time. Therefore Martian life does not exist at any other place and time. )

Makes nonsense to me.

Not to mention that the Quinn/Orenberg article only deals with the GEX experiment. It says nothing about LR or Pr.

Hort,
Worth a read:
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/15016/1/00-1020.pdf

Don't really understand reply 31. The logic was:
If A (bio experiments positive) and B (control confirms)then C (biology).
If A and Not B then not C.
If A and Not B and Not D (GCMS confirms) then definitely not C.

Alkaline Ph only confirms that the proposed inorganic process that would generate the Viking results is now probable (not definite).

Brian

You said "Alkaline Ph only confirms that the proposed inorganic process that would generate the Viking results is now probable (not definite)."

There are lots of steps missing before one can justifiably claim that an alkaline pH reading alone indicates that the proposed inorganic process that would generate the Viking GEX and LR results is now probable on Mars.

Firstly, the phoenix results would have to show that the martian soils with the alkaline pH contains the same constituents in the same proportions as the simulated martian soil where such results took place in a relatively narrow range of pHs. I.e. the effects seen in the Earth simulation might have depended on other factors than pH.

Secondly, an alkaline pH in the absence of sterilizing agents, is unlikely to have sterilized the martian soil if it contained microbes. How would they know if the Viking reactions on Mars was due partially to microbial action (which has been adequately demonstrated in control experiments on Earth) and partially to other factors including alkaline pH which just might be a marker for other factors if they only assume the soil is sterile with no confirmatory data over the years of study of the Martian soils and with no confirmatory evidence of sterilizing agents in the vicinity of Phoenix produced by the WCL lab?

Alkaline pHs without sterilizing soils cannot confirm the Viking results!! They have to be able to produce those pesky superoxides, even ferrates might help a bit. Where are they?

I would agree with you if you said that the alkaline pH reading provides some initial hard data which might eventually strengthen the case for the non-biological interpretation of the results of the Viking LR experiment if Phoenix comes up with data from its other tests that support that contention but in no way can an alkaline pH at one site confirm the proposed inorganic process.

Winston

folks>>>

Perhaps the soil without the ice is different in composition than the soil covering the ice. So the Rovers, which as far as I remember in the last 4.5 years have not seen ice, yet Phoenix lands in it. Viking 2 lands in an ice patch too.

Wouldn't it be prudent to think that the ice has what you folks are discussing? I am not anywhere near having a chemical or bio education as you folks do but 1+1=2 for me is the only way I can put it.

If Phoenix can get a scraped unsublimated ice sample in the TEGA then we will know more of the missing pieces of different Mars soil types, at least for 2 locations. 1 at Viking, 1 at Phoenix.

yt
dx

Hi dx.
The discussion centers around the dry top layer of regolith, soil, dirt or whatever we call it. Alkaline soil is required for the organic superoxide explanation for the Viking results to hold true. (No lander other than Phoenix has hit ice).

the ice results will be interesting. Liquid water plus a carbon dioxide atmosphere gives carbolic acid. While this is weakly acidic, when the massive Martian volcanos were active and pumping out gas (and water vapour) any water would have been strongly acidic. So perhaps the ice is indeed salty and acidic. It really depends what was the environment when it froze.

Brian

I would almost bet that the topmost layers of ice at the phoenix site "recently " came from the atmosphere as frost. So it should be weakly acidic unless various reactions in the topmost soil layer changes the pH.

Winston

LWS,

I think it is more likely water snow. Frost is more transitory. Just some things I read.

[link]

Fred

brian>>>

Thank you for that explanation. Alkaline soil is required for the organic superoxide explanation for the Viking results to hold true

I tend to agree with this statement. So perhaps the ice is indeed salty and acidic.

So, now comes the BIG Q! What organisms can grow and maintain its life in a salty and acidic environment? Is this correct? Would it be found in the salty and acidic ice itself or below it?
[Really] assuming the ice is just a 10' covering to a liquid moving [or stagnant] reservoir below it.[probably biting of more than I can chew here-but I am considering that the deeper one penetrates the soil the warmer it gets!]

I was only considering generalities to the Q's I asked in the original post to this thread, and I do appreciate all your deep comments to get to the initial starting point for a discovery of the soil type to be capable of sustaining life. BTW>>>is that Mars life or our life?

yt
dx

Hi Fred

Thanks for the link. It looks like it might be snow instead of Frost. That makes it even more possible that transient water might wet soil particles and be trapped in soil interstices and provide a medium for microbial life near the surface.

Here are 2 recent images on the surface that suggests frost or ice to me.

Winston