Viking robots found life on Mars in 1976, scientists say

[heisenberg]

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows that NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.
Further, NASA doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47031923/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.T4loEcIth2A

 

[Gatefan1976]

Bah
If they were real Vikings they would have killed the male bacteria and made off with the women bacteria.

 

[OMNI]

Bah
If they were real Vikings they would have killed the male bacteria and made off with the women bacteria.

green!

 

[heisenberg]

Bah
If they were real Vikings they would have killed the male bacteria and made off with the women bacteria.

 

[mzzz]

Bah
If they were real Vikings they would have killed the male bacteria and made off with the women bacteria.

LOL

 

[SciphonicStranger]

Sounds to me like they are just interpreting the data in a way that gets the results they want...

Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth, so it's premature to draw any conclusions.

"Ideally, to use a technique on data from Mars, one would want to show that the technique has been well-calibrated and well-established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the method, while on Earth we can," planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

 

[mzzz]

Give it time, they can run the same procedure of analysis to see if it holds for Earth data. They were just doing mathematical analysis and looking for degrees of complexity beyond normal non-biological processes, and they did find something. It's too early to say either way until further analysis has been done on their methodology itself.

 

[Bluce Ree]

The more fascinating part of the story is that there are Viking robots and they've achieved space travel!

 

[Bluce Ree]

Give it time, they can run the same procedure of analysis to see if it holds for Earth data. They were just doing mathematical analysis and looking for degrees of complexity beyond normal non-biological processes, and they did find something. It's too early to say either way until further analysis has been done on their methodology itself.

Too bad we can't just scan for lifeforms.