[BRIEF NOTE] Did Viking discover life on Mars?

[rfmcdonald]

The latest news item announcing that the experiments used by the Vikings Mars landers of the 1970s to determine if there might be Mars actually did detect life, just life that we did know how to identify back in the 1970s before we learned of the extremophiles of Earth, something that absinthe_dot_ca linked to, just as james_nicoll did. The former linked to the paper, "Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments".

The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

At best, this is provocative stuff, and makes the case for a followup mission to Mars. Comments in Jason Major's Universe Today item make the point that retroactive analyses of the data are great at picking up patterns, just patterns that are imposed by the researchers combing through the data again as much as patterns that actually exist. One of the authors of the paper, Gilbert Levin, designed some of the Viking probes' life-detection experimental kit and has since argued at length that NASA scientists almost went of their way to interpret the evidence as proof of an absence of life.