The Viking landers and its possible discovery of extraterrestrial life
Link here. One of the scientists involved in the Viking project has written a memoir of her experience, and the article interviews her.
Patricia Straat served as co-experimenter on one of the most controversial experiments ever sent to Mars: the Labeled Release instrument on the Viking Mars landers. The experiment’s principal investigator, Gilbert Levin, insists to this day that the project found extraterrestrial life. Most scientists doubt this interpretation, but the issue has never been fully settled.
Read it. It illustrates how uncertain science can be, even when an experiment produces a result that everyone involved dreamt of. As Straat notes,
The results met the pre-mission definition of a positive life response. But of course as soon as we got it everyone came up with alternative proposals to account for the results nonbiologically.
The problem was that though their experiment found evidence of life, none of the other Viking experiments did. Most significant was the apparently complete lack of organic material (based on carbon) in the soil.
To this day, no one has a good explanation for these results on Viking. The results remain a mystery, one that really will only be solved when we can return to Mars in force, and find out what it is really like.
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Link here. One of the scientists involved in the Viking project has written a memoir of her experience, and the article interviews her.
Patricia Straat served as co-experimenter on one of the most controversial experiments ever sent to Mars: the Labeled Release instrument on the Viking Mars landers. The experiment’s principal investigator, Gilbert Levin, insists to this day that the project found extraterrestrial life. Most scientists doubt this interpretation, but the issue has never been fully settled.
Read it. It illustrates how uncertain science can be, even when an experiment produces a result that everyone involved dreamt of. As Straat notes,
The results met the pre-mission definition of a positive life response. But of course as soon as we got it everyone came up with alternative proposals to account for the results nonbiologically.
The problem was that though their experiment found evidence of life, none of the other Viking experiments did. Most significant was the apparently complete lack of organic material (based on carbon) in the soil.
To this day, no one has a good explanation for these results on Viking. The results remain a mystery, one that really will only be solved when we can return to Mars in force, and find out what it is really like.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
I am amazed I have never heard about this other than generic statements about how Viking tested for signs of life but they all came back negative or ambiguously unlikely. After reading this article I am stunned there was never a follow-up on this with something like Phoenix to include a simple digital microscope to look at the sample. You don’t have to see the individual microbes, give them enough time and you will see the aggregate structures they form like fuzz on a rotting fruit.
Ryan Lawson: You’ve been reading the mainstream science press too much. :)
I have reported on these Viking results since the 1990s, when I first became a science journalist. It didn’t take much research to learn about them, just a willingness to do it.
What would it take to replicate the experiments on Mars with today’s means? Assume I’d put things together in a somewhat hackerish approach, what equipment would I need, energy, communication, remote controlled actuators etc.? Could I do it rather low cost (just materials and engineering, excluding qualification, launch etc.)? Any idea how much mass and volume it would require?
And would it even make sense or would it just satisfy the curiosity of people involved at that time?
I recall, that at the time, the preponderance of opinions was that the detection of CO2, originally designed to be an indicator of biological respiration, was generated by planetary chemical peroxides when contacting the experiment’s liquid growth substrate. It was thought the intense solar radiation levels at the Martian surface would cause and maintain such forms of reactive peroxides. It was such an emotional letdown; similar to the initial photographs released showing vast fields of green and blue landscapes, later to be color corrected to the harsh reddish environment we frequently see today.
John: This was the explanation offered. Gil Levin, principal scientist for the labeled release experiment, never bought it, and offered many reasonable objections to it.
There are too many uncertainties here. The truth is that we really do not understand what happened. It was likely a chemical reaction of some sort, but that is not certain by any means.