I saw this article and immediately recalled how poorly informed and uninspiring a publication Space.com is. Like most mainstream hack jobs concerning astrobiology, the article teases the reader with hints of life, but entirely ignores hard evidence for extraterrestrial vitality. In this case, the lamestream tantalizes the reader with unnecessary speculation that the 1970s Viking Mars Lander found — and killed — life on Mars — and points the blame at the dead.
The interview features Dirk Schultz-Makuch, a timid soul who dares not say what he damn well knows: We found life on Mars and it is living. Gil Levin, NASA’s Principal Investigator responsible for the Martian life tests — the only direct tests ever conducted — maintained until his death that the so-called “Labeled Release Experiment” confirmed microbial activity.
(Which begs the question, if you are going to hire a guy to give you an answer, and he does so, but you don’t trust his answer, what does that say about you?)
Here is Dr. Levin’s statement on the matter in 2019, three years before he passed — unvindicated — at age 97.
This subject so frustrates me that I had to find someone else to pull hair out with me, so I rang up Tusk buddy Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe, who founded the discipline of Astrobiology when Dirk was a child. I asked Chandra to provide his observations, which I am posting exclusively here.
11/20/2024
Gil Levin (1924-2021) and Patricia Straat have always maintained that the 1976 labelled release experiment on the Mars Lander Viking 1 provided positive evidence for microbial life on the red planet. Radioactively-labelled nutrient supplied to sub-surface soil was taken up with appropriate isotopic signatures in the effluent gases so that a positive result was immediately declared – only to be recanted by NASA scientists who urged caution. An initial claim of super-oxidants in the solid that led to a false positive was shown untenable with later investigations of Martian soil. Further data that appeared to back up Levin’s claim of a positive result was consistent with later observations of a seasonal variation of methane in the Martian atmosphere. The majority of space scientists have maintained the claim of a negative result for Martian life detection, and Dirk Schulze-Makuch’s interesting twist has been to suggest that the Viking experiment may have actually “killed” microbial life with an innate abhorrence of H₂O that might actually exist on Mars. The examples that have been given include microbes adapted to arid desert terrain on the Earth, and this position is certainly logically valid.
My own personal preference, however, is to go along with the views expressed by Levin that the Viking experiment did indeed lead to a positive detection of microbial life on Mars. Naysayers, of whom there are many, prefer to maintain a contrary position. Particularly culpable are online journals that insist on always maintaining a standard position in every “controversy.” Dirk’s position is, however, logically defensible, but only if one insists that the Viking results were indeed negative. A recent podcast reviewing the Mars life data may well be relevant in this context (https://blueplanetred.net). It is a case of comic irony that whilst the presence of microbial life on planets, comets and wider still throughout the universe (as argued by us from 1984) is hotly disputed, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence appears to have been respected and sanctioned from as early as the 1960s.
~ Chandra
https://profchandra.org/https://independent.academia.edu/ChandraWickramasinghe
https://blueplanetred.net/chandra-wickramasinghe
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIffcDXNghph9EP9PRi2AIQ
https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/directory/professor-chandra-wickramasinghe/
https://www.nifs.ac.lk/about/director/professor-chandra-wickramasinghe/
http://www.physics.ruh.ac.lk/ab/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsDfI8U_Kug
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CWexjVBCyc
Naive children may ask, since Mr. Dirk is “Astrobiologist,” why doesn’t he just come clean that he knows the last 50 years of his discipline have been entirely wasted? Because, dear child, Mr. Dirk is motivated by speaking fees and grant money to tease but not discover. To discuss but not locate. To speculate but not prove, lest he be teased and ridiculed.
Dirk knows damn well we found life on Mars. He knows damn well life is smeared on the outside of the Space Station. He is well aware there are vast clouds of it in interstellar space and comets spew fountains of bacteria. But to acknowledge the prior work of others demonstrating these facts, instead of misdirecting and blaming? Well, that might sound nutty, and unbutter his bread, don’t ya know.
I’m convinced “Astrobiologists” sit in their pajamas late at night furtively reading Rhawn Joseph in the Journal of Cosmology, wondering of a life lived differently, with testicles.
Tusk on Tape: