Via Drudge.
Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, will declare on Friday the Viking spacecraft may have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.
Hopefully, they choose kinder names for their little peroxide children than “Joop”.
Melbourne Herald Sun has more.
Even if it were true we can’t rule out that he simply isn’t detecting terrestrial bacteria that have hitched a ride. We’ve got bacteria living on the outside of the space station after all and I’d expect every craft we’ve ever sent up is carrying plenty of hitchikers.
Joots found on Mars?? They just found the Lost Tribe of Israel!
@Jose,
all unmanned spacecrafts have been irradiated with radiation before takeoff for the last half decade to kill off all life on that craft.
Now the simple fact is that this isn’t foolproof, but it does make hitchhikers unlikely.
Paging Mr. Quaid, paging Mr. Quaid. Your virtual vacation is ready…
Any bacteria on Mars cannot be hydrogen peroxide based. H2O2 would break down extremely quickly in the Martian soil, as it would react violently with the Iron and Sulphur in the soil. In fact, the H2O2 argument was first raised as a way of explaining away the positive results from the “Labeled Release” experiment on the Viking landers, and the argument is ludicrous on its face.
Dr. Gil Levin has been making the claim that there is bacterial life on Mars ever since the Viking missions – and he is in a position to know, as he was in charge of the biological experiments on the Viking landers.
What Levin did find is that Martian bacteria have a reverse chirality in their amino acids and sugars compared to Earthly life; instead of left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, Martian life has right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars. This led Levin to invent teh artificial sweetener tagatose.
…bad enough the kid had to around all his life with last name of Houtkooper, but to add insult to injury his parents named him Joot. They must have been eating some wicked mushrooms.
“Joop Houtkooper?” Are you sure of this name? It’s almost poetic. How about giving us a poem about it? Maybe along the lines of Ade.
BTW, I find nothing spectacular about the fuss over “maybe” life on some dead planet. After all, when my family moved here from our planet we left a thriving society arguing about health care.
Its marvin and K-9 working on their ELUDIUM Q-36 EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATOR and all those ISTANT MARTIANS as well
Joot Houtkooper is the martian translation of John Smith.
Google that ludicrous name – he’s a psychic of some sort or what?
“@Jose,
all unmanned spacecrafts have been irradiated with radiation before takeoff for the last half decade to kill off all life on that craft.
Now the simple fact is that this isn’t foolproof, but it does make hitchhikers unlikely.
Posted by: Roland Deschain at August 23, 2007 2:06 PM ”
True Roland. But lets not forget that once these probes are outside our atmospheric influence, I’m quite sure the resulting onslought from Sol will get rid of any remaining stow-aways.About the only thing the might survive would be a cockroach,which can withstand 670 times the lethal dose of radiation as humans. But methinks they would find the lack of O2 to be a problem 🙂
It’s my nice twin, living on Mars.
Marvin
How do we even know it made it to Mars?
Need I remind you of Capricorn One?
Truth to power!
/off with the ditzy leftwing moonbat conspiracy theories… now where’s my tinfoil hat?
Jose,
That’s just not true. There is no bacteria living on the outside of the space station. There has never been detected any life form outside of earth and its atmosphere.
enough
Jose watches too much startrek. It’s where he gets his bad science and worse sociology.
Perhaps if we put as much effort and money into trying to find liberal integrity or good NDP ideas we could be successful with those dreams as well.
“Joop” is, I think, not an uncommon name in the Netherlands, where I suspect Dr. Houtkooper was born. Joop Zootemelk was a great bicycle racer from the Netherlands. He won the Tour de France in 1980 and finished second in at least one other Tour. If memory serves, he also won the World Championship (a somewhat mis-named event) in his late thirties.
Sigh. What is it with this desperate and frantic search for the faintest inklings of what only a sober biologist would call ‘life’? This article is BS of the highest order, piled higher and deeper than the compost in back of my lot.
“It is a possibility that life has been transported from Earth to Mars or vice versa a long time ago.” says Joop.
“Speculation about such interplanetary seeding was fuelled a decade ago when researchers said an ancient meteorite found in Antarctica contained evidence of fossil life on Mars.
Doubt has since been cast on that finding.”
Doubt? More like shown to be media-driven hype and piss-poor science!
As for this announcement (prior to peer-reviewed scientific publication! Can you say “cold fusion”?), what the article fails to say is that the scientific instrumentation on the viking lander was not specified to do these tests. What the data imply is that it is logically possible to suggest a biological origin, but that this is far from required, and quite frankly, highly unlikely.
BTW, there is only one Joop M Houtkooper listed at Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen. He is at
Center for Psychobiology and Behavioral Medicine
Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10
D-35394 Giessen
Germany
joop.m.houtkooper@psychol.uni-giessen.de
As a quick google search shows, his “other” research subjects are esp and psi and he publishes in the Journal of Parapsychology.
I’ve got to stop and have a lie down, or perhaps a drink…many.
Maybe Joop esp’d and psi’d the life force!!!
Where do the newspapers find these tools……?
Where do the newspapers find these tools……?
Put another way – Where do these tools find the ‘newspapers’….?
more bacteria, hot damn.
Any active bacterial life existing on mars now is highly unlikely.
Perhaps some bacteria locked in the ice from millions of years ago would be the best scenario.
Easy enough way to know for certain. Fire a probe over to Mars, grab some soil and bring it back for study.
……..capricorn one not withstanding.
Any active bacterial life existing on mars now is highly unlikely.
Perhaps some bacteria locked in the ice from millions of years ago would be the best scenario.
Easy enough way to know for certain. Fire a probe over to Mars, grab some soil and bring it back for study.
……..capricorn one not withstanding of course.
opps, double post, my bad!
Now we know who is driving all those SUV’s on Mars causing all that Global Warming there.
We should send AL GORE,DAVID SUZUKI,JAMES LOVELOCK,MAURICE STRONG and the other eco-wackos to mars and hope marvin has his ACME DISITIGRATING PISTOL cleaned
hydrogen peroxide?
well that explains it.
human males are attracted to the blonde peroxide bimbos because….. we’se all evolved from the stuff. ya, thats it, H2O2 is our great.0 E20 grandaddy. and dna dont lie.
LOL !!!
also I wanna know where the martian from the bugs bunny cartoons fits in all this.
I smell a conspiracy to discredit WB cartoons in favor of disney….
Great.
The Mars Lander found evidence of contact lens disinfectant on Mars.
Have you ever seen ROBINSON CAROSO ON MARS? great movie