Michael Brooks, consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, sends us a new perspective on the riddle of the empty planet next door.
Some pesky scientists have just pointed out an appalling design error in NASA’s latest attempts to find life on Mars. This is beginning to look like a conspiracy. Does someone not want us to find life on Mars?
NASA has tried looking for signs of life on Mars precisely once, in the 1976 Viking mission. The result was positive. The reason nobody says there is life on Mars is that another experiment, part of the same mission, couldn’t find any carbon-based “organic” chemicals in Martian soil. This, NASA decided, overruled the other result: with no carbon present, there could be no microbes living on or under the surface of Mars.
Last year, the Phoenix lander repeated the carbon search and failed to find organic molecules. The problem is, we know that there ought to be organic molecules on Mars. Asteroid and comet impacts will have put them there. So what’s going on?
http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/06/is-there-a-mars-conspiracy.html
Remember, the media is often complicit with the conspiracy so this does not necessarily prove anything more than this is a thought deposited into the collective by the "machine." Could be more, could be less...it doesn't affect Who I Trust.
