And Now For Something Completely Different..

I came across this paper by a man named Gilbert Levin a month or so ago. It was written in 1997.

Gilbert Levin has been laughed at by many of his peers in the science community for a few decades now. I, on the other hand, applaud him for his brutal honesty. Who is he, you say? Dr. Levin led the team of analysts that was put in charge of the numerous tests for biological life on Mars during the two Viking missions in the mid 70's. He maintains to this day that Viking definitively proved the existence of microbial life in the Martian soil, and boy does he make a damning case chemically. Read the paper if you get a chance. I will only offer a very brief and rather crude summary.

Obviously, being the first operable probes on the surface of Mars, the holy grail of the Viking missions (as with space exploration in general) was to run some kind of test that would show whether there are other living things out there somewhere. A series of various experiments were developed to do just this, testing for several different kinds of life forms that could possibly inhabit Mars. Once the landers were safe on the ground, they charged up from the sun and got to work, collecting samples and running tests. Of these tests, the entire team (not just Levin, mind you) put the most stock in what was called the Labeled Release experiment. In short, this worked as follows: The lander scooped up some soil, placed it under vacuum, and added a few drops of a nutrient broth to it. The broth had some amino acids and various other compounds that microbes would find rather tasty, except they were radioactively labeled. In other words, there was an identifiable, radioactive carbon isotope in these nutrients so whatever happened to its components could be observed. In general, a sample full of microbial organisms here on Earth would immediately emit carbon dioxide, CO2, from respiration after having this nutrient broth poured onto it. A sudden and drastic spike in the emission of radioactive CO2 was agreed by all to be a positive sign of microbial activity in the sample. And wouldn't you know it -- all nine LR experiments done by the two Viking probes, thousands of miles apart from each other, gave the same exponential increase in radioactive CO2 as a result of this test, thus yielding what may one day be hailed as the most important scientific document ever:


Levin goes on in his paper to give great explanations about the other tests that I won't get into here, and he also gives the data at the end of it along with some nice pictures. It's definitely worth the time to read it. It's a damn shame his NASA colleagues kept moving the goalpost back merely because they didn't want to cause a worldwide scene with so little information. In essence, if Levin is right - and I suspect he is - all we know is that microbes are in the soil. We know nothing about them other than the fact that they breathe just like life on Earth.