"Scientists have discovered life on Mars."
Dozing on the couch early this morning, between snooze alarms, I hear that sentence come from the newscast on my television, and I am instantly awake. My eyes pop open and I sit bolt-upright, throwing the blanket off my chest.
"Scientists are now saying they believe a lander sent over 30 years ago actually did discover life on Mars. Now, this isn't the little-green-men kind of life, but they say they have found evidence of biological activity on the Red Planet. In other news..."
"That's IT?!"
I'm all at once astounded, amazed, and outraged. We found life on another fucking planet - and not just any other planet, but one of the closest planets to us - and it gets a less-than-10-second blurb between the Weather and the latest update on the Gingrich "campaign"? What the fuck is wrong with that picture?!
Finding life on Mars is a HUUUGE deal! Astronomically huge, you could say, pun completely intended. Because, first of all, finding any life anywhere else would change everything we now know about our place in the universe. It would change the entire outlook of every single religion practiced by humanity! For the first time in the entire history of life on Earth, we would know that we are not alone! So, yeah, kind of a big deal.
But then to find life on Mars, specifically, would increase the importance of that discovery by an order of magnitude. Because it could mean one of two things: either, A) life actually began on Mars, and later traveled to Earth, essentially changing our entire concept of the origin of our species (for instance, a large asteroid slams into Mars, blowing chunks of it out into space, which later hit Earth as meteorites [we've already found Martian-meteorites in Antarctica]; and some of the bacteria or other organisms on some of those Martian-meteorites could've survived the trip, essentially becoming "seeds" that later flowered in our environment); or B) if life actually formed on two-out-of-eight planets in our incredibly-ordinary-solar-system - if we found evidence of a second genesis right next-door to us - then life must be incredibly common in the universe.
So hopefully you can understand why I'm a little upset that they didn't think this story warranted more than just a headline.
I have to know more. So I grab my laptop and start searching the news feeds. Doesn't take long to find an article that goes into a lot more depth. And I'm disappointed (though, I hate to say, not surprised) to discover that once again, the media has simultaneously dumbed-down and overblown another science story.
No one has discovered any life on Mars. The actual story, beyond the sensational headline, turns out to be that a team of mathematicians took another look at the hard-copy data of the soil samples taken by the two Viking landers back in 1976. They analyzed these numbers to determine their level of complexity, using a new theory that biological systems are much more complex than non-biological ones. And, using this new theory, they found data that was so complex, that they believe the only explanation is that it shows evidence of biological life-forms.
So, at most, what they've actually discovered is evidence of the possibility of some sort of biology on Mars, at some point. Hardly the same thing as finding "life on Mars." But then on top of that, this mathematical-complexity-theory of biological systems that they've based all of their findings on, hasn't even been proven to work on Earth! So all of their findings are based on a method that they haven't even proven yet!
How in the fuck do you get from "mathematicians have used an unproven theory on 36 year-old data to suggest the possibility that life may have existed on Mars at some point" to "Scientists have discovered life on Mars?!"
Unfortunately, this is something I see time and again from the mainstream news media. They did it with the whole "Large Hadron Collider May Create Black Hole and Destroy Earth" story (no, it won't). And they did it again recently with the "Scientists Have Discovered Particles Traveling Faster Than Light" story (no, they didn't). They never report actual scientific findings. Instead, at the barest hint of only the most sensational stories (black holes gobbling up the planet, speed-of-light barrier broken, life on Mars, etc.) they jump all over it, remove anything resembling context, evidence, or truth, and splash the tabloid-esque headline across the front page or the evening newscast: "Bat Boy Found on Mars Travelling Faster Than Light! 'Trying to Destroy Earth,' Say 'Scientists'!"
Ugh.
It's mornings like this that I weep for my species.
< /nerdrant >
Showing posts with label meteorite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meteorite. Show all posts
Friday, April 13, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Rocks From Outer Space...
I've purchased two meteorite fragments in the past week.
I've never bought a meteorite before, and until recently, hadn't given them much thought. But as my interest in astronomy and astrophysics has grown, so has my fascination with meteorites. The idea of being able to touch, to hold in my hand, a piece of material that was formed in outer space, has thrilled me in a way that I find hard to describe.
Somewhere in the Milky Way, billions of years ago, a gigantic star a million times larger than our Sun ran out of fuel. It had burned through all of its helium and hydrogen, producing heavier elements in the fusion process: nitrogen and oxygen, then silicon and carbon. Then it had burned through all of those elements, as well, producing yet heavier elements such as neon and magnesium. This process continued for billions of years, creating heavier and heavier elements, until finally, the nuclear core of that giant star produced an element that it could no longer fuse for fuel: iron. And this infinitesimal speck of iron upset the delicate balance between gravity and atomic explosion that had been that star, causing it to explode in the most violent and catastrophic event in the known universe: a supernova.
That explosion sent elemental material careening out through space, all throughout that local area of the galaxy, where it eventually cooled, and mixed with other material from other exploded stars, to form enormous clouds of dust and debris. Pieces of this debris clumped together, attracted by their gravitational pull in the vacuum - the bigger the clumps got, the more mass they had, so the stronger their gravity, so the more debris they pulled into them, so the bigger they got. Every planet was produced in this way, including our own. But this particular clump of debris - iron and nickel and stone by this point, among other things - never became a planet. It was simply a large asteroid.
Approximately 700,000 years ago, that asteroid came just a hair too close to Earth, and fell down our planet's gravity well, becoming a meteoroid as it hit our atmosphere, and exploding into fragments as the force of our gravity and the heat of re-entry combined to tear it apart. The fragments slammed into the planet north of the Arctic Circle, near what is now Norbbotten, Sweden, making it a meteorite. Over the next 700 millenia, those fragments were pushed and pulled this way and that again and again by glaciers, and tectonic shifts, and an Ice Age or two. Then, in 1906, two children tending cattle in a field discovered the first fragment of this gigantic rock from outer space.
And in a few days, I will be able to hold a slice of it in my hand.
Isn't it beautiful?
It's now known as the Muonionalusta meteorite, and it's the oldest meteorite ever discovered. The pattern of lines visible on the slice in the image above is known as a Widmanstätten Pattern. It's produced by bathing the slice of meteorite in nitric acid, to oxidize the metals it is composed of. The nickel and iron oxidize at different rates, creating the pattern, which outlines the nickel-iron crystals that formed as the asteroid grew in that dust cloud so long ago.
I don't know what exactly it is that fascinates me so much about this. It's almost as if this tiny piece of metal and stone is a tangible piece of the forces of creation. That vast majority of Nature, of Tao, that dominates the rest of the universe outside of our microscopic little blue bubble of air and water. And I want to know that Nature, to understand it, to be able to visualize it, to feel it. And this solid evidence, this proof of that Nature, somehow takes it out of the realm of abstract contemplations, and makes it real for me. It's like faith becoming fact. It seems almost impossible somehow, and yet there it is, undeniably real. Iron crystals, from a long dead star, touching my skin.
Like a kiss from Creation.
I've never bought a meteorite before, and until recently, hadn't given them much thought. But as my interest in astronomy and astrophysics has grown, so has my fascination with meteorites. The idea of being able to touch, to hold in my hand, a piece of material that was formed in outer space, has thrilled me in a way that I find hard to describe.
Somewhere in the Milky Way, billions of years ago, a gigantic star a million times larger than our Sun ran out of fuel. It had burned through all of its helium and hydrogen, producing heavier elements in the fusion process: nitrogen and oxygen, then silicon and carbon. Then it had burned through all of those elements, as well, producing yet heavier elements such as neon and magnesium. This process continued for billions of years, creating heavier and heavier elements, until finally, the nuclear core of that giant star produced an element that it could no longer fuse for fuel: iron. And this infinitesimal speck of iron upset the delicate balance between gravity and atomic explosion that had been that star, causing it to explode in the most violent and catastrophic event in the known universe: a supernova.
That explosion sent elemental material careening out through space, all throughout that local area of the galaxy, where it eventually cooled, and mixed with other material from other exploded stars, to form enormous clouds of dust and debris. Pieces of this debris clumped together, attracted by their gravitational pull in the vacuum - the bigger the clumps got, the more mass they had, so the stronger their gravity, so the more debris they pulled into them, so the bigger they got. Every planet was produced in this way, including our own. But this particular clump of debris - iron and nickel and stone by this point, among other things - never became a planet. It was simply a large asteroid.
Approximately 700,000 years ago, that asteroid came just a hair too close to Earth, and fell down our planet's gravity well, becoming a meteoroid as it hit our atmosphere, and exploding into fragments as the force of our gravity and the heat of re-entry combined to tear it apart. The fragments slammed into the planet north of the Arctic Circle, near what is now Norbbotten, Sweden, making it a meteorite. Over the next 700 millenia, those fragments were pushed and pulled this way and that again and again by glaciers, and tectonic shifts, and an Ice Age or two. Then, in 1906, two children tending cattle in a field discovered the first fragment of this gigantic rock from outer space.
And in a few days, I will be able to hold a slice of it in my hand.
Isn't it beautiful?
It's now known as the Muonionalusta meteorite, and it's the oldest meteorite ever discovered. The pattern of lines visible on the slice in the image above is known as a Widmanstätten Pattern. It's produced by bathing the slice of meteorite in nitric acid, to oxidize the metals it is composed of. The nickel and iron oxidize at different rates, creating the pattern, which outlines the nickel-iron crystals that formed as the asteroid grew in that dust cloud so long ago.
I don't know what exactly it is that fascinates me so much about this. It's almost as if this tiny piece of metal and stone is a tangible piece of the forces of creation. That vast majority of Nature, of Tao, that dominates the rest of the universe outside of our microscopic little blue bubble of air and water. And I want to know that Nature, to understand it, to be able to visualize it, to feel it. And this solid evidence, this proof of that Nature, somehow takes it out of the realm of abstract contemplations, and makes it real for me. It's like faith becoming fact. It seems almost impossible somehow, and yet there it is, undeniably real. Iron crystals, from a long dead star, touching my skin.
Like a kiss from Creation.
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