Posted on 07/30/2016 8:13:28 PM PDT by PROCON
The day Gil Levin says he detected life on Mars, he was waiting in his lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, watching a piece of paper inch out of a printer.
Levin snatched the sheet and scrutinized the freshly inked graph. A thin line measuring radioactive carbon crept steadily upward, just as it always did when Levin performed the test with microbes on Earth. But this data came from tens of millions of miles away, where NASA's Viking lander was — for the first time in history — conducting an experiment on the surface of Mars.
"Gil, that's life," his co-investigator, Patricia Straat, exclaimed when she saw the first results come in. There was jubilation at JPL. Afterward, Levin said, he drove into the mountains above Los Angeles, sat on the ground and stared up at the night sky.
"I was sort of trembling, you know?" he recalled. It was July 30, 1976.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Will Obama go there and tell them they need to accept human refugees who only dream of a better life away from Earth?
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t. Surface conditions were amenable to it in the past and there is doubtless viable conditions in the subsurface for microbial life to survive.
I’d like a more modern version of Manchester and Cortinas for everyone.
Half the population of mars already voted obama
Hogwash.
That was only a minor energy flux reading on one dynoscanner. Might be something we can transplant.
There are undoubtedly microbes there now, since we landed our contaminated hardware there.
But otherwise there would be no purpose for life to be on mars.
I would hate to see a perfectly good planet be dotted with a ton of Starbucks. I wonder if Martians like Frapuccinos?
Cortina, eh? Always wondered why that didn’t make it over to the USA; the only British Ford that did from that era was the (Mercury) Capri. The Cortina’s replacement, the Sierra, showed up in the 1980s as the Merkur XR4Ti.
“Hogwash” doesn’t cut it in a discussion over the possibility of some type of life having arisen on a terrestrial planet. Care to offer any thermodynamic or biological counterpoints?
Gene Hunt drove one. If it wasn’t for Life On Mars, I may never have learned about them at all.
The Quattro in Ashes To Ashes was more fitting for the character.
I was a business associate of Gil Levin when I lived in Richmond in the 80’ and I also have a degree in astronomy. I was satisfied with his presentation at that time and I belive there is primitive life on Mars - I think the case can be made that there were sentient beings there before the ascent of hominids several MYA.
Agree. It seems something caused some big changes to occur in the past. Some images clearly indicate significant amounts of water once existed.
Weren’t there a few FoMoCo products called Cortinas sold here briefly in the ‘70s, maybe? Little units similar to the Pinto, etc?
Hogwash dittos.
Yes. Ford Cortina in Britain from ‘62 to ‘82. Somehow some of them made it to the States, because a geeky engineer I knew had one.
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