Road Map to Mars

In a year that has already seen announcement of plans to mine asteroids, the first privately funded spacecraft docking with the ISS, and engine testing on the Skylon project, plans for an even more ambitious project have emerged.

The Mars One program has announced a thorough road map detailing its plan to establish a human colony on the surface of the Red Planet by 2023.

How will this be paid for? They plan to turn the Mars One project into the largest media event ever by coupling the astronaut selection and training process to a reality TV show!

You can read their plan, but here is a summary:

Such ambitious plans as this have usually fallen at one of the first two hurdles: funding and technology. However as we have seen with SpaceX, private firms have a great capacity for cash sourcing, and with the plan to turn the whole thing into a worldwide media event, Mars One might be well on their way to purchasing everything they need.

Technology wise, they have been very clever, and designed their whole plan around things which already exist and can be bought. In fact, all the landers and launchers are hoped to be supplied by SpaceX. This is great because it means that part of the money Mars One will be spending to explore space, will be spent by a company trying to explore space! This is exactly what we need for the space industry to flourish.

I really hope that this project gets going. They face some major hurdles - cosmic radiation poses a major problem for interplanetary voyages - but I'll be waiting with bated breath to see how far this thing gets.

Good luck, Mars One!

Pics or GTFO: Why we haven't found life on Mars.

Over the past couple of days the internet has been buzzing with its perennial excitement over a new 'discovery' of life on Mars. Yesterday came reports that a team of researchers retro-analysing data from NASA's 1976 Viking missions concluded that the landers did indeed find microbial life in martian soil.

A little background: In 1976 Viking 1 and 2, conducted four biological experiments on the martian soil (pictured above). Though three were unambiguously negative, one produced interesting results. Various samples of soil were injected with different microbial nutrients laced with radioactive carbon-14. Over a period of a few days, gas released by the soil was analysed and it was found that traces radioactive carbon dioxide had been released, a possible indication that carbon was being metabolised by bacteria.

Recently, a group of scientists conducted complexity analysis on the data and found that the active samples exhibited complexity associated with biological life, whereas the sterile control samples did not.

Great, that's that then. Well, no, not quite. 'Is there other life out there?' is one of the biggest questions in science history! Therefore, any such discovery cannot be attributed to anything short of the direct observation and full analysis of living samples. In otherwords 'Pics or GTFO'.

Having said that, the original Viking experiments could not have discovered life even if all the results were positive. The most they could have achieved was an observation of a process consistent with what we would expect from a biological process.

Now, while the recent results are very interesting from a complexity science point of view, they do not in anyway prove the existence of life on Mars. They are nothing more than a statistical analysis of 30-year-old inconclusive results of an observation of a phenomenon that may be biological. You can probably start to see now how this is getting quite tenuous.

Unfortunately, this story is yet another example of a poorly researched news piece riding the wave of its ow misleading headline. Bad journalists! Carl Sagan and the Viking lander look down on you with shame...