[meteorite-list] Organics on Mars

From: Martin Altmann <altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2011 14:50:24 +0100
Message-ID: <003401cbaf3b$02be5370$083afa50$_at_de>

Hi Count, I bet both won't happen.

After the somewhat overhasty and in the end a little bit almost embarrassing
announcements around ALH 84001 years ago. NASA wouldn't think twice, but a
hundred times, before declaring former life on Mars.
Such a claim would need a very strong evidence at least.
As it touches one of the largest question ever with remarkable impact not
only on science, but also on culture, philosophy, religion ect.pp
(Shhht younger folks: Star Wars, Star Trek, the Uncle from Mars etc, isn't
reality. Reality is so different from that genre. So much more exotic and
fascinating!
NOTHING stalwart we have yet in our hands, which could make us sure to a
certain degree, that indeed there is life elsewhere in cosmos. All so far
speculations, assumptions, probabilities).
 
Organics aren't such - as McKay was quoted too.
To postulate life or a former life out of the presence of organics, would be
the same as to say, that comets would have been inhabited by life-forms,
because amino acids were found in some of the carbonaceous chondrites
or to conclude that Roscosmos had secretly developed the warp drive, because
large clouds of alcohol were detected in farer space between the stars.

>Unfortunately, the loons

No. Remember, that the 40-years jubilee of Apollo was a gigantic media event
around the globe, with an increased demand for lunar meteorites.
Nevertheless the prices remained constantly low and often close at the
historic all-time-low.
Or think about the Martians, which exploded in price during the last four
years only, and not, when the Martian Renaissance started long before with
all the orbiters and the first rovers, neither a jump happened, when the
final evidence was delivered by the rovers, that the shergottites definitely
are laying around on Mars' surface.

Price explosions are caused - if we let isolated cases, like media-hyped new
US-falls, aside, where on the one hand specialized falls collectors are
eager not to miss them out and on the other hands particularly laymen, but
also curators pay here and there attention - quite always caused not by the
demand, but by the supply side.

Simple example - Sikhote multiplied in prices within shortest time, after
the strewnfield was exhausted.
Gebel Kamil was now cheap (despite the media), will be later more expensive,
when the main load will be absorbed.
And the main factor unfortunately for price inflations are for years now the
artificial shortage of meteorites, caused by the introduction or the
persistence of improper legislation, preventing new finds.
Gibeon is only a small example, Campo will follow btw. Gibeon,
but the main problem is, and here we observe already partially dramatic
price increases, is that the most productive find areas of the World were
and are now closed by the will of a handful unschooled barbarians,
Oman, Australia, Sahara, down to such hysterical actions like happened in
South Africa, Namibia, China, Poland, Argentina, Denmark....
This shortfall of new finds can't be compensated by Antarctica.

The scientific landscape will be poorer - researchers, collectors and
curators by far won't have that choice anymore and will have to spend a
multiple for their - compared to former times: few - meteorites.
For some of them it will be the end of their occupation with meteorites.

If not right away the real scientists find together to form a corrective for
these destructive ones among their fellow-scientists,
then we all can forget it.
Then all that, what the great majority among the professionals and amateurs
so laboriously and so incredibly successfully had built up over the recent
decades, will be lost. Irretrievably.

Well, looking back, we should be content with ourselves, that we permanently
recommended to the collectors as well as sometimes to the curators too, to
built up also a collection with the rarer and rare types from the hot
deserts, as long as it is still affordable and as long as it is still
possible at all.

Most of us, and neither many of the researchers, hadn't fully got it, what
we had. An epochal period in meteoritics. Never in history, there were so
many new finds made on the globe, like in the first decade of the 2000er
years.
And according to the will of a few, never again in future so many new finds
shall be ever recovered.
We all took notion of how a few countries forbade with their laws all
private involvement and with that also the meteorites themselves, and we all
rather found it amazing, how incredibly stupid people can be in these single
countries. - Now we face that on a global scale.

To come back, Count, to the Martians.
Who knows? Possibly there are laying some Martian rocks here around, with
remainders of cellular and fossilized life inside. Also ALH 84001 - check
the launch pairing numbers - certainly isn't alone.
And never in history of mankind the odds and chances, that such a meteorite
will be recovered were larger,
to answer one of the mightiest question men was asking.
Alas, I fear, the stones lay on Australian, Omani or Algerian soil - and
everyone, who would accept that task to find it, would be declared by that
kind of above mentioned people to commit a crime.
We have the technical abilities perhaps, to go to Mars and to retrieve
samples there and to dispatch them back to Earth. But they would be only
very limited spot tests. The technical means we have, but the financial
ones, we hardly can bare.
So we will never know. Because a handful clerks and a handful curators and
some people, who seriously pretend to be meteoricists prevent such stones
from being found.
(Sometimes I almost think, they must be acolytes of a creationist sect, that
they are so eager, that no meteorites at all shall be found, those stones,
which are all soooo much older than bishop Ussher allows to that sect.
Rrrocks older than all others here on Earth. Not thinkable, if they would
have evidence of life in a different place! A global sect, as patriots they
aren't, so much damage they cause to the meteorite research and the national
collections of the individual countries, which are paying their salaries :-)

Hey Count, gosh, we can't all, researchers and privateers, emigrate to
Canada or USA or Germany, where true interest in meteoritics exists, and
reason rules between civilized persons and which therefore will stay
liberal, only because some extremists usher in one country after the other a
meteoritic McCarthy-era.

We had it all and we had all possibilities.
Dramatizing? Not at all. The change, we're facing will be dramatic.

And unfortunately I'm too old, but have no grandchildren, that I or them
could live until Antarctica will have compensated, what these guys and gals
destroy now. (Gosh, why one can't retrain them to fields like artifacts,
environment, protected plants... I guess they would be so much more happy
and meteoritics would get rid of the most hindering obstacles).

Well, it's the old problem. Meteoritics as a branch of science is an unknown
niche.
That's why the prohibitionists do have carte blanche.
Count, how many of these countries with such kind of legislation are able to
run a space program?
A planetary space program? Also compared with Earth-bound astronomy,
seen the costs, the results and the possibilities meteorites offer, one
can't have any form of space exploration that efficient and that cheap like
meteoritics.
Perhaps one should inform the individual ministries of science in these
individual countries about,
to make an end to that menace and to guide the lost prohibitionists back to
be occupied with research on meteorites and not in abusing their expensive
and rare time to eliminate all chances for new meteorites being found.

Hope rules,
maybe we will see one day the recovery of such a Martian.
Hopefully it will happen in a country, where the finder isn't forced by laws
to keep the stone unanalyzed as doorstop or where he leaves it where it is,
because he doesn't want to waste nerves, time and money, in being harassed
by the state and the mettalibans.

Seen the technical limitations of rock analyzing in situ on a far world (or
even such things to dig deeper, to drill in the soil there) and seen the
enormous costs such efforts and missions consume,
I almost would think, that such a recovery rather or earlier would be made
in meteorites than with space probes.


Aaaaaaand to proof, Count, that I don't believe, that a SNC-price-explosion
will take place for that reason you forecast,
I'll email you privately to foist the very last slice of one of the most
spectacular looking shergottites upon you, still at a price from years ago.

Best!
Martin




-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com
[mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von Count
Deiro
Gesendet: Freitag, 7. Januar 2011 20:40
An: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Betreff: [meteorite-list] Organics on Mars

They've been sitting on this for thirty years. I predict NASA will confirm
biological life has existed on Mars by the end of the year. The price per
gram for SNCs will explode. Unfortunately, the loons out there will be
pushing the ersatz martians and the main stream media will be complicit.

http://news.discovery.com/space/viking-mars-organics-experiment.html

Best to all,

Count Deiro
IMCA 3536
______________________________________________
Visit the Archives at
http://www.meteoritecentral.com/mailing-list-archives.html
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Received on Sat 08 Jan 2011 08:50:24 AM PST