Religious "conspiracy" to derail life-on-Mars research?

[Dogmudgeon]

I snickered, too. Then I saw who wrote it. (Michael Brooks, consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense)

http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/06/is-there-a-mars-conspiracy.html">Is there a Life On Mars Conspiracy?

Gilbert Levin, who ran the 1976 experiment to search for life, the one that got a positive result, thinks it’s all down to a religious conspiracy dating back to the early 1960s. When I was researching my book 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, I travelled to Levin’s Maryland offices and listened to his account of the run-up to Viking. In 1961, he told me, the Executive Director of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, invited him to attend a meeting in Washington. When Levin arrived, he found himself among fifteen of the top scientific minds in the US. None of them knew what the meeting was about until John Olive told them he had been charged by NASA with directing an effort to look for life on other planets.

“Phil Abelson, editor of Science magazine, was sitting next to Dean Cowie, a nuclear physicist,” Levin told me. “He grabbed Dean by the arm and audibly said, “Dean, let’s get out of here. The Bible says there can be no life on Mars.”

Hmm ...

WWWoOD?

(What Would William of Ockham Do?)

--d!
Are you pulling my leg, or is your dog just real friendly?

[struggle4progress]

1. Oh, good work! From an alleged comment at a meeting 40 years ago, we deduce -- a conspiracy!

[Why Syzygy]

2. The article is current ..

The conclusion is the same. It's those evil Bible thumpers. Couldn't possibly be NASA's fault.
There could be no reason our government wants to conceal findings, based upon "national security" or some such.
Exactly how many "religious scientists" does NASA employ? There's supposedly a magazine editor who is a hold out.

:tinfoilhat:

But I have to admit there is a troubling history here. Rocket scientists joke about the “curse of Mars” because the success rate of spacecraft bound for Mars is lower than 50 per cent. The most famous failure is perhaps the 1998 Mars Climate Orbiter mission, which crashed onto the surface because one team of engineers used imperial units in their design, while the other team used metric.

So, the question remains: have attempts to explore Mars been secretly scuppered by religious scientists keen to keep planet Earth “special”? Have they been hiding their sabotage under a veil of incompetence? Or is it that scientists really can be astonishingly incompetent without any outside help? Only Dan Brown’s next novel can tell us.

[struggle4progress]

3. * shrug *

[Silent3]

4. "Only Dan Brown’s next novel can tell us."

I don't think the author of the story is considering the conspiracy angle all that likely. Is even entertaining the conspiracy idea out loud giving it too much credence? I suppose you could make that case, but given the flippant last line of the article, I'd say this isn't much more that idle cocktail conversation published as a minor article.

At any rate, I doubt anyone would consider detecting organic compounds, even using better-designed experiments, as utterly conclusive of life on Mars. A positive result there would at best boost the probability. Until we can do at least as well as seeing Martian microbes through a microscope, being 99.9% certain we aren't viewing recent (recent meaning from anytime during human space travel) contamination carried to Mars from Earth, I don't think any good scientist would feel comfortable making a strong positive assertion of life on Mars.

So even if this crazy conspiracy did exist, at most it would mess with marginal degrees of suspicion of Martian life. We simply haven't attempted anything that could have been close to conclusive yet anyway.

[charlie]

5. New Scientist annoys me

When they're not sensationalizing, they're giving space to writers who don't understand what they're writing about.

[Occam Bandage]

6. New Scientist is the National Enquirer of science. nt