Harold Levison, planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute, debunks claims of Earth-origin Martian meteorite ALH84001 (ejected ~16M years ago) while acknowledging its potential microbial life hints, though not definitive. He highlights NASA’s 1996 Mars missions—Global Surveyor (Nov 5), Mars Pathfinder (Dec)—and Europa’s subsurface ocean as a more promising life candidate, despite sealed fissures and unproven habitats. Levison dismisses Cydonia "artifacts" as natural formations, stressing science requires extraordinary proof, while noting Mars’ terraforming potential hinges on buried water. Upcoming robotic missions, not manned ones, remain the safest path to exploration, given risks and costs, with runoff basins offering better life-preservation prospects than UV-blasted poles. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, as the case may be, and welcome to another edition of Kudo's Wats.
That's live talk radio all night long.
From the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands in the west, east to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast of Coast A.M. I'm Mark Bell.
And we've got what's going to be a very interesting program this evening, because I've got a lot of questions, and I'm sure you do too.
You all know that while I was gone on vacation, as occurs when I'm gone on vacation, because that's the way it is, have no other answer.
Big things break.
NASA suddenly announced that, lo and behold, they have a meteorite recovered, which they thought contained life.
Apossilized samples of life from the planet Mars.
And that was followed up, or on the heels of that, we got other news about Europa and the possibility of a watery center to Europa and that there might be life there too.
Non-trivial revelations indeed.
And I have many questions, and I'm sure you do, and we've got a man this morning who may be able to answer some of them, Dr. Harold Levison.
He is a senior research fellow, Department of Space Sciences, Instrumentation in Space Research Division, and works for the Southwest Research Institute.
His may be in physics, Franklin and Marshall College in 81, M.S. in Astronomy, University of Michigan, 83, and a Ph.D. in astronomy, University of Michigan, 1986.
His principal research interest lies in the area of the dynamics of astronomical objects.
In particular, he focuses on the long-term behavior of the solar system and its bodies, though he has undertaken both observational and theoretical projects in the pursuit of these interests.
Most of his research involves the development of large-scale numerical experiments.
So, if he researches the dynamics of astronomical bodies and objects, he'd be a perfect person to ask how a meteorite gets from there, Mars, to here, the third rock from the sun.
His work on the solar system includes studies of the long-term dynamic behavior of comets, the dynamics of objects in the Kuiper belt, I believe it is, the stability of Trojan asteroids, and the origins of Pluto.
He has recently performed a numerical integration of the orbits of thousands of the belt objects for the entire age of the solar system, about 4 billion years.
In addition, he has performed the largest CCD search to date for slow-moving objects in our solar system.
He is also a member of the team that used the Hubble Space Telescope to find objects the size of Halley's Comet in the belt 4 billion miles from the Sun.
And he has a professional chronology as long as your arm.
He's a member of the American Astronomical Society, Division of Planetary Science, and Division of Dynamic Astronomy.
So we have a heavy weight on our hands here.
unidentified
and in a moment we will ask him about all the recent revelations Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell It also, by the way, is fortunate we have the doctor here this morning because the following just cleared the wire.
Scientists later this year will head back to the Antarctic, the ice fields, where the famed Martian meteorite was found in the hopes of finding up to 1,000 more.
Ralph Harvey, who will lead the search funded by the National Science Foundation, has disputed NASA's claim that the meteorite known as ALH84001 indicated possible Martian life.
But he says more study of the rock and others is needed.
He says it's just a coincidence that his team is going back to the same area where the famed meteorite was found.
He says the trip was planned a long time ago.
Almost sounds like an announcement from the White House.
Every time they get ready to do something, well, we have this scheduled for the last year and a half.
At any rate, let's go to Colorado, I think Boulder, Colorado.
Yes, I actually came home the day of the press conference and spent two hours sitting in front of my TV watching the press conference and trying to understand exactly what these guys were claiming.
The actual article didn't come out until this week.
I also had a great deal of skepticism, and I still do.
As a matter of fact, I think the scientists involved also are skeptical.
I don't think anybody is really claiming that they found proof that life once existed on Mars.
What they're saying is, is there's a line of evidence, four different points in their argument, actually, which leads them to conclude that the simplest explanation, if you call this simple, is that life on Mars created what we see.
If you had been the lead scientist, team leader, who was looking into all of this, with the evidence they had, would you have gone public at that time?
Any idea why they just now are concluding that G, it's from Mars and G, it shows that there was life there perhaps millions or billions of years ago, whatever?
The next obvious question is how something gets from Mars to the Earth.
I talked to a scientist the other day, and obviously it has to be blasted from the surface of Mars, which means there must be some sort of impact on Mars.
The scientist I talked to the other day, and you can confirm or take issue with this, said, I said, look, wouldn't it have to be something about the size of the KT event, that which wiped out the dinosaurs here on Earth?
And he said, no, more like MT.
Would you take issue with it?
In other words, a gigantic explosion of some sort.
One of the questions I had when I saw all this stuff was that the life that they seem to be finding on Mars, if this is indeed what they're doing, is very similar to the life that we find on Earth.
That's how they're making all their arguments.
And I thought that was a little odd.
But I thought about it a little bit, and it could be that what we're seeing is not independent life.
That maybe Mars and Earth were swapping spit, as a friend of mine put it, over the entire history when life was forming.
And it could be that these two instances of finding life, if indeed Mars does have life, is not an independent occurrence.
If that's the case, and this is all really idle speculation, okay?
But if that's the case, our study shows that it's a lot easier to get stuff from Mars to the Earth than the other way around, then maybe the place that life actually formed was on Mars.
Well, asteroids and comets, particularly comets, probably came from regions where life didn't have a chance to form.
They both contain a lot of organic material, actually, very similar to the organic material found in the Martian meteorite.
But they probably formed in an environment that was just too cold for life to form.
And it probably, because it wasn't on the surface of a planet and didn't have a thick atmosphere, there probably wasn't liquid water where the asteroids and comets formed.
And so the likelihood of asteroids or comets having anything that any kind of life at all is quite small.
And indeed, most of the meteorites that we know about come from the asteroid belt and are chunks of asteroids.
And they show absolutely no sign of having life on them.
Matter of fact, that's one of the tests that these guys ran when they were looking at the Martian meteorite.
They took meteorites that are believed to come from the asteroid belt and ran similar tests, and they were all negative.
But it's my understanding that there's been a lot of discussion in the literature recently that suggested that Mars had a much warmer environment in the distant past.
There's clearly signs of running water, that there was running water on Mars, and there's now a lot of evidence in the atmosphere due to the chemical makeup of the atmosphere that's leading people to conclude that the atmosphere was much thicker.
But that was billions of years ago, not tens of millions of years ago.
Probably tens of millions of years ago, the environment on Mars probably wasn't very much different than the environment that we see there today.
Mars lost most of its atmosphere because of its low mass.
The first answer to that is it couldn't analyze this rock.
It could only analyze dirt.
And so that's one of the fundamental issues about what Voyager, I mean, excuse me, what Viking found.
First of all, Viking, because it was the first spacecraft ever to land on another planet, they were very careful.
And they chose the safest place for it to land, not necessarily the scientifically most interesting place for it to land.
So it's like sending what now technologically is a very primitive spacecraft.
After all, it landed 10 years ago, excuse me, 20 years ago.
Landing a very relatively primitive spacecraft in Antarctica, right, on an ice sheet and trying to figure out what the environment of Earth is like.
So it's not a very good measure, I think, of the more interesting places on Mars, the river valleys and the low points where we see sometimes we see fogs in the photographs indicating that there may be some kind of condensation water.
Somebody just sent me a fax from a place called South Lyon, Michigan, and says this rock is much more likely from Earth.
It says, come on, Art, a rock from Mars 50 million years ago.
Isn't it more likely that it came from Earth?
How about Hudson Bay or Guatemala after an asteroid hit?
This whole topic is not observable, so it is not science, but religious faith.
Signed Ron in Michigan.
So it sounds to me like perhaps a religious objection, very thinly veiled, but he's saying it is, on the part of science, a kind of a religious faith, Doctor.
To be honest with you, I don't know what that means.
It seems to me that this isotopic dating or fingerprinting that we've done on this rock is very, very convincing to me.
I was for a long time very skeptical.
The early work done on this subject, work 20 years ago, argued that you couldn't get your rocks off the planets in order to get them to move between the planets.
And that all the asteroids we'd all the meteorites we'd be finding would all be from the asteroid belt, which is this rubble pile of rocks that exist between Mars and Jupiter.
But I think that this fingerprinting that they've been able to do on these rocks is very convincing.
These isotropic ratios are exactly what we see on Mars.
And so I don't see really any scientific conclusion other than it came from Mars.
There's one exception to that.
It's an interesting story.
The place where it doesn't match what normally we see on Mars is in carbon.
And this was noticed a couple years ago by a group at the University of Arizona.
But this rock looked like every Other Martian meteorite, except for the carbon.
And they were sort of scratching their head about that, but they actually pointed out that the way you could change the carbon fingerprint is by life.
All right, so then that was during a time when you admitted a little while ago the atmosphere on Mars and the makeup might have been very, very different.
If life, all life on Earth right now were to be extinguished and billions of years were to pass and you were to look at Earth from space, would you know that man had been here?
However, if we look at your earlier model of Mars, the one you talked about earlier, there must have been some sort of catastrophic, either short-term or long-term change in the atmosphere and the situation on Mars to make it what it is today.
Yes, but the surface of Mars is a lot older than the surface of Earth.
And we can date surfaces in the solar system by counting craters.
If you look at the moon, for example, there are two types of terrain you can see on the moon.
There is the highlands, which have been pulverized by meteorites.
And there are these craters all over the place, and they're overlapping.
And that argues that the highlands on the moon are very old.
Matter of fact, probably dating back to the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
The seas on the moon, the dark areas, don't have a lot of craters on them.
That argues that it's relatively young.
The Earth has very, very, very few craters, a handful.
If you look at Mars, there's quite a few craters, indicating that the surface of Mars actually probably dates back a very long time, probably billions of years.
So it's much easier to hide things on the Earth than it will be on Mars.
Do we know anything about how long it might take for microbial life to become early primitive life, I don't know, polywalks, something that would crawl from the oceans that were once there?
Well, you're asking, I'm certainly not an expert on that.
You have to ask a biologist really what happened on Earth.
My recollection from college biologists, going back a bit, is that it took billions of years on Earth for single-celled organisms to evolve to multiple-celled organisms.
Does the finding of life on Mars make life throughout the solar system, the whole cosmos, much more likely?
I mean, here we've got Earth teeming with life, and Mars, which apparently once had life, and these are but the two planets that we've had a look to at.
Remember, I asked you all these, when you asked me about this idea of things moving back and forth, I listed all these questions we would have to answer before I would call it a viable scientific theory.
And if any one of those questions ends up being no, that a microbe could not have survived the impact that threw the rock into space or survived in transit, then I think we have strong evidence that life evolves on each planet independently.
I would have to look at the details of what they were planning to do.
And I would have to know a lot more about where you find life on Earth and whether it can be stored effectively, let's say, deep inside rocks or so that it would be safe from the hostile environment of space.
Space is incredibly hostile.
UV radiation, gamma rays, it's a mess.
So you really have to ask the question of whether things could survive.
All right, my next question is, where in this rock did they find it?
Because an obvious question is, when this rock slammed into Earth, could it not have acquired this fossilized life from Earth, from the crash, into Earth?
And rather than going through arguments of why that couldn't happen, I think the simplest explanation is again, they had these control samples, these meteorites that came from the asteroid belt.
And none of them showed anything similar to what we see in this rock.
Even though they crashed into Earth in a very similar way, in a very similar place to this particular rock.
And matter of fact, they studied asteroids of many different ages in order to make sure that there was something special about this particular rock when it landed.
And all the rocks of all the ages that they studied all were negative.
And there are, I know, people who have argued that that may actually be the case.
It's very hard for me to believe that these rocks could get out of our solar system very easily and then actually find another solar system and hit another planet.
I find that very, very hard to believe.
The probability of that happening, I would say, is quite small.
It's not zero.
It's quite small, and no one's really done the calculation.
My answer is that scientific method is a philosophy of life, just like any other philosophy of life.
And it has rules that you apply when you live your life.
Rules on how to collect data, rules on how your thought processes should move in order to arrive at conclusions.
I tend to believe in that philosophy, and I'm living my life by that philosophy, but there are certainly other philosophies.
And all I can tell you is by applying that particular philosophy, which by the way has been very successful, our entire technological civilization is based on the writings, if you will, if you want to sort of put it in the religious context of the scientific method.
But it's still just a philosophy of life.
And there are other people that could have different philosophies that are just as valid, I presume.
don't believe them they have a right but such a great to believe that i guess if i have to believe mark uh...
If we are able to repeat, go to the Antarctic, find more rocks that are arguably from Mars, that contain fossilized remains of microbial life, where do we go from there?
In other words, once you have established that, and more rocks, no doubt, will establish it, then what?
It seems to me that the real one of the real missing pieces of evidence in this whole exercise, if you read the paper, is the inability for them to actually chemically analyze one of these tiny fossils.
We have yet, as far as I understand, we do not have the technology to chemically analyze something that small.
And it seems to me that what the next, I think from the point of view of the people that actually wrote the proposal, the people, I mean, wrote the paper, and the people that are doing this particular line of research is not only to collect more meteorites, but to develop the technology necessary to analyze those very small samples.
Because it seems to me, again, from what I understand, I'm not an expert, that they can do that with the fossils of bacteria that we find on the Earth.
Okay, these guys are 100 times smaller, and therefore they can't do it with these guys.
And I think they may be able to make a much more convincing case if they can do that.
And Rude Art jumped right into the middle of the Martian story, the meteorite that landed in our, was found in our Antarctic, because I was so dying to know about it.
Didn't ask enough about Dr. Levinson's work and the organization he works for, Southwest Research Institute.
And we'll get to all of that and more about the meteorite Mars and the fact that we all may be Martians.
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Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast2Coast AM with George Norrie.
Let me ask you this.
What is going on to necessitate this so quickly?
There seems to be a deadline in their brains and they need to get this done.
They know their whole New World Order is inches from going up in flames.
So they're afraid of the awakening and they know that their collapse is about to take place because we've been asleep at the switch and we've let incredibly corrupt interests take control of our society.
Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell Dr. Levison's principal research interests lie in the area of the dynamics of astronomical objects.
So that makes him a great person to ask about how a meteorite got from there to here.
He has an A.D. in physics, Franklin and Marshall College, 1981, an M.S. in astronomy, the University of Michigan, 1983, and a Ph.D. in astronomy, the University of Michigan, 1986.
His professional chronology is entirely too long to read.
He's a member of the American Astronomical Society, Division of Planetary Science, and Division of Dynamic Astronomy, and works for the Southwest Research Institute.
And Doctor, I want to ask you about that, because I should have in the beginning of the program.
My day-to-day work consists of sitting in front of a computer terminal and writing computer codes.
Remember that the solar system, human beings have only been around for a very short period of time.
History is thousands of years.
But the solar system itself has been around for 4.5 billion years.
And in order to try to understand how the solar system formed, which is my primary interest, the way we do that is we run experiments on the computer.
We actually write computer code that allows us to form planets or follow the evolution of planets over long periods of time.
And then we can look at what comes out of the computer code and compare it to what we see and try to get an understanding for what the physical conditions were back at the time the solar system formed.
At least that's one way of trying to figure out how the solar system formed.
And that's really my expertise, is following the behavior of objects and the orbits of objects for very, very long periods of time.
Department of Physics, University of Central Florida.
It reads, Two possible source craters for the Martian meteorite, ALH84001, have now been identified through an extensive search of impact craters on Mars.
The 1.9 Kg 4.2-pound meteorite, recently identified as showing possible evidence of past Martian life, was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and was blasted off Mars during a meteorite impact about 16 million years ago.
Dr. Nadine Barlow, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, identified two likely source craters through a search of a crater catalog she compiled while doing graduate work at the University of Arizona in the mid-80s.
A number of characteristics of the meteorite helped Dr. Barlow narrow the search for possible source craters.
So she believes she has identified the actual crater on Mars from which this meteorite came.
I mean, I would have to look at the evidence that you would present, obviously.
You know, scientists are natural skeptics.
But it certainly doesn't surprise me if this turns out to be the case.
As you and I were discussing earlier, the surface of Mars is very old.
We see all these impact craters all over the place.
And this type of impact, like I said, tens of millions of years ago, that's fairly recent in the time scales that we think about when we think about impacts.
And for example, like I said, the highlands on Mars are 4 billion years old, or 3 and a half billion years old.
So it certainly doesn't surprise me that such a recent event as the one that probably knocks this meteor off Mars will be...
Because the things of which it was made had the materials in it that would form an atmosphere.
Comets, for example, have a lot of gases in it.
Matter of fact, the oceans on Earth probably, I mean, one of the theories is that the oceans on Earth actually came in in the forms of comets and in the Earth way back in the early beginning when the the Earth was forming.
So what happens is that it slowly leaks away.
You can imagine, for example, a balloon with a small hole in it, right?
If you're pumping air in faster than the air can get out, then you'll get a lot of air pressure.
That's what happened early on in the history of Mars.
But then as the impact rate on Mars went down, as it did throughout the entire solar system, very shortly after the major planets formed, that leak is continuing and continuing so that the atmosphere slowly leaks away.
Here are three questions about the Mars rock from a man in Alhambra that he doesn't think can be answered.
Let's try him.
How large a mark would be made on the surface of Mars to eject rocks at Martian escape velocity?
Rocks large enough to survive the upward journey through a Martian atmosphere, space travel for many years, then a fiery re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, and why do we not see such a huge impact area on barren Mars?
Well, I guess we answered that one already.
Apparently, we do.
What evidence of scorching from re-entry through Earth's atmosphere would be found on the outer surface of the rocks, and what kind of microbes could survive such a scorching?
Well, indeed, that's how they identify these things as meteorites, is that the outer surface has a crust that's been burned.
And matter of fact, one of the interesting facts about this rock is when they found the organic material on it, one of the questions that they asked is whether that could be contamination.
And what they found is that the burned surface of the rock didn't have any of these materials on it, because they were probably destroyed during the entry process into the Earth.
And it was only when they got deep inside that they saw the organic material.
But that few degrees, since the planets are so far from the Sun, actually are huge linear distances.
So that the plane that the Earth sits in and the plane that the Mars sits in are slightly different.
And the target of the Earth and the target of Mars is so small compared to the thickness of that plane that I don't think you can say anything about where the launch points actually were or anything about the coincidence that it hit the pole.
There's the Martian Global Surveyor, which is an instrument with essentially an orbiter, which will study the atmosphere of Mars and take high-resolution photographs of the surface in many wavelengths.
There is a lander that has a little robot that's fairly small.
I guess it's, I've seen people, a model of it.
I guess it's a couple feet by a couple feet, which will go around and sort of poke under rocks and that kind of thing.
And I really think we need to, and then there's a Russian spacecraft, which essentially has both aspects of that.
I think our policy really needs to be driven by the science.
And I think, although this is a very fascinating result and may be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century, if it turns out to be right, I think it's very much premature for us to start changing our scientific goals in our space program in order to meet this result.
If there was higher life forms on Mars, like people or elephants or what have you, it was destroyed, was it not, when the comet that knocked that rock into orbit hit the surface, similar to the destruction of the dinosaurs, but much worse.
Well, not as, I mean, I'm obviously curious about it, and I've read some things about it, and although my research area, it's not my research area.
My feeling about it is that the pyramids, as far as I understand it, can be explained by the wind patterns we see on Mars and as erosion artifacts.
The faith on Mars is, I think, just a coincidence.
And I think the story I can tell is that I don't know if you recall, a little, I guess that was a year and a half or two years ago, Galileo flew by an asteroid called Ida.
And one photograph does not convince me, especially since you see things like this, like I said, the Face on Ida, until we go back and take more images of that particular feature.
I certainly agree with you, but there are many people who are saying that NASA, for some reason, seems very disinclined, almost amazingly disinclined, to want to go back and re-photograph it at all.
I think NASA really needs to, right, I'm not a representative of NASA in any way, so you have to take that into account what I'm going to say.
They have a very fine line they need to balance, that they have to give the impression, and it's a true impression, that their interest is the scientific interest.
And so this idea that there's a faith on Mars is viewed with skepticism, to say the least, by the scientific community.
And therefore, as a representative of the scientific community, they can't put too much faith in it.
They can't make the faith on Mars the driving reason why they have to go back to Mars.
Well, if you look at Mars and you were to set a list of priorities of scientific interest in terms of what to go look at first, second, third, and fourth, where would Cydonia fit in?
If that image comes back and tends to confirm with even greater detail or begins to suggest with a heavier weight that this object or these objects are not natural.
What evolution of thinking would that put you through?
That's a hard question and we're coming to a break here, so I'm going to let you think about that during the break.
And we'll come right back and we'll also ask about what Galileo found regarding the watery undersurface of Europa and the possibility of light there as well.
Maybe it is common.
My guest is Dr. Harold Levison from Boulder, Colorado, and we'll be right back.
unidentified
You're listening to Arc Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks tonight, an ongoer presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
You wanted me to speculate how my thought processes would change if these objects on Mars actually ended up being artificial.
That's right.
And you asked me to contemplate that question.
I've been contemplating that question.
And it's a very difficult question.
Because if that did turn out to be the case, or indeed we found evidence of intelligent life elsewhere, you know, with the study programs looking for radio waves, it would represent such a fundamental change in how we view ourselves that I couldn't even begin, I guess I'm going to rip out on this question, to speculate how my thinking would change.
The analogy I came up with while I was waiting is that I have a young baby girl.
She's two years old.
It's my first little girl, first baby.
And somebody asked me about a month before she was born, well, how do you think it's going to feel to be a father?
And I could have tried to answer that question, but it wouldn't even have compared to the change that actually occurred.
And I really think that's, it's on that kind of level.
It would be, it would shake my, you know, it would shape my view of the universe down to such a fundamental level.
Well, basically, it was a study done that said if intelligent life were discovered, it would thoroughly upset the general public, but it would particularly upset scientists as a group more than any other.
I guess that a lot of scientific paradigms would be suddenly turned upside down, and careers that have been built on preaching about those paradigms would go up in smoke.
Well, but that happens all the time in the scientific field.
I mean, it's very fast.
I work in a field that didn't even exist five years ago.
And I'm the reason why I'm surprised is, now, of course, this is a biased view because I'm a scientist, but I would tend to think that scientists are the most agile, well, maybe not the most, but a very agile group when it comes to adjusting their thinking to what we actually observe.
And I must admit, I don't know off the top of my head the escape velocity from the surface of Mars.
So I'm going to be going to disappoint your listener a little bit.
As for their second question, the escape velocity from Mars is small compared to the orbital velocities that are involved as the planets orbit the Sun.
So really what would define the impact velocity on the Earth would have something to do with really Mars's orbital velocity and the Earth's orbital velocity, and not actually the velocity in which the rock left the surface of Mars.
He then wants to know how much volume or mass would make it through our atmosphere at those speeds, whatever it would be, escape velocity from Mars and then impact on Earth.
In other words, how much mass would likely make it through to crash into Antarctica?
Now let's skip very quickly before I open the lines.
I've been purposing to do that.
Europa.
I mean, right on the heels of the Mars news, suddenly they release information about new photographs of Europa or photographs of Europa that would seem to indicate it may have a watery interior, leading again to speculation that where there is water, there very well may be life.
I think that Europa is one of the most interesting objects in the solar system.
The idea that it may have a liquid center or a liquid ocean, actually it's rock in the center.
So the structure of Europa would actually be sort of a rock-like planet or moon covered with a liquid ocean, covered with a solid ice surface.
If it really does indeed have a liquid ocean, that would be the structure.
So it's not down in the core where the water is.
It's sort of in an intermediate level.
That idea actually dates back, I think, to about 1978 or 1979 and actually predates Voyager's visit to the Jovian system by a few months.
The images that Galileo has recently taken of Europa is only really slightly better than the images that the Voyager actually took, because Galileo hasn't really gotten very close to Europa yet.
And there's some tantalizing things that we see which tend to indicate that at one time the core of Europa must have been liquid.
And again, it has to do, one of the primary things, is the lack of craters.
We talked about that earlier.
You can date the surfaces of these objects by actually counting the number of craters.
And there are very few craters on Europa.
So that leads us to think that it's young.
And it looks sort of like, if you look at pictures of Europa, Antarctica with these ice flows and chunks of ice floating off and running into other chunks of ice and that kind of thing.
Whether that kind of geology is forming now or whether it formed millions of years ago and Europa has since solidified and now is solid ice, no one really knows the answer to that yet.
I'm not sure if Galileo will ever be able to answer that question.
But remember, the last, Galileo is on a very eccentric orbit, so it spends most of its time very far from Jupiter.
And every once in a while, every couple months or so, it goes screaming through the satellite system of Jupiter so that it goes by one of the main moons of Jupiter.
It hasn't yet done that for Europa.
And the kind of images we've been getting of Ganymede, for example, which is the one it really flew by, has been spectacular.
And I think we were going to learn a lot about Europa when Galileo actually does the really close flyby.
If they were, again, coming back to the likelihood of life, if the hypothesis, if we were to discover there is indeed microbial or even greater life under the surface of this moon,
would that then, would a discovery like that on Europa then suggest that life is very likely, or would you again suggest we've been spit trading with Europa and everything else close by?
That's exactly what the argument is, and no one knows how hot that fire is.
What is causing the main heat source inside of Europa is the tidal effects due to Jupiter.
Just like the Earth has tides in the ocean that are several feet, some places even more, where the gravitational tug of the moon lifts the water sort of away from the Earth and there's a bulge.
Well, everybody's familiar with that, with the water.
They may be less familiar with that, but the land.
It turns out there's a land tide, that the shape of the Earth itself, the rock, is deformed by the moon.
It's about nine inches, I think, is the number that comes to mind.
And as the Earth turns, the rocks are moving around because of this tide.
And that's actually slowing the Earth down.
So the day is getting slightly longer as time goes on.
And what it's also doing, and that energy from the rotation of the Earth, is being turned into heat in the interior of the Earth.
Now, it turns out that's not very important for the Earth.
Now, is there some reason to believe that if all these conditions are as we believe they might be, that life could have evolved and be there, in fact, now well beyond the microbial stage?
And I ask that because there has been, I believe, recent research at very, very, very deep ocean levels here on Earth, places where sunlight virtually never ever reaches.
I mean, it's totally pitch black, probably very much the way it is on Europa.
Arthur C. Clarke, I believe, the man who speculated about the Clark belt and then had it named after him, wrote in a science fiction book, as I'm sure you're well aware, something to the effect of you may go anywhere, you may do anything but hands off Europa.
Do you suppose that he was thinking about exactly what we're discussing right now when he wrote that?
As a scientist, if we had an opportunity to go to Europa and begin to find out whether life in fact existed there or not, what would be your cautions about doing that?
Even with respect to Mars, as we begin to extend out and look for life elsewhere, should we be so tampering?
NASA and the Soviet Union have taken very extreme measures for Viking, for example.
They boiled it and they got it very hot.
They wanted to make sure that it was sterile when it went to Mars and not to contaminate Mars.
And as far as I am aware, the programs by Russia now and the U.S., which are going to be launched at the end of the year, they're both taking very, very careful precautions about contaminating Mars with life.
And I think that is a very smart idea.
Europa is a totally different issue.
I don't see, although there has been talk within the scientific community of actually sending a spacecraft, a lander, to Europa, that, with the current technology, all that really will be able to answer, I think, is whether there is a liquid ocean on Europa or not, right, using seismographs similar to what we do to study the interior of the Earth.
A couple, tens of miles worth of ice is awful hard to get through.
I mean, if you would have asked somebody in 1958 whether we were going to go to the moon in the next decade, I think the answer would probably have been, I don't believe that.
Right?
The wonderful and exciting thing about science is it goes in directions very quickly that we can't even imagine.
I study the re if you go back and look at your textbooks, you'll learn the structure of the solar system is that there are four rocky planets in the inside, and then there's an asteroid belt, which is a rubble pile, right?
We're talking about the possibility of life elsewhere.
Europa, for example, with an ocean under tens of miles of ice.
We're talking with Dr. Harold Levison in Boulder, Colorado.
He is a senior research fellow, Department of Space Sciences for Southwest Research Institute.
He has an A.B. in Physics, Franklin and Marshall College, 1981, and an M.S. in astronomy, University of Michigan, 83, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Michigan, 1986.
He is a member of the American Astronomical Society, Division of Planetary Science, and Division of Dynamic Astronomy.
He was with the Ames Research Center.
He was with the U.S. Naval Observatory, the Orbital Mechanics Department, and so many more places that I don't have time to go through them all.
He's the guy to ask questions about this sort of thing, and I promise I'm about to open the line.
unidentified
so if you want to get a question in get on the phone Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
I think now, as we look back, we can probably say with pretty good certainty that some people in government might have been aware of what was going on and they turned their cheek the other way just to let it happen.
I also believe that some bigger groups got involved with al-Qaeda to do what they did on that horrible day.
This wasn't just a small group of people who came in and did their thing.
There was a much bigger picture there.
And if you see the events that have unfolded since this tragedy occurred, how we've lost rights, how we used it to go in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how it has really not stopped.
Because it's going to continue.
We're going to have more and more episodes and more and more involvement in other countries.
And just mark my word, this planet is going through an incredible change.
And thank God we've got you here to talk with us about it.
Now we take you back to the night of August 21st, 1996 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell Now, I promise we'll go to the phones, and we will in just one second.
Well, what has been discovered in the last few years is a belt of comets, very similar to the asteroid belt, that it surrounds the planetary system.
Pluto is actually, rather than thinking of it as this lone thing sitting out at the end of the solar system, which is the view that astronomy has traditionally had, turns out to be the largest member of perhaps the most populous part of the planetary system.
It's a ring of debris left over from the formation of the planets, just like the asteroid belt is a debris field.
But this is where a large fraction of the comets that we know about and have named have come from.
And this region of the solar system was actually suggested about 50 years ago by Puiper, who you mentioned at the beginning of the show, who was a very famous American, actually was Dutch, but he spent his professional career in the U.S., a planetary scientist.
He suggested this ring may have been there 50 years ago.
And that idea sort of faded away from favor, mainly because no one would have a chance to be able to observe this thing.
And it was sort of forgotten about and pretty much rediscovered.
The idea was rediscovered about 10 or 15 years ago.
But the first proof that it was there was actually only gotten in 1992.
So here's a whole new region of the solar system, previously unguessed, that we're currently studying.
I'd like to ask your guest if anyone has ever done a computer model based upon the planetary dynamics of the theories proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky concerning the Venusian comet,
Martian being pulled out from an inner orbit and how that might be related to the Martian meteorite thing.
The answer to that question is that as we currently understand how dynamics work, that whole thing could not work.
Venus is in a very stable orbit, and when we study Venus's orbit, go forward and backward and integrate its orbit for billions of years, it stays exactly where it is.
Velikovsky's ideas, I believe, state that this whole event must have happened around 2,000 years ago, if I remember what he thinks correctly.
And that clearly could not have happened.
Venus really needs to be there in order to keep the Earth stable.
The Earth's orbit being stable really depends on Venus being where it is.
And so the fact that the Earth is even here indicates that Venus was there since the formation of the planets.
And so I think that any really serious modeling of Velikovsky's ideas seems to indicate that they're not right.
You admitted that it's possible that life might exist under the surface of Europa in that ocean at something past the microbial level.
Is there any reason to say, no, it could not be when I would suggest to you that something as complex, for example, as Earth's dolphin might exist below the surface?
Is it not possible that intelligent life could certainly develop along an entirely different plane which wouldn't depend on technology for advancement?
Or would it automatically depend on technological advancement to be measured as we understand it?
One of the pieces of evidence put forward for the idea that the meteorites in question did in fact come from Mars originally is that the composition of the meteorites matches a distinctive signature of gases that were present in the Martian atmosphere.
And indeed, here is a criterion matched by the Sidonian research proposed by Horace Crater, Stanley McDaniel, and Richard Hoagland.
The geometry of the mound configuration and the face is unquestionably a distinctive signature.
And my question is, why isn't the geometry of the mounds that are proposed by Dr. Horace Creeder and the appearance of the face enough of a distinctive signature of possible intelligent origin to raise NASA's priorities in investigating those objects?
All right, let me add to that a little bit before you respond, Doctor, with this facts.
Art, respectively, I think it should be pointed out to the doctor that there are, in fact, two known NASA Viking photographs showing the face on Mars, frame 07A13, 035A72, taken from differing perspectives and differing sun angles.
It only occurs during the formation of the satellites.
So as far as I understand it, the only sources for heat right now are radioactive decay, which is probably the most important thing in the Earth, for example, and the tidal effects due to Jupiter.
There's also, in Saturn, for example, in the planet itself, there's a heat source that has to do with differentiation.
Originally, for example, when Europa was made, all the rock and the ice was mixed together.
But as the rock settled out, that also heated the planet.
But again, that's a process that has come to completion.
These systems are old enough that a lot of these initial things have probably gone away.
unidentified
Right.
But if the surface is flexing because of the gravitational forces from Jupiter, could it be altering the pressures enough, you know, through the watery surface and into the core of Europa?
I think it's very hard, when you're talking about temperatures and pressures as high as you think about in the core, it's very hard to make an analog of what is solid and what is liquid.
And I think that's where the dispute's coming, the dispute in that area is coming in.
The fact that we have a very strong magnetic field to me indicates that stuff must be moving around in the core in order to produce the magnetic field.
And if that's the case, then it's not really a solid the way that you would think as a rock, right?
it's a recently new result and all i'm not a geophysicist so i'll again it's not my expertise but i have heard claims that there's evidence that that is indeed decayed well of course we know we yes we know that our uh...
They have organic chemicals in them, and they are meteorites or meteors that flow around through the system.
And I'd like to hear what he has to say about them.
And what is the difference between this meteor that we found in the Antarctic and the carbonaceous dichondrites that commonly occur and have organic chemicals in them?
Well, the fact that this meteorite has organic material in it is indeed not a rare occurrence.
Meteorites from the asteroid belt, which is where most meteorites are believed to come from, including the ones that the caller is asking about, do have a lot of organic material in it.
Matter of fact, everywhere we look, we see organic material.
It's believed that Pluto has a significant amount of organic material.
Comets are very dark, and it's believed that that's because their surfaces are coated with sort of a tarry gook.
When we look at interstellar space and look at the dust grains between the interstellar, between stars, we see a lot of organic material.
The organic material itself is not necessarily a sign of life.
What is special about this particular meteorite is that it comes from Mars.
And Martian meteorites, and indeed Viking data, show that usually do not have organic material associated with it.
And the fact that this particular Martian meteorite does is very intriguing.
But again, and I found this interesting, the Antarctic is a place where when they find rocks, in all likelihood, they are not from Earth, but they are from elsewhere, meteorites or at least from elsewhere, correct?
My guest is Dr. Harold F. Levison from Boulder, Colorado.
And he's talking about the Mars meteorite.
And we're talking about many other things, including Europa, where there may be who knows what lying beneath tens of miles of frozen ice.
unidentified
You're listening to Arc Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from August 21st, 1996.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's alright and it's coming on We gotta get right back where we started going Love is good, love can be gone We gotta get right back where we started going Do you remember that day?
It's sunny day When you first came my way, I said no one could take your praise And if you get hurt, if you get hurt I don't think that I can take my back on your bed.
Oh, I had it coming up.
We got it right.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired August 21st, 1996.
If we ever get to the point where we can, I'm sure you're familiar with the term terraforming.
Would it be possible, in your opinion, to take one of these likely places for life and eventually have the technology to make it a habitable location for human beings?
There's been a lot of speculation on that, and people have actually been working on that question.
Reputable scientists have been working on the question of turf warming Mars.
And it seems, although it's not within our technology today, it certainly may be in the near future, not meaning our lifetime, but within a few generations.
You need to warm Mars, and you need to increase its atmosphere somehow.
And like I said, the details have not been worked out on that.
And there's a lot of issue, actually, as to what is actually there.
There's been speculation that there's a large amount of water stored underneath the surface of Mars as a permafrost.
If that's there, it would be a lot easier than if it's not there.
We just don't know.
And so if you're interested in doing something like that, you really need to do the scientific, basic work to find out actually what the raw materials, which raw materials are there.
And I would say NASA's in the process of doing that, slowly and too slowly from a lot of people's point of view.
But they are attempting to evaluate whether that's indeed possible or not.
The models that I've seen, and again, I'm not an atmospheric scientist, but a good friend of mine actually is, and he works on this particular topic, tend to point to the fact that the atmosphere will warm due to the carbon dioxide that we're pumping into the atmosphere.
Models show that.
There's now, I think, beginning to be evidence that the atmosphere actually really is warming.
I think, and I've gotten in, this is more of a policy discussion than a scientific one in many ways, but getting in discussion with friends of mine who are not scientists, my argument is that we should not be running the experiment.
Because by the time, the atmosphere is very, I don't know if you are familiar with the word chaotic.
They intend to bombard the ionosphere with tremendous amounts of energy to actually heat it.
And there are a lot of people who are, and I'm one of them, who's fairly concerned about this process.
I mean, tremendous amounts of RF that are going to be concentrated on a very small specific portion of the ionosphere to produce heating.
For what purpose?
The stated purposes of this are two.
One, to study the effect it will have on communications, because we use the ionosphere for long-distance communications.
And two, strangely, to map underground caverns and caves.
In other words, some sort of return bounce, a very strong return bounce, that would somehow map subterranean caves and so forth.
It's very strange, but since you brought up the subject of chaos and small effects, small energies or something having large effects, I thought I would run that past you, but if you're not familiar with it, it's going to be very hard for you to comment on it.
This may not pertend to Dr. Levinson's field of expertise, but my question is with the speculation of long-term effects of meteor and meteorites on the planet, what effects might meteors play or meteorites play considering the number that bombard the atmosphere every year on the deterioration of the atmosphere?
But on top of that, the reason why I'm answering that so certainly is without knowing a lot about the models, is because we have core samples of ice sheets which can date back the atmosphere for a very long period of time.
And even more than that, we have deposits on ocean floors that are now above ground because they've been pushed up.
And the indication is that the Earth's atmosphere hasn't changed appreciably in that regard over the times we've been able to measure.
So I think there's observational evidence that the raining in of stuff doesn't have a global effect.
What about, conversely, what would a great deal of space travel, that is to say, objects like the shuttle and so forth, leaving the atmosphere with great force?
If you look at craters on the moon, for example, go out with a pair of binoculars and look at craters on the moon.
Forget the fact that they're all round.
Right?
Independent of the angle it came in.
The angle really doesn't play a role.
unidentified
I see.
And one more question, Doctor.
Maybe out of your particular line of study, but I have an idea from the recent discoveries from the shuttle photograph of storms on the Earth, the sprite that extend way up into the ionosphere.
Do you think it might be possible that ozone is created by lightning storms and therefore replenishes the ozone layer constantly?
It has always been thought that storms would not replenish ozone, but as he pointed out, there's recent evidence of these incredible spikes from storms that extend way into space.
I have an interesting hypothetical situation that I thought about that I haven't heard any discussion about in regard to the rock from Mars and the, I suppose, the plant material that was on the or inside the rock.
Do you think it might be possible for a meteor to strike Mars and then come and strike the Earth, and there would be a splashing effect from the heat generated, that that could be something that would be both a combination of Mars and Earth that had splashed up into the atmosphere and then or up above the atmosphere and then gone for thousands of years around the Earth and eventually landed and was found.
I actually brought a little pamphlet home with me which are going to tell us.
The Mars Global Surveyor, which is the orbiter that will be imaging the surface, is as of January 23rd, so this is getting a little out of date already, was supposed to be launched November 5th.
The Mars 96, which is the Russian spacecraft, is supposed to be launched on November 16th.
Again, these dates are quite a bit out of date, so I don't know how accurate they are.
And the Mars Pathfinder, which is the micro rover and lander, is supposed to be launched in December.
There's a fundamental difference between the Earth, the energy sources on the Earth and the energy sources in Europa.
The Earth, at least the surface of the Earth, gets most of its energy from the Sun.
The Europa is five times further away, which means it gets 25 times less energy, which makes the Sun not a very important source of energy for Europa.
So Europa is being heated from the inside out, while the Earth is being heated from the outside in.
There's no thick atmosphere on Europa.
Remember, the Earth has got such a nice, comfortable place to live with regard to temperature because it's got this thick blanket of gas that's holding the light in.
If in the next few years they recover a lot more meteorites, or some more meteorites, and also discover fossilized life of varying sorts, or even something more exciting like plant life or small animal fossils or something like that, I take it then the excitement level would go through the roof.
The field is shrinking drastically due to budget cuts by the federal government.
And my feeling is that the field will be something like a third smaller in five years.
It's not a very good outlook.
And the people that's going to hurt the most are the young people.
Especially when it comes to situations like postdocs or a situation that I'm in.
I'm what's called a soft money position.
And that is, I have to raise my salary from grants, which I write, I've got four or five of them to various federal agencies.
And it's very hard to break into those programs.
And as the money tightens up on those programs, the tendency is going to be to fund people who they know will produce, who are the people that are already established, rather than newcomers.
I think it's great.
You should go to graduate school.
It's going to be the best few years of your life.
I feel that way.
And it's an investment in just the activity of actually doing science.
And you have to look at it that way.
It's going to be very tough to get a job at the end.
Well, I certainly think so, but I think a politician would answer you can only pay for certain things.
And society has to decide what is more important to it.
I think that astronomy, although the numbers sound large when you look at it in just, you know, in terms of what our salaries are, for example, is actually a fairly small amount compared to other things in the federal budget.
And I think that it, this is again my personal belief, is that it's short-sighted, that science does a lot of very positive things on many levels in our society.
And by destroying is too strong a word, but by decreasing the scientific output, I think it has very negative long-term effects on society.
If you had your way and money was no object and you could direct the priorities of the U.S. manned space program, and you could say, all right, let's go to the moon, or let's go to Mars, or let's go to Europa, or, you know, we just really were pouring the bucks in and you could set the priorities.
We do not have the technology currently to get a man to Mars, but we have the technology of getting machines to Mars.
And on top of that, if you try to take a man to Mars, you have to move all the food and water and all the air, and that is a lot of mass to get to Mars that you could fill up with instruments if you were just sending robots.
I had a lady who called me up not long ago with a simple but interesting question.
She said, why are the planets basically round?
And when you consider the Big Bang, she asked, well, were all of these planets, in essence, thrown out from the Big Bang in a liquid form, much as a drop of liquid would be thrown out if you were to just toss a glass of water up into the air?
Well, those are very, very, very different questions.
The solar system, which is the sun and the planets, formed about 4 billion years ago.
The Big Bang is believed to have occurred something like 15 billion years ago.
The number is debated by a factor of 2.
It can be half as much or twice as much, depending on who you talk to.
The creation of the universe, what was believed to be created, was just a plasma, very, very hot gas.
And that all the stars and the planets formed through evolutionary processes that occurred inside of stars over that 10 billion years in order to set up the situation where the solar system could form.
So the planets are, the Sun is believed to be something like third or fourth generation after the Big Bang.
Most of the stuff for which the rocky planets are made of actually was made inside of large stars early on.
Stars are being formed and they're dying all the time.
And the big stars, when they die, they blow up.
And they spew out all this processed material.
And it's that that we're made of.
And the stars that are forming now have a slightly different chemical makeup than the solar system has when it formed because the process has been continuing.
It's an ongoing, you could look at the galaxy as a living organism where this process of birth and death of stars is going on and on.
I would like to think that as we get to understand physics a little bit better, that we will be able to try to explain what happened.
You know, there are two modern branches of physics, and they don't necessarily agree with one another, general relativity and Einstein, and quantum mechanics.
And there are regimes where each of these theories are valid, and regimes where they're not.
And the Big Bang, right after the Big Bang, is where they overlap so closely that we don't have a theory that unifies those two yet.
But I think it's within, I mean, maybe within our lifetime, we may have an answer.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Levison in Boulder, Colorado.
unidentified
Hi.
Yeah, this is Walt Marino.
Is there a particular reason why our solar system lies in a relatively flat plane, why it couldn't be planets circling in all sorts of planes relative to the sun and relative to each other?
And what happened is that the sun and the planets, but most of the mass in the solar system is the sun, they formed by a collapsing gas cloud that was much, much bigger than the size of the solar system.
And that cloud had what's called angular momentum.
And imagine what it is.
It's sort of a rotation.
And as a dancer or a skater, their arms are out.
They bring their arms in, they spin faster and faster and faster, right?
That happened when the solar system formed.
As this cloud, which wasn't rotating very fast to begin with, collapsed down to something the size of the solar system, it started rotating very fast.
And what happens in that situation is that there's so much of this angle momentum, this rotation, that the sun, in order to form, needed to spew out, well, spew out is not exactly the right word, needed to create this disk around it that had most of that angle momentum because the sun itself could not get all that angular momentum in it.
And the planets formed from that disk.
So there's really very good understanding of the physics that formed the disk from which the planets formed.
unidentified
So theoretically, it could not be in any other way.
And that whole idea that you enter a solar system and you're going to find a planet with life is sort of my mindset when I got into astronomy.
It really influenced my thinking a lot.
And also the work of Carls Hagan and Frank Drake sort of suggested that that may be the case, that there may be a lot of life.
But it turns out there's been some recent work that has suggested that life, at least the complex civilization, may not be as common as we think.
For example, there's work that recently been done on Mars, which shows that its obliquity, that's the tilt of its axis with respect to the orbital plane.
The Earth right now is at 23 degrees and Mars is very close to that.
But according to recent models, that tilt of Mars' orbit turns out to be chaotic, just like the chaos in the atmosphere, and swings wildly all over the place.
My friends who do atmospheric modeling of the Earth tell me that if that were to happen to the Earth, that we would be in a perpetual ice age.
So you have to ask, well, why doesn't it happen to the Earth?
And the reason it doesn't happen to the Earth is because we have a large moon.
And the moon stabilizes the obliquity of the Earth.
That's what these models have shown.
Well, large moons are rare, right?
Of all the major planets, if you ignore Pluto for a moment, the Earth has the largest moon compared to its own mass of any other planet in the solar system.
And again, remember this whole idea, we talked about it a little earlier, of Trying to get an idea of what is the norm by studying one example is very dangerous.
I think the current belief and scientific thinking on that is it was a comet that hit the atmosphere.
And it was so small enough comet that it couldn't penetrate the atmosphere.
So as it was shrieking through the Earth's atmosphere, it blew up.
And so the actual explosion, which occurred above the atmosphere, was very violent, knocked down all those trees, but yet did not leave a crater.
unidentified
So because I was reading that they could not find any kind of, you know, any kind of debris or whatsoever that a meteorite might have hit it or an asteroid of some sort.
I mean, the answers are interesting, but it's actually the process and the challenge of figuring these things out, which is what I love and why I do this.
Here is a facts, Doctor, from Long Beach, California, Al.
Is it conceivable, Doctor, that at one time, Mars may have had a life-supporting atmosphere which was, in effect, stolen or sucked away by a large comet passing by at a great speed?
If yes, could this happen to the Earth?
That is, in effect, our atmosphere being sucked away or burned up by a large celestial body passing near Earth?
It is true that impacts can blow off an atmosphere, and that the erosion of Mars' atmosphere may have been somewhat affected by things hitting Mars and blowing the atmosphere off.
But I know of no way for a comet passing by to suck an atmosphere off the planet.
Well, I'm going to go back to an argument I made a little while ago about the fact that science is a philosophy of life.
And it doesn't preclude religion.
I know some very religious scientists, and I know some scientists who are not religious.
And so I don't think the one really impinges on the other very strongly.
I know arguments in both directions.
To answer a question about Fred Hoyle's statistics on the formation of molecules, I'm not personally familiar with his work in that regard.
I do know that experiments as far back as the 60s and 70s show that it's very easy to get organic material out of inorganic material by putting in some energy source.
There was work by Stanley Miller, I think in the 50s or 60s, where he took ammonia and methane and common gases that are found in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn and put sparks through it to simulate lightning, and he ended up with simple proteins and amino acids and the basic building blocks of life.
I don't think that it's hard to get the basic chemicals from which life forms.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Levinson.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes.
I wanted to mention to the doctor that I found a really interesting website at Penn State University by a physicist named Jerry Smith.
He had several designs for an antimatter rocket to Mars that would launch in 2005, take 45 days to get there, and have 30 days on the surface and take 45 days to get back.
The question I have is why do they think these small creatures that are 100 times smaller than microbes on Earth, first of all, why do they think this comet or this asteroid is from Mars?
And I've heard they're why this meteorite is from Mars.
I've heard they've got it down to two specific sites from Mars.
Also, there's only a couple of places on Mars that it could have possibly come from.
And I understand that our artificial human intelligence, you know, computer-wise, hasn't really evolved that far.
And I also understand that the Hubble telescope was repaired by astronauts.
And so is the lunar rover and numerous satellites.
And that a lot of the experiments conducted onboard Skylab could not feasibly be achieved at this level of technology we have through robotics exclusively.
And there was a lot of sort of impromptu, resourceful inventing, you know, to not underestimate the human mind's capability.
I feel it would be to our interest if we could have a manned Mars mission for this particular purpose.
Also, one other thing I wanted to add is somewhere on the polar regions of Mars, if you could set down a soft landing, sort of like a nuclear furnace that could melt a shaft down to the hard-packed ground underneath, no tellings would remain.
It would all gasify the CO2.
You'd end up with it setting on the ground forming a huge cavern, a nice archaeological excavation site, because if they do find any high-tech there from a previous civilization, that's where you find it, where time and space sort of come to a freeze.
As your earlier remarks indicated, over a million or so years even a Coca-Cola bottle would disintegrate, but not under that ice pack.
However, the cost of getting a man to the space telescope was less than building another space telescope.
And that's probably not true for Mars.
And so you have to look at the economics of it.
And the other issue, of course, is that technology does not yet exist to get people to Mars, but yet we can certainly send spacecraft there.
The thing that people have to be more aware of, and I think it's sort of a problem in the PR machine of NASA, is that exploration of space is a risky business.
And things like the Mars Explorer we're going to lose spacecraft every once in a while.
It's a very risky thing to do.
And if you're willing to take that risk, then I think robotics are the way to do it.
One advantage of looking at Antarctica is not only do you have these ice sheets, but the runoff from large areas as ice moves around and it melts a little bit down there tends to concentrate all the rocks in one place.
So there's a much higher density than just the average density that you would expect over the Earth.
And I'd like to know that would the polar regions of Mars, would that be a good place to check for some kind of life that might be a little bit more upper in the stages of evolution?
Well, I would think that the best place would be to look is actually dig down and try to get to the perfrost lower down in Mars.
The polar regions of Mars are very volatile.
In the summertime, a large fraction of them sublime, and they're these large, that's what causes the dust storms of Mars, is that the carbon dioxide, which is a major component of the polar caps of Mars, actually melt away, turn into atmosphere, and then blow to the other side and condense out.
And so it's a very volatile place.
I would think that perhaps the best place to look would be to dig a big hole and see what you see far underneath the surface.
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What about that giant, what is it, like a giant hole there on Mars?
Well, there's a big runoff basin, which is clearly caused by water.
And that would be, if I were going to design an experiment to look for life on Mars, I would go into that runoff basin and I would dig a hole.
One of the problems with finding life near the surface of Mars is that the UV radiation from the sun is very strong there and it destroys organic material.
That's why we don't find organic material on the surface.
Well there are quite a few uh meteors from Mars around and uh like I said the one that they're talking about in all the press releases with life is a very special one.
It's a particular rock that is very different from the other rocks that we think we found from Mars.
Doctor, what is the new technology that allowed them after being in possession of this rock for so long to suddenly come out and say what they have said with regard to it?
Well, on some level, we are beginning to experiment with antimatter.
Antimatter, I mean, it's certainly not known whether antimatter exists in nature as something like a rock of antimatter.
The theory, before the development of a new the Big Bang has gone through many revisions in its history.
And before the latest one, which is called the inflationary universe, many people thought that there may be as much antimatter as matter in the universe.
And there may be stars and galaxies made out of antimatter.
The current thinking on that is if this new inflationary model of the universe is right, that's probably not true.
It's possible to make antimatter in these big particle physics accelerators.
And indeed, no one has yet been able to make an atom, let's say a hydrogen atom, of antimatter.
But they've been able to get close.
And it's my understanding, again this is not my expertise, that we may have one atom within the next few years of antimatter.
Okay?
It won't last very long, but we'll be able to create it.
So we are a long way away from being able to create a large amount of antimatter, large enough to, let's say, pilot a spacecraft.
A lot of energy packed in a very little amount of mass, which is exactly what you want to do for a spacecraft.
After all, to get something into orbit, a little, let's say, something that weighs a few pounds, most of the energy goes into transporting half the fuel half the way.
Sure.
And so if you could find a more efficient way to pack the fuel so that the amount of energy you get out per gram, let's say, is a lot higher, then you're much more efficient.
So I can see, you know, I mean, in a sort of a very tenuous way, that we'll be able to make use of that.
There's still a lot of, you know, huge amount of technical questions, and we're nowhere near being able to be able to do that.