Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Mars Rock with Signs of Life?

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

In 1996, real-deal NASA scientists announced they had discovered signs of ancient microbial life in a rock that had broken off Mars and landed on Antarctica. The news set off a controversy still going today. Do we already have proof of alien life?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here too Dave's here in spirit. So it's a short stuff. Let's go Martian rock Yeah, Chuck we did one recently on Not just steady, but you know how humans might respond to what the protocols are for talking to aliens

I don't remember what we named it, but we mentioned this in passing in that episode because we're talking today about a particular Chunk of rock that was discovered on December 27th, 1984 in Antarctica and it's called ALH 84001 And the ALH stands for the Allen Hills region of Antarctica was found The 001 stands for the fact that it was the first rock discovered of the season and it was the 84-85 collecting season So that's where the 84 comes from and you might say hey, that's great. That's interesting What so remarkable about ALH 84001 and I think we should talk about that in depth real quick Let's in depth real quick Yeah, we should for sure shout out geologist Roberta score

Who was the person who? Was out on a snowmobile and saw this thing for the first time every time she found one. She'd be like score Much of that kind of please So okay, so Roberta score finds this thing they bring it back and it's kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark style Stuck in storage for a remarkably long time because they didn't really know what they had on their hands until 1993 When they finally, you know, you started kind of looking into this thing a little bit more and they said wait a minute everybody This rock is from Mars and it was formed

When the earth was still molten about four and a half billion years ago And the way they figured it is that there was some Cataclysmic event that sent this rock launching out into space and it sort of bumped around for about 16 million years and Then eventually found our solar system What like 13,000 years ago? Yeah, and it got pulled into earth's gravity and eventually it Deorbited in landed in Antarctica. Yeah, why is it? It's so funny. It just seems like that stuff never lands in a suburban neighborhood in Alabama or something, you know I think it has plenty of times, but we've just so developed that and move so much earth

We just have no idea what what those rocks are. We're just pushing them out of the way And I guess they're even though it seems like there's people everywhere There's still a lot more land where people aren't around for something to land on definitely or the ocean, of course And then also took remember the only person to ever be struck by a meteorite I think was a woman in Alabama in like the 50s or 60s remember? Yeah, I think it was Alabama So it's it's raining meteorites in Alabama apparently Okay, so this thing was special. They realized it was from Mars and So they started to really take a much closer look at it and the first thing they discovered that

Really kind of knocked their socks off where these orange grains locked inside of it that they tested and they found were made of carbonate And they know here on earth carbonate forms when water that has carbon in it flows through cracks in Iraq That water evaporates and leaves and that carbon remains and so they said hold on a second here If this thing has carbon which is an essential ingredient of life Then that might mean this could be proof of life on Mars And it also says everybody that there was water flowing on Mars. Yeah another vital ingredient for life, right? So this kind of got their attention and focused it toward the idea that Perhaps there was some sort of evidence of life in this rock and they started looking very closely at it and

As the BBC put it in an article that we read They noticed near the carbonate grains worms and sausages that looked just like earth bacteria Except much smaller and that really got their juices flowing So now all of a sudden you have a team at the jet propulsion laboratory who are studying a four and a half billion year old piece of Mars Investigating it for possibly having harbored life at one point Right and we should point out that there were obviously was something like this There were people that were on what you would call or what I believe you called team believe or team believer But of course also people they said now this thing was probably contaminated

Here on earth like some kind of terrestrial contamination and that explains what we're finding here so you had two sort of groups of I guess for lack of a better word naysayers and believers and they were studying this thing really closely Yeah, and I say we take a break and come back and talk about what each team figured out Let's do it. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place?

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I'm Mangeh Shatikulur and to be honest I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born. It's been a part of my life in India It's like smoking you might not smoke But you're gonna get second-hand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast Tantric curses major league baseball teams cancelled marriages k-pop

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology My whole world can crash down situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father And my whole view on astrology It changed Whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are gonna change too. Listen to skyline drive and the iHeart radio app Apple podcast We're wherever you get your podcasts So Chuck Carl Sagan famously said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right?

Yeah, and the idea of A chunk of Mars bearing evidence of microbial life ancient billions of year-old microbial life is a really extraordinary claim so there was a lot of push among team believer to Find extraordinary evidence to back this up and like you said there was this idea that Perhaps this had been contaminated Terrestrially and there was a study that was conducted by an entirely different group of people from what I can tell that looked at other Martian rocks that had been found in the Allen Hills area of Antarctica that had been processed at the same jet propulsion lab and In a search for something that looked like what was showing up on the alh

84001 rock and they didn't find anything so that right there kind of bolstered the idea that this rock was special and unique and it Hadn't necessarily been contaminated here on earth. That's right. So that's one positive step forward for life on Mars mm-hmm More and more people I think started to kind of fall into the team believer camp but there was one person a specialist in Microscopy or scoppy. Sure. What are you saying? I'm going to say microscopy. Oh, well All right, fancy pants. Yeah, I'm feeling like great. Poupon here. Do you look to your micro my

Croscope? Yeah, yeah, I do when I examine my great Poupon so So this person joined the team basically saying or Advising them. Hey, we may want to hold our horses here Because we don't want to make fools of ourselves by going public with some findings that I don't even know if I believe and She started looking through this thing obviously through a microscope And when you get down there in microscopic land, it's they describe it on the BBC as terrain

Which is kind of cool like the terrain of this rock and saw these little black grains on the rims of These carbonate globs. Yeah, and they were very very tiny just nanometers in size and She learned that these were magnetic crystals made of iron oxide and iron sulfide Which was another big aha moment. Yeah, they're like really tiny compasses. They're magnetic and it turns out here on earth They're actually a byproduct of a specific kind of Magnetotactic bacteria. Nice. It's a cool word once you master it

It really is and it's it's a byproducts. It's a process of life that produces these little magnetites it can also be created in other ways, right? Non organically non biologically, but to do that to create these little magnetites nanometers across Non biologically it requires really really high temperature really really high pH and An environment that's not at all hospitable for life but that also means it's an Environment not at all hospitable for liquid water and since they had basically Essentially confirmed that liquid water had deposited those car that carbon

it would have had to have been liquid water that I Guess housed whatever bacteria that might have created those magnetites It was to put it differently It was another check in favor of the idea that something living had once been on this rock Right found by someone from team naysayer Yeah, who again like she had come on to I think to kind of save her colleagues from embarrassment She started out as a genuine scientist is supposed to she attempted to debunk this right not to be a jerk But to again like sure that's what scientists are supposed to do

I think from what I could tell she was also taking it upon herself to she wanted to be the one rather than say Other scientists who might not be nearly as kind or gentle about it. Yeah a team naysayer gives it a negative connotation team skeptic Yeah, yeah, I might as well have said team poo-poo pants. Yeah, I like all three So the team believer gets back on board to do some more studying They found organic molecules called Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PA H's that are in these carbonate deposits that they had originally found and Here's the thing you can find this stuff In the cosmos you can find it here on planet earth when you char your meat on a grill

They are the you know, you might have heard that if you grill things in a certain way with big char grilled marks There can be carcinogenic carcinogenic compounds. That's what that is And that just occurred to me. That's probably why you don't grill food, huh? Who me yeah, I'm not really happy about the taste of charred stuff But also I don't own a grill so that kind of All right, so there's a lot of stuff so that's what the PA H's are but They're created as a byproduct of life, which is sort of the key as far as this rock is concerned

And they found this stuff like when things decay is like an oil deposits and coal deposits Yeah from when microbes decay and become fossilized, right? So here's the thing again just like those magnetites PA H's can exist and be created non organically Right, that's just how they're part of cosmic dust and all that stuff But again the way that these that they showed up in this rock really made this team say, you know This is exactly what you would expect This this these PA H's to be deposited in this form if it had been deposited by a decaying microbe rather than Happening non organically right so again another big check in another box that supports the idea that life had once been

Inhabiting this rock that was from Mars Okay, so at this point. It's the mid 90s. It's 96. It's the summertime They don't have definitive proof, but they did submit findings in a paper in the in science in the journal science Mm-hmm. It was reviewed by a very esteemed panel which did include mr. Sagan or dr. Sagan. Yeah, okay? Mr. Dr. Reverend Sagan That's choir And then NASA got involved and grilled them and they finally decided alright I think we at least have enough to make a public announcement that we have possibly discovered life on or evidence of past life on Mars

and old Billy Clinton got up there made that announcement and It was a really really big deal as you would expect. I think the BBC reports that within just a few days a Million people had seen the the science paper online and this is a science paper It's not generally the kind of thing that most of the public will like click on and download and read and people were really into it There are news crews around the block in Houston trying to get a look at this thing Yeah, in the first week there were more than a thousand stories that NASA counted on on the announcement and they

Suggested that the scale of the coverage across the world actually Eclipse and exceeded the coverage of the first moon landing. So like you said, it was a really big deal I mean think about it Chuck the president of the United States arguably back then the leader of the free world Said hey some of our scientists think that they found evidence of ancient life on Mars Said it out loud in the Rose Garden at the White House. So yeah It was a huge deal and the public received it pretty well and pretty enthusiastically again. They're talking about microbes that existed 16 million years or more ago on Mars Yeah, it was still evidence of life in the scientific community. However, it was not received quite so well

Yeah, you know, I think since then All the evidence has been looked over and there is there's still team. They say or I'm sorry team skeptic Team poopoo pants is very much alive as is our team believer and The jury is still out. It's there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that point to it being life on Mars And I think that definitely sort of helped kick off a lot of our Subsequent research and interest on Mars. Yeah, just that first little hint I don't know if you could point like a direct line to funding or anything like that

But it wouldn't surprise me. No, you actually can I read that it actually created the field of astrobiology Which is pretty well funded today. Yeah, so it was a really big deal And the fact that the jury is still out like you said means that Somewhere I believe in Houston We have a meteorite that contains Evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. We just not everybody believes that's what it is And they probably put in a crate and rolled it back next to the Ark of the Covenant. That's right You got anything else and nothing else good one everybody short stuff is out

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