Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. There’s no one there to raise them if you did, or is there? Is there life on Mars? That’s the question NASA has been trying to answer for the last forty years, and with the new Mars rover, we might get closer to an answer. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking with the people responsible for some interesting instruments flying on the Mars 2020 rover.
Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Matteo Borri], an Italian engineer who’s been living in the US for the better part of a decade now. He’s had various projects ranging from robotics — including a BattleBot — AI, and aerospace. [Matteo] is also one of the engineers behind the Vampire Charger, a winner in the Power Harvesting Module Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize.
Right now, [Matteo] is working on an interesting project that’s going to fly on the next Mars rover. He’s developed a chlorophyll spectroscope for NASA and the Mars Society. This week, [Matteo] is going to share the details of how this device works and how it was developed.
During this Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing various technology that’s going into the search for life on Mars and elsewhere in the galaxy such as:
- Chlorophyll detection
- Mars Rovers
- Various other hardware hacks
You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hacking with Fire event page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.
Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Friday, October 5th, at noon, Pacific time. We have some amazing time conversion technology.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.
You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
Are there geese that speak English on Earth? You can’t prove that there are none. Same for life on Mars. And what to do if you find some? Invoke a Prime Directive you can’t enforce?
Bet they’d complain about all the quackery going on in their name.
Agreed on the logic (you cannot proof a “does not exist”).
However, Prime-Directive probably isn’t called for, since “life” does not necessarily involve being sentient. For that matter, it does not even involve intelligence-whatever-that-is (look at people on the interwebs, they’re most likely alive, but intelligent?)
Strictly and pedantically speaking we could actually prove that life does not exist on mars. Since the volume it inhabits is finite, and has a finite amount of mass we could in theory actually examine every bit of it. This would likely involve destructively sampling every bit of it and removing it from the vicinity of mars once we’ve determined that bit does not have life on it. Eventually we’ll either find life or no longer have a mars to examine. At that point we could definitively say that mars did not have life on it. That’s entirely unpractical and likely not doable without spending such a large amount of energy and time that it’s pointless to talk about though.
You can’t prove you didn’t kill something in the process. This is NASA’s bread and butter these days – getting funds to unscrew the unscrewtable.
What if some of those examined bits were home to a form of life that we don’t currently have a technology to detect?
chlorophyll? More like Borophyll!
this guy gets it. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Is that opening line a reference to some song? I vaguely remember hearing that somewhere.
Life on Mars?
David Bowie
It’s a God-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling no
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
For she’s lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
It’s on America’s tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
‘Cause Lennon’s…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lul-Y8vSr0I
Love the Tom Jones parody nature of it.
According to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, the answer to Hackaday’s headline question is, “No.”
That’s the same answer coming out of other NASA investigations for the last forty years.
Whiile you can’t prove conclusively Martian life doesn’t exist, using Bayesian statistics the results from previous investigations keep decreasing the probability value.
Use Jaynes. The better Bayes.