Life on Mars?
by
Gary North
Tea Party Economist
Recently
by Gary North: Conspiracy
Theories vs. the Religion of Democracy
There isnÂ’t
any life on Mars. There is no evidence that there ever was life
on Mars. But there is surely pork on Mars. NASA wants to continue
to slice off plenty of it.
NASA today
is eligible for sequestration, preferably 100% sequestration. NASA
does nothing worth financing by the private sector. It never has.
But now there are threats of sequestration. NASA is running scared.
So, whatÂ’s
a bureaucracy to do? Recycle that old favorite, life on Mars.
To keep the
search going, the media run stories once a month on “we’ve
almost found it.” The basic story never changes; only the names
of obscure scientists change. Because nothing is ever proven, NASA
has to keep adding new names of “almost, but not quite yet”
experts. I mean, it would look silly if the same old scientists
kept saying “almost, but not yet.”
The latest
report is in the Sydney Morning Herald. You will recognize
its outline. The outline never changes. It begins with a question
– a question that has produced no answer for a century. “Was
there once life on the Red Planet?”
A definitive
answer still eludes us, yet every sample from NASAÂ’s Curiosity
rover takes scientists a step closer to deciding whether Mars
– today freezing cold, bone dry and bombarded by radiation
– might once have been habitable.
Translation:
The pork search is open-ended. It will continue until NASA is sequestered
once and for all. The search will go on, no matter what. This is
government-funded science. No search ever ends until there is a
discovery that confirms the thesis. At that point, the budget doubles,
in order to pursue the discoveryÂ’s fabulous implications. This
is inter-generational pork.
Using its
sophisticated on-board laboratory, the roverÂ’s latest discovery
is of clay minerals – including sulphur, nitrogen, hydrogen,
oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. They were found in powder drilled
recently from a sedimentary rock near a former streambed.
The $2 billion
machine dug a 2.5-inch
hole. ThatÂ’s not quite a billion dollars per inch. It found
nothing significant. It will therefore continue to dig holes until
it ceases to function.
Look, the more
holes it drills, the lower the cost per inch of holes. These are
called “dry holes” in oil field research. They are called
“additional scientific research” at NASA.
They should
be called pork holes.
Elements
like these represent a cross-section of key ingredients for life,
suggesting Mars may once have sported an alien community of living
microbes.
Cross-sections
do not create life. Scientists donÂ’t know what created life,
but cross-sections surely didnÂ’t.
That said,
the new results fall far short of evidence for life itself –
past or present. All the same, the picture now emerging of conditions
on the fourth rock from the sun is encouraging. And scientists
are excited.
Pork always
excites scientists.
The latest
findings show that habitable environments existed on Mars, says
CSIRO astrophysicist Kurt Liffman. “It really is an important
result: there are signs of water alteration, where the water was
relatively neutral.”The environment
would have been conducive to primitive life-forms, Dr Liffman
explains, although there is no evidence for these life-forms so
far.
Translation:
“Nothing yet. We need another hole. Maybe there will be fossils
in the next hole. Each hole is 2.5 inches deep. There is plenty
of planet remaining.”
The Earth
boasts similar environments: dried lakebeds, for example, where
ancient bacteria reside beneath the surface.
Translation:
“There is life here on earth. There are also dried lakebeds
here. There is lots of dry dirt on Mars. LetÂ’s pretend these
were lakebeds.”
Science marches
on . . . at 2.5 inches per step.
Continue
Reading on www.smh.com.au
March
16, 2013
Gary
North [send him mail]
is the author of Mises
on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com.
He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An
Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright ©
2013 Gary North