July 27, 2022 • 15 mins
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?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's even here to dates here in spirit,
so it's a short stuff. Let's go Martian rock. Yeah, Chuck,
we did one recently on not just set, but you
know how humans might respond to what the protocols are
for talking to aliens. I don't remember what we named it,
(00:24):
but um we mentioned this in passing in that episode
because we're talking today about a particular chunk of rock
that was discovered on December twenty seven and Antarctica, and
it's called a l H eight four zero zero one,
and a l H stands for the Alan Hills region
of Antarctic, or was found zero zero one stands for
(00:46):
the fact that it was the first rock discovered of
the season and it was the five collecting season. So
that's where the eighty four comes from. And you might say, hey,
that's great, that's interesting. What's so remarkable about a l
A zero zero one? And I think we should talk
about that in depth real quick. Let's in depth real quick. Uh, yeah,
(01:08):
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 when she'd be like, Score didn't think way too
much of that kind of please with myself. Uh. So okay,
(01:31):
So ROBERTA. Score finds this thing. Uh, they bring it
back and it's um kind of Raiders of the Lost
Dark style, uh, stuck in storage for a remarkably long
time because they didn't really know what they had on
their hands until n 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
(01:55):
is from Mars and it was formed when the Earth
was still molten, about four and a half billion years ago. Uh.
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 sixteen
(02:15):
million years and uh then eventually found our solar system,
what like thirteen thousand 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
(02:35):
neighborhood in Alabama or something. You know, I think it
has plenty of times, but we've just so developed that
and moved 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 there, 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 for the ocean, of course. And then also took
(02:56):
remember the only person to ever be struck by a
meteorite I think was a woman in Alabama and like
the fifties or sixties remembered, Yeah, I don't 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
(03:19):
really kind of knocked their socks off were these orange
grains locked inside of it that they tested and they
found were made of carbonate. Uh. And they know here
on Earth, carbon it forms when water that has carbon
in it flows through cracks in a rock. That water
evaporates and leaves and that carbon remains. And so they said,
hold on a second here, if this thing has carbon,
(03:42):
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 towards the idea you that, uh,
perhaps there was some sort of evidence of life in
(04:03):
this rock. And they started looking very closely at it,
and as the BBC put it in an article that
we read, um, 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
(04:24):
Propulsion Laboratory who are studying a four and a half
billion year old piece of Mars, uh, 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,
(04:45):
but of course also people who said, no, this thing
was probably contaminated uh here on Earth like some kind
of terrestrial contamination and that explains what we're finding here.
So you had to sort of groups of I guess
for of a better word, naysayers and believers, and they
were studying this thing really closely. Yeah, and I say
(05:06):
we take a break and come back and talk about
what each team figured out. Let's do it. So, Chuck
(05:32):
Carl Sagan famously said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right,
And the idea of 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 um find extraordinary evidence to
(05:54):
back this up. And like you said, there was this
idea that perhaps this had been contain amanated 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 Alan Hills area of Antarctica that had been processed
at the same jet propulsion lab in a search for
(06:17):
something that looked like what was showing up on the
a l H eight four zero zero one 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.
Uh More and more people I think started to kind
(06:40):
of fall into the team believer camp um. But there
was one person, a specialist in uh microscopy or scoppy
what are you saying, I am going to say, microscope?
Oh well, alright, fancy pants, feeling like grape poupon here?
Do you look that your micro mic groscope? I do
(07:04):
when I examined my grape poupon. Uh So. Uh So
this person joined the team um 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.
(07:25):
And uh 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 uh,
(07:46):
these carbonate globes 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 um. And it turns out here on Earth
they're actually a byproduct of a specific kind of magneto
(08:10):
tactic bacteria. It's a cool word once you master it,
and it's it's a byproduct. 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 um,
(08:33):
non biologically, it requires really really high temperature, really really
high pH and uh 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
(08:53):
cars that carbon um, it would have had to have
been liquid water that um. I guess, how's 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 who? Again
(09:15):
like she had come on too, 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 um, not to be a jerk, but to again like,
that's what scientists are supposed to do. I think from
what I could tell, she was also taking it upon
herself too. She wanted to be the one rather than
say other scientists who might not be nearly as kind
(09:37):
or gentle about it. Yeah, team they say gives it
a negative connotation. Team septic Yeah yeah, I might as
well have said team poopoo pants. I like all three.
Uh So the team believer gets back on board to
do some more studying. They found organic molecules called policyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons p A h is that are in these
(10:02):
carbonate deposits that they had originally found. And here's the thing.
You can find this stuff, uh in the cosmos. You
can find it here on planet Earth when you char
your meat on a grill. Uh. They are the you
know you might have heard that if you grill things
in a certain way with big charred grilled marks, there
can be carcinogen carcinogenic compounds. That's what that is. Um,
(10:27):
And that just occurred to me. That's probably why you
don't grill food. Huh. Yeah, I'm not really happy about
the taste of charred stuff. But also I don't own
a grill, so that kind of profudes me from groom.
All right, so there's a lot of stuff. Um. So
that's what the p a h s are. But um,
they're created as a byproduct of life, which is sort
(10:48):
of the key as far as this rock is concerned. Uh.
And they found this stuff like when things decay is
like an oil deposits and cold deposits. Yeah, from when
microbes decay and become fossilies. Right. So here's the thing again,
just like those magnetites, phs can exist and be created
non organically, right, This is how they're part of cosmic
(11:10):
dust and all that stuff. Um. But again, the way
that these they showed up in this rock really made
this team say, you know, this is exactly what you
would expect. Um, this this these p a h is
to be deposited in this form if it had been
deposited by a decaying microbe rather than happening non organically. Right,
(11:32):
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 nineties, it's ninety six, it's the summertime. They
don't have definitive proof, but they did submit findings in
a paper in the in Science and the journal Science.
(11:54):
It was reviewed by a various steam panel, which did
include Mr Sagan or Dr Sakean. Yeahs their doctor, Reverend
Sagan esquire uh, and then NASA got involved and grilled them,
and they finally decided, all right, I think we at
least have enough to make a public announcement that we
have possibly discovered life on or evidence of past life
(12:18):
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. Uh. The BBC reports
that within just a few days a million people had
seen the Science paper online. And this is a science paper.
It's not generally the kind of thing that most of
(12:39):
the public will like click on and download and read,
and people were really into it. There were 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, UM, and they suggested that the scale of
the coverage across the world actually eclipse and exceeded the
(13:01):
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, UM 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,
(13:21):
and the public received it pretty well and pretty enthusiastically. Again,
they're talking about microbes that existed, uh, sixteen million years
or more ago on Mars, but 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
(13:44):
there's still team they say, or sorry, Team Skeptic, The
team poop poop Pants is very much alive, as is
are a team believer and the jury is still out.
It's there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that point to
it being life on mar Ours, and I think that
definitely sort of helped kick off a lot of our
(14:04):
subsequent research and interest on Mars. 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, Uh,
(14:29):
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 the grate and
rolled it back next to the ark of the Covenant.
That's right, you got anything else and nothing else? Good one,
everybody sure stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is
(14:53):
a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are really
listen to your favorite shows. M
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's even here to dates here in spirit,
so it's a short stuff. Let's go Martian rock. Yeah, Chuck,
we did one recently on not just set, but you
know how humans might respond to what the protocols are
for talking to aliens. I don't remember what we named it,
(00:24):
but um we mentioned this in passing in that episode
because we're talking today about a particular chunk of rock
that was discovered on December twenty seven and Antarctica, and
it's called a l H eight four zero zero one,
and a l H stands for the Alan Hills region
of Antarctic, or was found zero zero one stands for
(00:46):
the fact that it was the first rock discovered of
the season and it was the five collecting season. So
that's where the eighty four comes from. And you might say, hey,
that's great, that's interesting. What's so remarkable about a l
A zero zero one? And I think we should talk
about that in depth real quick. Let's in depth real quick. Uh, yeah,
(01:08):
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 when she'd be like, Score didn't think way too
much of that kind of please with myself. Uh. So okay,
(01:31):
So ROBERTA. Score finds this thing. Uh, they bring it
back and it's um kind of Raiders of the Lost
Dark style, uh, stuck in storage for a remarkably long
time because they didn't really know what they had on
their hands until n 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
(01:55):
is from Mars and it was formed when the Earth
was still molten, about four and a half billion years ago. Uh.
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 sixteen
(02:15):
million years and uh then eventually found our solar system,
what like thirteen thousand 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
(02:35):
neighborhood in Alabama or something. You know, I think it
has plenty of times, but we've just so developed that
and moved 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 there, 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 for the ocean, of course. And then also took
(02:56):
remember the only person to ever be struck by a
meteorite I think was a woman in Alabama and like
the fifties or sixties remembered, Yeah, I don't 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
(03:19):
really kind of knocked their socks off were these orange
grains locked inside of it that they tested and they
found were made of carbonate. Uh. And they know here
on Earth, carbon it forms when water that has carbon
in it flows through cracks in a rock. That water
evaporates and leaves and that carbon remains. And so they said,
hold on a second here, if this thing has carbon,
(03:42):
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 towards the idea you that, uh,
perhaps there was some sort of evidence of life in
(04:03):
this rock. And they started looking very closely at it,
and as the BBC put it in an article that
we read, um, 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
(04:24):
Propulsion Laboratory who are studying a four and a half
billion year old piece of Mars, uh, 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,
(04:45):
but of course also people who said, no, this thing
was probably contaminated uh here on Earth like some kind
of terrestrial contamination and that explains what we're finding here.
So you had to sort of groups of I guess
for of a better word, naysayers and believers, and they
were studying this thing really closely. Yeah, and I say
(05:06):
we take a break and come back and talk about
what each team figured out. Let's do it. So, Chuck
(05:32):
Carl Sagan famously said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right,
And the idea of 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 um find extraordinary evidence to
(05:54):
back this up. And like you said, there was this
idea that perhaps this had been contain amanated 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 Alan Hills area of Antarctica that had been processed
at the same jet propulsion lab in a search for
(06:17):
something that looked like what was showing up on the
a l H eight four zero zero one 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.
Uh More and more people I think started to kind
(06:40):
of fall into the team believer camp um. But there
was one person, a specialist in uh microscopy or scoppy
what are you saying, I am going to say, microscope?
Oh well, alright, fancy pants, feeling like grape poupon here?
Do you look that your micro mic groscope? I do
(07:04):
when I examined my grape poupon. Uh So. Uh So
this person joined the team um 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.
(07:25):
And uh 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 uh,
(07:46):
these carbonate globes 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 um. And it turns out here on Earth
they're actually a byproduct of a specific kind of magneto
(08:10):
tactic bacteria. It's a cool word once you master it,
and it's it's a byproduct. 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 um,
(08:33):
non biologically, it requires really really high temperature, really really
high pH and uh 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
(08:53):
cars that carbon um, it would have had to have
been liquid water that um. I guess, how's 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 who? Again
(09:15):
like she had come on too, 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 um, not to be a jerk, but to again like,
that's what scientists are supposed to do. I think from
what I could tell, she was also taking it upon
herself too. She wanted to be the one rather than
say other scientists who might not be nearly as kind
(09:37):
or gentle about it. Yeah, team they say gives it
a negative connotation. Team septic Yeah yeah, I might as
well have said team poopoo pants. I like all three.
Uh So the team believer gets back on board to
do some more studying. They found organic molecules called policyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons p A h is that are in these
(10:02):
carbonate deposits that they had originally found. And here's the thing.
You can find this stuff, uh in the cosmos. You
can find it here on planet Earth when you char
your meat on a grill. Uh. They are the you
know you might have heard that if you grill things
in a certain way with big charred grilled marks, there
can be carcinogen carcinogenic compounds. That's what that is. Um,
(10:27):
And that just occurred to me. That's probably why you
don't grill food. Huh. Yeah, I'm not really happy about
the taste of charred stuff. But also I don't own
a grill, so that kind of profudes me from groom.
All right, so there's a lot of stuff. Um. So
that's what the p a h s are. But um,
they're created as a byproduct of life, which is sort
(10:48):
of the key as far as this rock is concerned. Uh.
And they found this stuff like when things decay is
like an oil deposits and cold deposits. Yeah, from when
microbes decay and become fossilies. Right. So here's the thing again,
just like those magnetites, phs can exist and be created
non organically, right, This is how they're part of cosmic
(11:10):
dust and all that stuff. Um. But again, the way
that these they showed up in this rock really made
this team say, you know, this is exactly what you
would expect. Um, this this these p a h is
to be deposited in this form if it had been
deposited by a decaying microbe rather than happening non organically. Right,
(11:32):
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 nineties, it's ninety six, it's the summertime. They
don't have definitive proof, but they did submit findings in
a paper in the in Science and the journal Science.
(11:54):
It was reviewed by a various steam panel, which did
include Mr Sagan or Dr Sakean. Yeahs their doctor, Reverend
Sagan esquire uh, and then NASA got involved and grilled them,
and they finally decided, all right, I think we at
least have enough to make a public announcement that we
have possibly discovered life on or evidence of past life
(12:18):
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. Uh. The BBC reports
that within just a few days a million people had
seen the Science paper online. And this is a science paper.
It's not generally the kind of thing that most of
(12:39):
the public will like click on and download and read,
and people were really into it. There were 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, UM, and they suggested that the scale of
the coverage across the world actually eclipse and exceeded the
(13:01):
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, UM 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,
(13:21):
and the public received it pretty well and pretty enthusiastically. Again,
they're talking about microbes that existed, uh, sixteen million years
or more ago on Mars, but 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
(13:44):
there's still team they say, or sorry, Team Skeptic, The
team poop poop Pants is very much alive, as is
are a team believer and the jury is still out.
It's there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that point to
it being life on mar Ours, and I think that
definitely sort of helped kick off a lot of our
(14:04):
subsequent research and interest on Mars. 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, Uh,
(14:29):
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 the grate and
rolled it back next to the ark of the Covenant.
That's right, you got anything else and nothing else? Good one,
everybody sure stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is
(14:53):
a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are really
listen to your favorite shows. M
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