As for Viking, It was a “failure” in the sense that expectations were so different about what we would find on Mars. Before Viking, for a century many thought Mars was a living planet. When the pictures came back of a dead planet that looked a lot like the moon, public interest dissolved. When the experiments for life were inconclusive funding dried up for more Mars probes. I think I read somewhere that Viking cost taxpayers over $7 billion if adjusted to 2026 dollars.

At any rate, this particular topic has run its course and I think I will be careful addressing it again in the future. I acknowledge you for your detailed explanations, and I both appreciate them and have learned from them.

1. Viking’s failure caused a two decade lapse in Mars exploration

No….And I am not sure what you mean by ‘failure’… It found no concrete proof of life, ONE of the life experiments- the labeled release (Dr. Levin’s experiment) gave a result that Levin claimed for decades was proof of life. It wasn’t, the problem wasn’t just that life can be more alien than we are expecting, but the conditions of the surface were more alien than expected… Viking proved nothing conclusive about life on Mars, but that hardly makes it a failure, and I don’t think its failure to find life impacted the length of time it took for us to return. ANY tests on the surface are – in my opinion- unlikely to EVER find any sign of life or its remains- the surface is far too hostile – unless life progressed to the point that it could leave a fossil trace, we will NEVER find life on the surface. And since the leap from single cell to multicellular life seems to be the primary stumbling block … Earth was stuck with single cell organisms for 2-3 billion years before we made that leap, and then things exploded from there…. It is unlikely we will find obvious fossils on mars

The surface of Mars will break down any organic molecules into component parts very rapidly. I am not hostile to the idea that Life once existed on Mars… I actually think there is a fair chance it did…. and I will go a step further – if life ever existed there, then- as mars changed- it adapted and went DEEP underground…. we find extremophiles miles below the surface on Earth- but looking on the surface for life is highly unlikely to yield a positive result.

I am not sure why you call Viking a failure…. It taught us about the surface conditions and gave a null result on life at that spot, I hardly think it was responsible for the cadence of probes sent to Mars…

Certainly, if it HAD found life, conclusive proof, then yeah, fleets of probes would have been sent- but that was unlikely in the extreme from the very beginning.

2. Budgets OBVIOUSLY have an influence over mission planning.

Well… obviously that is true- but the implications that you draw from that obvious fact are just… weird…. The monetary constraints, along with the size weight and power (SWaP) budgets mean that you have to find ways to collect the most meaningful data that you can with what you have got… If you get an instrument on a mars mission, the odds that you will get another shot are pretty damn low, there is a selection process and its very rigorous- if you cannot justify the resources you require then you are cut.

You seem to think the incremental approach is some way to game the system – to draw out the the funding… it simply isn’t the case. In fact, think about Viking- If a previous mission had truly analyzed the surface conditions and had revealed the presence of super-oxidative compounds on the surface, then Levin might have had a chance to design a better experiment that would be more conclusive.

The more you understand the conditions under which you conduct an experiment, the more confident you can be in its results.

The rovers found no life, but they launched them over and over- finding signs of life would be cool, but highly unlikely even if you assume that was there once

For sure, no scientist would want to drag out their investigation of potential life in the solar system. I agree that makes no sense from their perspective. But for long term NASA budget planners who are not scientists and whose job it is to secure funding from Congress and the White HOuse, it might make sense. Try to get out of scientist mode for a minute and think about that.

See, that is where you get into la-la land… NASA has NO idea what the priorities of the next administration will be- That is why we are losing the space race against the Chinese (yes- losing it despite the recent success of Artemis II). Every 4 years priorities change more or less randomly, how can you possibly think that they can somehow attempt to game the system decades ahead of time…. ? When changes of administration also lead to changes in NASA leadership at many levels…. there is no permanent cabal that can oversee a decades long plot…

Believe me- I could write a goddamn novel on the organizational dysfunction at NASA, but the sort of thing you are suggesting implies a level of continuity and competence I _WISH_ NASA had….

I have a fascination with organizational dysfunction… Sometimes its systemic, sometimes its the result of a few toxic people- but I find it fascinating, and valuable to study… if only as a study in what NOT to do.

I remember walking into the building of a high profile organization at NASA, and walking down a hall that was covered with over 27 ‘motivational posters’…. the walk down that hall told me what I needed to know- it was a culture of fear led by inept bullies… Big fish in a little pond that wallowed in the power they had…..and I was right.

the most venal are also the most stupid, there is no way to game the system as you are suggesting.

Now, other than the AI post I made, I DID state in detail my reasoning for what I believed. It’s in the earlier posts. ER even said my points were detailed and well made but he just didn’t agree.

As I have said, there are two important points: 1. Viking’s failure caused a two decade lapse in Mars exploration. 2. Budgets OBVIOUSLY have an influence over mission planning. Do you deny these two things? I have also said several times in this thread that what I was talking about is not a “conspiracy”. I even said that in the title of one of my posts on this thread. For sure, no scientist would want to drag out their investigation of potential life in the solar system. I agree that makes no sense from their perspective. But for long term NASA budget planners who are not scientists and whose job it is to secure funding from Congress and the White HOuse, it might make sense. Try to get out of scientist mode for a minute and think about that.

Thank you for the detailed info about Dragonfly and its payload. It does seem like this is a good mission that could produce results. But how many times have we sent missions to Mars just looking for “the conditions to support life” without instruments like what’s on Dragonfly? We’ve done the same with Europa missions even though they are typically a decade or two apart. What would make sense to me from both a science and budget standpoint would be a standardized suite of life searching instruments on EVERY lander/rover we send out.

Yes I’m not an expert and I appreciate your long post explaining your knowledge on the topic. That may be time consuming but it is much better than two or three sentence comments that are essentially “you’re wrong; that’s stupid; you’re a flat earther”. I actually have very thick skin but you got under it that time.

OK I apologize for overreacting.

That sort of use of LLMs will never give you anything of any value, it will just give you what it thinks you want to hear- in fact if you do not understand that, then you really need to be careful about using LLM’s at all… Of COURSE if you prompt an LLM with “NASA incremental approach to finding life is in part to maintain funding”, you are going to get conspiracy theory bullshit-

I wasn’t insulting you, since you didn’t post your thoughts, you pasted the output of a large language model that was trying to string words together in a way that its algorithms and weights and pre-programmed ‘decision’ making routines ‘decided’ would satisfy what you wanted… you will get words selected in an order that follow the patterns of similar conspiracy arguments in its training dataset… it provided no references or sources for its ‘claims’…

The idea that NASA and/or its scientists do an incremental approach with missions that take decades in order to game the system for funding is conspiracy theory bullshit… and it IS on par with the flat earther nonsense. That may not be what you want to hear, but I absolutely DO have far more experience with how NASA works, or at least worked until it was destroyed, than you do. I know far more about Dragonfly than you do since the key instrument looking for the signs of life was designed and built in large part be the people in my branch that I worked in.

I responded WITH MY ACTUAL thoughts and words, and suggested a book you should read that I found made an excellent scientific argument about how one would go about looking for life WITHOUT contaminating that search with any preconceptions about what life is.

One of the instruments on Dragonfly is the LDMS (Laser Desorption Mass Spectrometer) -It is part of the DraMS (the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer). The scientists working on it were very literally across the hall from my office.

I even briefly worked on a Dragonfly LDMS subproject investigating a way to use a femtosecond laser to weld the Calcium Fluoride window directly to the stainless steel output port of the LDMS laser, so that they could have a vacuum tight seal without using epoxies to seal the window onto the output port. Epoxies ‘outgas’ – even the best ones, and under the influence of the intense UV laser and the atmosphere of titan the outgassed molecules could contaminate measurements. I was able to weld the CaF2 window onto the steel, it was an extremely strong weld and most importantly didn’t leak…A couple of papers came out of that work. More on this can be found Here: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/fall_2018_final_web_version.pdf
( Page 12 -when I was 80lbs heavier and had much more hair)
and the paper is Here:https://opg.optica.org/abstract.cfm?uri=LAC-2020-LW1B.2

sorry, there should be a free version available from NASA but I am not finding it for some reason…

Dragonfly’s DraMS (the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer) was specifically built to look for _complex_ organic molecules (again, you should read the book I recommended in the post you inexplicably deleted- – this is the best test possible to determine if there is life) I am not sure exactly what more you could possibly ask for in terms of searching for life… what tests could possible be better in your opinion?! It even DOES have ‘microscope’ with ~100 micron resolution…So the entire premise of your objection was based on an incorrect assumption- but again, if you see something with the microscope that looks ‘weird’ or ‘lifelike’, what does that tell you?

Remember the debacle with the Allan Hills meteorite? “Hey guys look! We found something that looks a whole lot like earth microbes!!!”
Well, that turned out to be bullshit and demonstrated that trying to use morphology as a life indicator is dangerous.

Pareidolia is a great thing for survival “Hey, Grog, does that silhouette over there in the moon light sort of look like a sabretooth tiger?” That human ability to fill in the gaps when you have too little real data has a high false positive rate – but its an evolutionary benefit- if you _think_ you see a tiger and run you are safer than if you decide to wait for more data… but what’s great for survival, in this case, is a liability in trying to do science on the unknown.

This is not some incremental approach somehow trying to game the system to get more funding…that really is not how it works… in fact it simply CANT work that way on these sorts of missions- think about the time scales involved… Do you think a researcher really thinks “Ok, I want to design an instrument that miiiight return tantalizing indications of life… so that when the next call for missions comes around IN A FEW DECADES I be more likely to get funded again to find something maybe incrementally even more exciting….ASSUMING of course I am not retired and ASSUMING that I manage to survive the extremely competitive process to get on the mission ”

You have to see how silly that sounds, right? Some serious scientist would waste decades of their life just to game the system for funding that may or may not happen many years later, when there is an intense competitive process to be one of the lucky few to be selected to build an instrument for a mission?

Or do you think that NASA itself thinks this way?
It makes no logical sense either way…

Dragonfly’s initial design phase started in 2019, it will land in 2034 , I assure you along every step of the way up to launch all the reviews are about MAXIMIZING the science return…. You have NO concept of just how much back and forth goes into making sure the instruments on there are providing the most definitive data possible astrobiologists want to find definitive proof of life, they are not thinking about how they might devote a decade of their life to something that MIGHT provide a teaser for the next mission to Titan…. neither is the agency, that is ludicrous – Cassini launched in 1997 Dragonfly will launch ~30 years later… do you REALLY think they are gaming the system so they can get funded for another mission in 30 years ?

The scientists know what they are doing, Dragonfly is going to search in the best way possible- It will be flying from place to place drilling into the subsurface and analyzing the material for molecules that are are indicative of life, molecules that simply cannot be explained by abiotic processes…Again-if you look at the book I recommended in the post you deleted for no valid reason- this is the best, most unbiased way to go about searching for alien life in a completely alien environment.

The book – if you really want to learn how scientists have to approach these things is “Life as no one knows it” By Imari Walker

So as pointed out above Dragonfly has a microscope, it has the far more useful DraMS which cam search for molecules that cant be explained by abiotic purposes- WHAT MORE do you want? What do YOU think would be better?

So lets imagine a science fiction scenario-Lets say Dragonfly lands on the shore of a Methane sea, and the shore is COVERED in the remains of dead Titanian seaweed- for all we know it could look like shards of ice or just a slushy mess of water ice and methane under the main camera… it looks at it under the microscope and we see that the slush consists of tiny little regularly sized particles with a a dark spot in the center- some scientists remark that the particles SORTA look like cells, but other scientists point out that the dark spots simply could be the result of the tar like hydrocarbon mist that has been observed to rain out of the titan sky under certain weather conditions and so when they land in the methane sea they serve as nucleation points for freezing water ice which then washes up on the shore… so the microscope has given you nothing conclusive… you take a sample and use the mass spectrometer and lo and behold you find extremely large complex molecules that no plausible abiotic process could create and concentrations of some trace elements at levels 1000′s of times higher than is found anywhere else in the landscape or in the ocean….THAT would be a pretty damn good indication of life… THAT is why tools like the mass spectrometer are far superior to the microscope….

Now… your use of your moderator power in this case was entirely inappropriate- I could, of course undo your action, but I won’t…. I am going to assume you maybe had a bad day, I would like to believe you’re better than that sort of behavior. You can choose to acknowledge that and undelete them, or not- whatever… I won’t get into some pointless Moderation war with you… To this point since Pod made us ModGods I have yet to delete a post, you using it on the science board because I disagreed with you on a topic I have actual experience on and you have none is childish.

Finally… you are using AI completely backwards.

NEVER ask it to confirm your views, because it almost always will (not sure you saw my joke post where I had it act as a collaborator to design a relativistic monkey supercollider? It was agreeing and ‘excited’ about the scientific merit of the project).

These AI’s are extremely useful for some things, and in many ways are – even at this early stage- a revolutionary tool on par with the creation of the internet…. but you are using it backwards.

It is very good as a research tool, as long as you are careful… but if you use LLMs to confirm your world view it is FAR more dangerous than selecting only news sources that conform to your own world view-down that path is madness- literally- MANY people have become completely delusional doing this.

These AI models are great in many ways, Extremely helpful with research , but you have to really check the references it gives you. It is amazing at helping you code to solve complex problems… as long as you have a way to validate the results of that code against reality.

They are great research tools, but asking them for an opinion like that is less than useless.

I would absolutely never be someone to say scientists are stupid or greedy. Scientists care deeply about their projects and want them funded, and they also know they are on the taxpayer dollar. So do the bureaucrats who run NASA. As I stated before, budgetary considerations driving low risk incremental missions in finding life is not an idea I came with on my own.

In fact it seems so obvious I find it hard to believe I have to convince anyone here about it.