Short Stuff: The Mars Rock with Signs of Life?

for talking to aliens. I don't remember what we named it, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 we take a break and come back and talk about

what each team figured out. Let's do it. So, Chuck 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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