RUSH: I saw this next story yesterday, and I asked myself, “How long is it going to take for this to get a certain kind of treatment?” It hasn’t happened yet because there are so many other pressing issues, but it’s an Associated Press story, and the headline: “Mars Killers from Earth?” Get this.
“Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have stumbled upon alien microbes,” i.e. life, “on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist,” a single scientist, “theorizes in a paper released Sunday. The problem was that the Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life and didn’t recognize it, the researcher said in a paper presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. This new report, based on a more expansive view of where life can take root, may have NASA looking for a different type of Martian life form when its next Mars spacecraft is launched later this year… The Viking experiments of the ’70s wouldn’t have noticed alien hydrogen peroxide-based life and, in fact, would have killed it by drowning and overheating the microbes…”
Apparently here the NASA probe, Viking, were “looking for Earth-like life, in which salt water is the internal liquid of living cells. Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, that [kind of] life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, author of the new research. That’s because a water-hydrogen peroxide mix stays liquid at very low temperatures [and] doesn’t destroy cells when it freezes and can suck scarce water vapor out of the air… One Viking experiment seeking life on Mars poured water on soil. That would have essentially drowned hydrogen peroxide-based life, Schulze-Makuch said…. ‘The problem was that they didn’t have any clue about the environment on Mars at that time. This kind of adaptation makes sense from a biochemical viewpoint.’ Even Earth has something somewhat related. He points to an Earth bug called the bombardier beetle…”
You ever hear of the bombardier beetle? Apparently it “produces a boiling-hot spray that is 25 percent hydrogen peroxide,” uses it “as a defense weapon.” So here we go. Here we go! We’re living the past. In the past, of course, white guys were so arrogant and so unconcerned. We killed the Indians. We wiped out a beautiful, pristine continent known as North America. We started chopping down trees. We brought horses. We brought syphilis, racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, and environmental destruction — and now we’re doing the same thing to Mars! We are arrogantly condescending to these microbes, not even thinking for a moment that they could exist! No! We just show up with our spacecraft, we pour water on them, and they die! “If humans are so arrogant about our status on earth and therefore rampantly kill off other creatures willy-nilly, it makes perfect sense that we’re doing the same damage to other planets because we’re just not sensitive enough to their alternate hydrogen peroxide-based life form.”
By the way, hydrogen peroxide is all over the place here. Isn’t it in hair colors, dyes and that kind of thing? We’re sensitive to hydrogen peroxide! Hell, there wouldn’t be relationships without it. We know full-well that there’s hydrogen peroxide here, but we’ll have a new organization spring up as a result of this: People for the Ethical Treatment of Hydrogen Peroxide Based Life Forms, and they’ll jump all over Bush. This happened during the Bush administration. Bush wipes out Mars, in addition to destroying Iraq.