How Strippers Explain Life On Mars

“I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’ve got nothing against strip clubs, but I do have something against them at noon on a Monday. The day shift at a strip club? You can’t unsee that.” – The Office

I go to a quantum mechanic – he fixes and doesn’t fix my car at the same time, and I can’t ever be certain about what it will cost. (meme above and top meme as found)

Last week, NASA had a press conference on what they’re calling “the strongest evidence yet” for life on Mars. According to their announcement, the Perseverance rover had taken pictures of a rock sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon”.

This is a coincidence, since that was the name of the stripper at my bachelor party.  The rock was from a site called Jezero Crater, which I assume (based on her face) was the stripper’s real name.  As I recall her face was a temporal anomaly:  it could stop a clock.  The only explanation for this was my best man was on a budget of something like $4.98.

The rock did not work for tips, however, but like the stripper it shows potential biosignatures dating back about 3.5 billion years.  These biosignatures include organic materials, chemical reactions that mimic microbial activity, a g-string, and what the scientists called “leopard spots”, which I really hope can be cured by antibiotics.

The people who write press releases for NASA Scientists are cautious, of course; they emphasize that non-biological processes could explain it, like geochemical reactions under specific conditions.  But after a year of peer review in Nature®, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy went so far as to say, “We can’t find another explanation, so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”

Unlike Sapphire Canyon.

I hear that most electricians need to strip to make ends meet. (meme as found)

This isn’t the first time NASA has twerked and gyrated with the idea of Martian microbes.  Let’s rewind to 1976, when the Viking landers touched down and ran their own biology experiments to hunt for life.

The Labeled Release experiment, led by Gilbert Levin, injected Martian soil with nutrients and watched for gas emissions that meant “metabolism!”  These are, in layman’s terms, signs of life chowing down on the snot that NASA sprayed into the dirt.

Positive results popped up on both Viking 1 and 2, but NASA dismissed them.  Why?  Well, it appears that NASA wanted to not find life, and hunted for explanations high and low until they came up with:

  • perchlorates in the soil oxidizing everything to
  • it was Tuesday and we don’t do our best work on Tuesday, to
  • it was the Bicentennial and we were distracted by the shiny new quarters or
  • we won the war, go back to sleep.

The scientist in charge still insists to this day that it was life, but NASA just said, “Well, we don’t know what we were thinking with doing an experiment like that.  How did you sneak it on the Viking?  The experiment never could have found anything.  Have you seen Smokey and the Bandit®?”

Fast-forward to the 1990s, and I recall the unveiling of Martian meteorite ALH84001.  This fragment of rock, ejected from Mars about the time your mother was born 17 million years ago and crash-landing on Earth the time that stripper was born about 13,000 years back, contained carbonate globules with what looked like fossilized bacteria complete with hydrocarbons.

The scientists noted that these were possible microbial remnants from a wetter Mars.  But skeptics piled on:  “The fossils were too small because I can’t fit in one, the hydrocarbons could be from space dust or an Exxon® station, and we won the war so everyone should go back to sleep and have you seen The Usual Suspects?”

Do bacteria communicate by cell phone?

Now, we’ve made it to 2025. right on the dot with the rover findings pushing the timeline for life on Mars back to the Solar System’s dawn, around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

I’ve predicted that we’d find evidence of life on other worlds before (I think but am too lazy to check) 2030, and intelligent life before 2040.  Mars counts as “other worlds,” right?

I’m calling this as a win.  We’ve ticked the box on “life elsewhere.”  Dust off the telescopes, crack open the hot tub and light up a cigar.

Now comes the deeper question:  Where did life come from?

Life on Earth is improbable enough.  The current theory is that a cosmic vegetable drawer in the Frigidaire™ Galaxy sits for long enough where atoms randomly congeal just the right molecules to morph into RNA, then DNA, slap on some cell walls, and voila, you’re evolving from slime to Shakespeare in just a weekend.

The odds of that?

Astronomically against.  Take protein folding:  some proteins are so convoluted that the random chance of them assembling correctly exceeds the age of the universe by factors of 10 FOLLOWED BY 77 ZEROES or more.  That’s not something that I’m making up.  Actual biochemists have crunched the numbers, showing that even simple enzymes require precise sequences that blind luck couldn’t hit in billions of years.

It’s like expecting a tornado in a junkyard to assemble a functional air fryer, but with extra steps involving quantum hiccups, existential dread and daytime-quality strippers named Destiny.  So, if life popped up on Mars around the same time as it did on Earth, both in that narrow window post-Solar System formation, random chance starts looking like a lousy bet.

I donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see it. (meme as found)

Enter panspermia: the idea that life (or its building blocks) hitchhikes through space on comets, asteroids, or meteorites, seeding planets like dandelion fluff from the movie Alien.

I did a thought experiment and came to this conclusion:  it’s the lazy way to colonize the galaxy.  There is no need for warp drives and spaceships when biology, gravity, and time does all the work.  Spew out spores into the void, wait for them to land on a Goldilocks world, and boom: mold on bread, except the bread is a planet.

Oh, wait:  bread doesn’t mold anymore thanks to all those preservatives and microplastics.  My bad.

Anyway, biological life is the universe’s perfect replicator, even better than A.I.  It’s self-sustaining, adaptive, and cheap.  Forget A.I. overlords; this is nature’s von Neumann probe, probing without permission, replicating, and repeating.

I sent it by itself and now its favorite cheese is probe-alone.

But here’s the rub: something had to kickstart the whole shebang.

Panspermia just kicks the can backwards in time:  where did the original life come from?  And don’t forget the timeline.  Life as we know it, Jim, needs heavy elements heavier than the primordial hydrogen:  carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, the stuff that makes water, proteins, and yes, even PEZ®.

Those only form in supernovae, and it takes time to make enough of them so we’ve got the iron and phosphorus that we need to make steaks on a nice rocky world.  The Solar System itself is just a punk at 4.6 billion years old, so early life on Mars or Earth had to brew from second- or third-hand atoms.

No heavy atoms, no guitars so no heavy metal.

What’s the simplest conclusion?

Hmmmm.

Yup.

Intelligent design.  Life’s complexity indicates purpose, not at all an accident and the math shows that.  To think otherwise is like finding an air conditioning unit in the desert and thinking, “Must be erosion.”

I did give up cleaning my dryer filter for Lent.

The canyon between life and not-life is so vast and the math is so brutal that Occam’s Razor slices away the nonsense, leaving design.

Your mileage may vary.  But for now, Mars whispers, just like Saphire Canyon, “You’re not alone.”  Whether that’s comforting or terrifying depends on your worldview.

But for me, in a universe this designed, even the stripper jokes write themselves.  Life is the easy way to conquer the galaxy, so we have to ask ourselves, are we twerking hard, or hardly twerking?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

36 thoughts on “How Strippers Explain Life On Mars”

  4. Beloved wife inherited an antique corner piece, a secretary, when her mother died. It was in rough shape, finish-wise, as someone had, un-wisely, decided to refinish it with what appeared to be shoe polish. It fell to me, therefore, to undo the damage.

    She was on the phone with her sister one evening while I was hard at work on it, and when sis asked where I was, BW replied, “Harbinger is out in the garage stripping my secretary”. After a short silence on the line, BW added, “That didn’t come out right.”

    I’ll say. BW has never been known to be anything other than rabidly jealous. And her ‘executive assistant’ at work had seen her best days during the Pleistocene era. But it got a laugh out of her sister, who brings it up every year at the holidays.

    One more tidbit – In 1999, NASA lost control of the Mars Climate Orbiter, trashing the mission to the tune of 327 million of your tax dollars. The culprit? Seems that Newton-Seconds and Pound-Seconds don’t mix. Little whoopsie on the insertion burn sent the spacecraft to its doom. I was in grad school at the time, and one of my professors posted an article on the disaster outside his office, with some pithy remarks on the merits of measuring twice and cutting once.

    1. Harb-

      NASA should have fig-gured out that Newton Seconds was the right measure. But, they confused Mars with a Mars Bar. Typical Butterfinger moment from Never A Straight Answer.

      We know there’s life on Mars anyway. Bugs Bunny discovered it back in the 1950s, right?

      And, wish I had a 50 year old secretary to strip.

      1. Well, there wasn’t an Earth-shattering kaboom when the Orbiter hit the deck. So NASA has that going for it, which is nice.

  5. It’s like looking into a mirror with a mirror behind you. It goes on forever, and for a few moments, you exist in unmeasurable places. You’re holding the mirror…or are you?

    Intelligent design is one of those things that makes you wonder. Where did the intelligent being come from? And, where does it stay? The thing is that such an entity could, and would, have abilities that would make our scrambling for relevancy as insignificant as a single cell creature in the middle of the Pacific. The fact that what can only be described as miraculous events occur, and some have interacted with what they describe as angels, makes me wonder if the total history of Earth is a planned event down to the smallest of details. My puny brain can only wonder of such things, but is comforted to know it’s there.

    1. “makes me wonder if the total history of Earth is a planned event down to the smallest of details. ”

      I’ve pondered that same question but ultimately decided the answer is “no” because God gave us free will. If God is intervening and controlling everything with lots of divine intervention and such, then he didn’t really give us free will. The trade-off to having the free will to choose, is that many people will choose poorly and do evil in the world causing people to suffer.

      The paradox of course, is that is God is omniscient, he knows in advance all of the bad decisions we’re going to make. So if he knows all of the details advance, does that mean it is “preplanned” even though our free will caused the events? That is where my head starts to hurt thinking about it.

      JB

  7. Anyone that has ever planted a garden, or used Roundup(tm) to kill weeds, already knows that life is very common in the universe. No matter what you do, it is impossible to keep weeds away, and anything you do to kill them just causes them to come back 10X stronger. Their tenacity and adaptability is truly amazing.

    The weeds in my garden just laugh when they hear that Mars is inhospitable.

    JB

      1. John – No, Not Life. As Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper noted…

        Elvis Is Everywhere… Elvis is Everything…He’s there Bg E inside of you and me.

  10. Back when I was doing my PhD in physical/organic chemistry at the University of Florida, working at the Quantum Theory Project, they had a conference once a year at which nearly all of the bigwigs in the field showed up – one year, Albert Szentgyorgi was there and gave a lecture, I think he got the Nobel Prize for discovering Vitamin C. There was this other guy named Sidney Fox from the University of Miami, and he was the guy who put ammonia, salt water, calcium carbonate (a/k/a limestone), and oxygen in a container, and closed it up, then ran electrical currents through it – like the lightning hitting the primordial seas. He never got anything more than simple peptides, no protein or anything like that – and he spent decades, his life, trying. No dice. So it really looks like abiogenesis isn’t a thing. Then, if you consider the universe, and there’s nothing outside of it, then the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy – disorder – either stays constant or increases. So you don’t get order from elementary particles in random motion where all of the particles are te same, which is the theory. Galaxies look pretty ordered – where does that come from? It’s like putting hydrogen gas into a cylinder and waiting for however you want, then opening it up to find a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1932, and a collection of socks, none of which matches any of the others, inside. Or finding helium atoms inside. It just doesn’t happen. Or finding a sun inside, that doesn’t happen either. Where does the ordering information come from – and no, not ordering from a Divine Amazon, either – the information from which order is created… OK, so it’s not a closed system, because we see a decrease in entropy – an increase in order – which makes it an open system – so what is outside?

    It takes a lot more work and mental gyrations to believe that there is an explanation that does not involve Creation and Design, than the opposite – Occam’s Razor here.

    2. But Ben Hill Griffin created edible concentrated OJ, right? His fav granddaughter was AG of FL in 2000. Hanging chads days. Katherine Harris, anyone?.

      Read “Oranges” by John McPhee. Has a chapter on him. For you non-college football fans, he’s the largest $$$ contributor to the University of Florida. The FB stadium is named after him.

      UF is the home base of male jorts. UGH.

    3. The Big Bang shows that hydrogen is a gas that when heated and allowed to cool turns into people…eventually.

      1. This is known colloquially as the

        “First there was nothing. Then it exploded. Then Everything.” Theory of the universe.

        It is slightly less plausible than the rantings of the Flat Earth Society.
        With holes in the theory large enough to drive a universe through.

        Bare mathematics kicks its ass, as noted in the above OP.
        The universe simply isn’t old enough for the necessary number of mutations to come up with, for but one example, a single duckbill platypus, from scratch.
        QED

  11. Back when I was doing my PhD in physical/organic chemistry at the University of Florida, working at the Quantum Theory Project, they had a conference once a year at which nearly all of the bigwigs in the field showed up – one year, Albert Szentgyorgi was there and gave a lecture, I think he got the Nobel Prize for discovering Vitamin C. There was this other guy named Sidney Fox from the University of Miami, and he was the guy who put ammonia, salt water, calcium carbonate (a/k/a limestone), and oxygen in a container, and closed it up, then ran electrical currents through it – like the lightning hitting the primordial seas. He never got anything more than simple peptides, no protein or anything like that – and he spent decades, his life, trying. No dice. So it really looks like abiogenesis isn’t a thing. Then, if you consider the universe, and there’s nothing outside of it, then the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy – disorder – either stays constant or increases. So you don’t get order from elementary particles in random motion where all of the particles are te same, which is the theory. Galaxies look pretty ordered – where does that come from? It’s like putting hydrogen gas into a cylinder and waiting for however you want, then opening it up to find a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1932, and a collection of socks, none of which matches any of the others, inside. Or finding helium atoms inside. It just doesn’t happen. Or finding a sun inside, that doesn’t happen either. Where does the ordering information come from – and no, not ordering from a Divine Amazon, either – the information from which order is created… OK, so it’s not a closed system, because we see a decrease in entropy – an increase in order – which makes it an open system – so what is outside?

    2. If the whole random “assembly of stuff to make complex systems” had any merit, then, why are we not finding much, much simpler structures all over the place – like a 8mm X 50 torx head screw … or even a 16-penny nail? A Chevy Corvette is far simpler than a eukaryotic cell … but I’ve yet to dig one up in my back yard when putting in fence posts….

  12. I remember sitting in a 500-level biochemistry class in college … looking at a molecular diagram for an enzyme … a molecular machine that can seek out a specific molecule, rip it apart (or put it together) eject the result and do it all over again. Then I remember thinking, “Anywhere outside of pH 7.0, this massive molecule will denature and break and cease to work … and you want me to believe this is an ACCIDENT? To say nothing of the bicarbonate buffer in our blood that keeps us alive from breath to breath … or a hundred other “automagic” functions that if they were not present, neither would be we. You have to be genuinely and fundamentally stupid to believe that we “evolved” from “electrified slime” … or a pHD Biochemist.

      1. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” becomes a lot less far-fetched, the deeper science digs. In any direction. The only thing left is to be dragged kicking and screaming while denying to the limits of one’s capacity that the Intelligent Designer could be what is popularly known as “God”.
        And it becomes rapidly obvious Darwin himself was a high-functioning midwit, who simply didn’t know what he didn’t know, which was enough biochemistry basics – just for starters – to stun an ox if hit in the head with the full book-weight of it. The gymnastics of the Darwinolatry fanatics in response begins to resemble meth withdrawals.
        But it’s always fun to watch.

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