To help ET understand heep'um big astrobiology lesson from Viking:

This is from Dr. David McKay and company. Know who he is ET?

ORGANIC MATTER IN SNC METEORITES: IS IT TIME TO RE-EVALUATE THE VIKING BIOLOGY EXPERIMENTAL DATA? D. M. Warmflash1, S. J. Clemett2 and D. S. McKay1, 1Mail Code
SN, NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX 77058
Lunar and Planetary Science XXXII (2001) 2169.pdf

"Given this perspective on organic material, a
biological interpretation to the Viking LR results
can no longer be ruled out. In the LR experiment,
a solution containing 14C labeled organic com-
pounds was injected into soil samples. The de-
tection of radioactivity in the overhead space
would indicate that one or more of the substrates
had been chemically converted into a carbon-
containing gas. To serve as a control, some sam-
ples were heated enough to destroy most known
terrestrial microbes so that an indication for life
would be a positive response from unheated sam-
ples and a negative response from heated samples
[13]. On Mars, the LR results had met minimum
criteria for a biological interpretation [2] but due
to the GC-MS results, the LR responses were
later attributed to putative soil inorganic oxidants
[3]. Since the time of Viking, studies have been
carried out with the objective of determining an
oxidant or combination of oxidants that might
exist on Mars and have produced the observed
kinetics of the LR response. To date, no such
agent has been found that produces all aspects of
the LR results on Mars [14, 15]. Therefore, in
light of the SNC meteorites data and their impli-
cations for the possibility of organic matter near
or on the Martian surface, it is concluded that
inorganic and biological explanations for the Vi-
king LR data should now be considered equally
plausible until more complete studies of the Mar-
tian surface are carried out. "

I don't suspect ET will understand...try and "phone home" instead. What planet are you from ET? You never did say?

:-)

BD