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Interesting Structures On Mars
fear writes: "Meta Research has just released a new report on what they call 'Artificial Structures on Mars. Much of it is obvious nonsense ('animal-like shapes,' for example) similar to seeing things in clouds, but some structures look interesting: spots, tubes 1, tubes 2, track, 'vegetation', 'trees', triangles, strange lines, T. Which geological and climatic processes cause the formation of such structures?" Though I see no trees or vegetation, these are still fascinating images of Mars, and Meta Research looks like an interesting, off-beat site to check back to.
to slashdot our site!"
Funny the way some sites choose to respond to getting the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of nerds.
I certainly can't claim to be able to identify all of them, but some are definitely very common structures here on earth too. I'll go in order... Spots - can't say for sure, but notice that the spots appear only on the undulating region. That suggests a dark undersurface that is being exposed due to geologic cause (maybe) or erosion because of the way the wind whips over the various areas (more likely). Tube 1 and 2 - very common feature here on earth, you're looking at sand dunes at the bottom of a chasm. The high-overhead angle and the shape (slightly curved) of the dunes fools the eye into applying a 3D effect to them, which is why they're being called tubes. However it's much easier to see the real situation in... Track - here you can clearly see that you are looking at sand dunes at the bottom of a chasm. The reason you get the nice lines is that the chasm forces the air to blow in a single direction, which allows the dunes to form. If the wind can come from any direction then you don't get nice dunes - yes, that's right, in most deserts the prevailing wind is REALLY prevailing! Why is the line split in the Track? Well just a guess, but look at the right side of the picture, notice that the track splits right on that large rock outcrop? Vegetation & Trees - no comment, can't really say. Actually looks like subterrainian (sub-marsian) liquid flow? Triangles - simple misidentification of shadows, all too common. Those are just rocks - look down from an airplane at houses below you at sunset some time. Strange lines & T - dunno Maury
Perhaps there is a lot of natural gas in that area? Given the size of the river in your picture, that photo was taken from pretty high up and covered a fairly large area (tens of miles in each direction as a rough estimate). There could be a lot of natural gas in that area in the form of smallish pockets (which is actually how it is normally found aparently) and you need a fairly large number of wells and pipes to really exploit an area.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why don't you think these are pipelines? They look just like the natural gas pipelines out by where I live. The pipelines themselves are buried, but a pipeline access road runs over top of the line. These lines are laid down straight as an arrow through whatever terrain might be in the way. Bicycling on these roads is lots of fun as they generally go over mountains instead of through them, sometimes going over *VERY* steep hills (the kind where you have to get off the bike and more or less just pull it up behind you). If the roads are graveled in, then they would show up bright like that against a relativly dark soil.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well that took all of 1 minute to make the server take a plop. Anyone have it stored in cache?
about ten replies and it's slashdotted already?
:)
Anyway, nature has a lot of way to form perfect (at the distance) geometric forms, but I look forward to 2020
Hugs, Cyke
To listeners of the Art Bell show and to readers of Aliens, Aliens, Aliens, reports of artificial constructs on Mars is old hat. Richard Hoagland has been arguing the case for Mars for years. What's sort of interesting are remarks made by Arthur C. Clarke about those "crystal tubes". Add that to former government workers coming forward en masse claiming that the US government has a lot more information on extraterrial life that old videos of "Close Encounters", things are getting pretty interesting for UFOlogists.
The "tubes" appear to be an optical illusion. Look especially in "Tubes 1". Look at the shadows on the crater in the upper right, then look at the shadows in the "tube". It appears to be a valley, not a tube. The "tiger-stripe" ridging is the result of the cliff edge slumping. Likewise, the "track" is a slumped cliff edge. The triangles are shadows in a dune field.
cb
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
It makes me wonder if these guys really get out much. I mean, I don't have any schooling in geology, but I've been to some national parks and seen some crazy natural formations. I'd believe that all those pictures were of natural phenomenon if they were taken on earth. Add in that they came from MARS, and who needs space aliens to explain stuff?
Seriously. I could probably make these guys cream their shorts by taking some blurry black and white photos at Yellowstone and telling them they were "unreleased NASA photos of Mars".
The enemies of Democracy are
Matter of debate? "It's made by martians!" "Huh?" "It looks like a face; it must be made by Martians!" "Um... And that cloud over there that looks like a bunny?" "Martians made that too!"
Look, it is a simple fact that our brains are wired to see faces in things. Any arrangement of three dots in a circle ends up looking like a face to us. "Strongly" in this case just means "also has a dot for the nose." It's also a simple fact that on a planet the size of Mars (or Earth) you're going to see a lot of crazy things in natural formations. Of all the mounds of dirt on Mars, one looks a lot like a face. Yawn.
Sure, it _might_ be aliens... but the face itself isn't _evidence_ that aliens did make it.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's obfuscation, all right, but not where you think...
Keeping the mystery alive about the 'face' does two things: keeps interest in Mars high, and keeps all the conspiracy theorists from spending their time looking for the real conspiracies.
It's like Area 51 -- The government being all cloak-and-dagger about it keeps every high-powered telescopic lense focused on _it_, rather that the _real_ top-secret anti-gravity alien-technology aircraft flight test center, which is probably somewhere north of Walla Walla, WA.
The enemies of Democracy are
Dude, those triangles are just sticky-up rocks with shadows falling from the sun positioned at the top of the picture. My guess would be that it was setting at the time...
Either that or they are ALIENS!
Posted from the wireless couch.
See "All your base are belong to us"
spelled in Martian rocks.
On a more serious note: erosion patterns
on earth are well-studied and characterised.
Not so on Mars. 100 years from now every
formation on Mars will have an explanation.
one of you techheads should program a random terrain generator linked to a webpage and have a voting system to see if a person sees anything in that picture.
Sorry, but terrain is not formed by "random forces". Craters f.ex have a special known form, depending on what formed them, they can look like a bowl (wolcanic) or various impact craters (asteroids). But none of them would actually be with almost vertical walls and a flat floor as this one looks like.
Same goes for riverbeds and only rarely does landscape actually form something that resembles a triangle.
The way we should interpret those images is just "wow, neat, but like most reports it doesn't prove anything"
--
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D727
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The article that I read about the martian face stated that new higher resolution pictures showed nothing unusual. But on the same page was another article talking about huge dust storms on the surface of mars. Kind of like taking a picture of the egyptian pyramids during a sandstorm from space and saying that there's nothing there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there really is a face, just that the new pictures don't really prove anything. Now if we could have dropped the satellite onto it while taking pictures...
This morning as I looked at my breakfast bowl, in amongst the swirling lines of porridge and milk, I swear I saw an image of Richard Stallman staring right back at me. Scared me half to death!
Macka
Here's an example of the tubes -- look at the high res version, lower left corner.
One thing to note when we look at stuff that's come back from mars is that the most of the planet has not been viewed with the narrow angle camera at all -- for example, go here, select a region, then look at the clickable map -- the little light blue tracks are the places where the narrow angle views are available.
Came across this while randomly looking at the MSSS gallery -- view the "full size image".
Notice some parts look like the "tubes" that people show from mars photos, but when you see them merging into large dune areas they appear to be just sand dunes?
The basis for that is much shorter than the "thin atmosphere" tale may explain. Besides I would remind you that today's thin atmosphere carries clear isotopic signs of not being the original one that Mars could carry in its early times.
As someone who had been directly studying some features, I would note a few things:
Geometries? Yes, there are geometries. There are lots of them. But I would stop far from claiming artificialities on them. They can be the cause of very natural phenomena, having enormous dimensions. Such things are, for example, very large impacts that produce a "rombic wallpaper" pattern for hundreds of even thousands of kilometers.
Mars has tons of water. The Hell with what NASA claims as they have shown no worser in lies as in facts. Yes, this water is far less than what we have on Earth but it still manages to create small underground lakes and ponds in such places like South Arabia Terra. In the past it covered all Northern Hemisphere and even such higher landscapes like Arabia Terra.
Mars suffered of some weird phenomena that wiped out most of its surface water in very short time. Near Mons Olympus and in some highlands on Acydalia, there are clear traces of megafloods that nearly caved a good piece of Mars crust. In geological terms people name these things scablands, as for a similar landscape in Washington State of the same name.
There is a very high chance that some biology existed in Mars. And some features are very suggestive that some of it survived and exists nowadays in Mars. Note that I believe on NASA results as much as I believe that the Face of Mars was built by an alien mind. In fact the study of several documents and the tragedy of Professor Wolf Vishniac lead me to conclude that there were people on Viking Project that falsified results and produced a scientific analysis with a very biased weight. In fact, there were people inside the project, like Professor Horowitz, who were not only aggressively opposed to the prospects of life in Mars, but also tried to undermine the work of some members of the team, and specially the work of Vishniac.
If there were lill green men on Mars, than 99% of their world will be impossible to be seen as this world was completely washed out.
The Face of Mars is probably the product of a living being but one as much as dumb as our trees, corals or liquens.
There is a goemetry on Cydonia. But it is hard to determine its nature. The most probable is the pure result of physical forces of natural or near natural origin. Anyway the probability of terraformation cannot be put fully aside.
The most terryfying in Mars are not "formations" or "geometries" or even "faces". The most scaring are craters. For nearly 5 years I have been studying them and came into one conclusion. In Mars craters are far from being interpreted only as a natural phenomena. In some places their distribution correlates with landscape formations that are completely independent in origin. There is even one hill that possesses a ring of more than 10 craters sorrounding nearly 90% of its cliffs. Much like if someone pointed straightly to the sides of this hill. Curiously they are nearly equal in diameter for a large part of the hill.
NASA lies. Yes it lies. But not only. It also shuts down the voices of those who dissent. Or helps to shut them down. Why? No its not an alien conspiracy. Just some people claiming for "Good Science" love to be "more popists than the Pope himself". And maybe some governmental short-mindness and underground politics is also in place.
I'm telling you, all these pictures and they haven't found the outline of the buried Shadow craft that we all know is there! C'MON NASA, STOP HIDING THE TRUTH!!!!
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
http://members.nbci.com/_XMCM/primall/mahir/mahir_ ring.jpg
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
As for Art Bell, I have heard pieces of his show when I get up to take my dog outside in the morning, and for the most part its just as valuable as this article.
Oh come on. Art Bell can be way more entertaining than Slashdot. "Antichrist Line", anyone?
Fuck ya if ya can't take a joke.
C-X C-S
I've seen all these structures in porous Si. The resemblance between this material and large structures on land always amazes me.
-- Cheers!
Anyone notice how most of the images are conveniently cropped at strange places?
---------------------------
"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
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Sorry. Didn't mean to fly off the handle. But after years of telling people the Cydonia face was only a rock, I thought I'd seen the end of this asininity, and it pisses me off that in this day an age, assholes are still willing to believe in Martians (or even, god help us, reticulans). Yours was the first post that seemed to give me reason to let fly.
After examination, I still think it's a load of crap. I've had to make this point on other fora recently; it's getting silly.
Pick up any issue of Fortean Times. Examine its 'simulacra' section. Therein you'll find examples of everyday objects that look like people, things, whatever.
If it's got a beard, it must be Jesus
If it's got a quiff, it must be Elvis
Why is the "okay, so cydonia wasn't really alien. But this is" considered a valid argument for these structures being anything other than natural?
How come people who believe in the whole jesus/god thing are "normal" but the people who believe in aliens are "crackpots"? Seems to me aliens are a far more plausable idea than some omnipotent diety running everything.
The unfiltered picture still looks like a face to me. Enough to be intressting anyway...
n ia /asom/artifact_html/slide.asp?image=7
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo
Shon
The right hand picture in the "T." image is obviously a "/.".
Taco, what have you been up to?
--
Is Richard Hoagland's http://www.enterprisemission.com. One page with a few pictures of these Mars structures is http://www.enterprisemission.com/sequel.htm and others are at Glass Tubes, and Cydonia Triangle. Another site with tons of Mars surface feature images is http://barsoom.msss.com/moc_gallery/index.html.
Whatever happened to our sense of exploration, our sense of wonder?
Most of the comments for this type of stuff do nothing but proclaim anyone with a little imagination as a nut job.
The fact is, IF we do not get off this planet and expand then we as a race are doomed and eventually there will be no trace we even existed.
So the structures some see on Mars may be natural, but at the same time they may be artificial, until we go there ourselves to find out we won't know for sure. I think an ever so slight chance that there is artificial structures on any planet or moon in our solar system needs to be investigated thoroughly and as soon as technically possible.
We trace our own history back almost 4 million years, yet many fail to realize that 4 million years is a drop in the bucket of time compared to the age of just our solar system, a LOT could have happened on the planets circling our sun in that time.
Certainly if at some point a civilization existed on Mars way back when there may be a chance some structures were built that we may be viewing the remains of now. Consider that on Earth, if we were wiped out today evidence of our own existence would persist on the surface for around 1 billion years, after which time it would become more and more difficult to find such evidence at surface level.
There are lots of questions about our own history, questions about just what level of technology ancient civilizations may have had.
Open your minds a little folks, encourage our leaders to spend more on exploring our own solar system than they currently spend on silly shit like weapons of war which ultimately aren't going to do us much good in the long term.
Then again, maybe NASA does know more than they let on (after all, just why aren't we going to the moon anymore?). Personally I think any knowledge that would disprove or bring into question religious beliefs would be suppressed in the US because a majority of the people are believers in such rubbish.
Trips
Take a look at Picture 18:
a /asom/artifact_html/slide.asp?image=18
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydoni
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
They could be harder rock veins running through softer rock. The surrounding soft rock will erode more easily than the harder rock, thus exposing these patterns. Look at highway outcrops. You may notice a similar pattern in some geographic areas.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
This paper seems to be the most in-depth analysis of the face on Mars that I've seen. And it has a lot of interesting information. Almost wants to make me believe in the face again. :)
Its a good read.
At that site, I saw this interesting slide called T&!, which obviously connected with me as a censored version of "T&A". What an interesting surprise it was. And I was looking forward to even more Martian pr0n.
It's my job to look at satellite imagery of the Earth every day. And looking at these Mars pictures, I don't see many structures that I haven't seen in earth geology. The tubes (dunes or ravines), triangles (dunes), and other formations are all things you'd see if you looked in the right places on Earth.
The only features that did seem a little strange were the 'trees' images. While they could be lava flows, lava is usually not that fractal or inhomogeneous. They do look more like natural vegetation, although without scale on the images it's impossible to tell. So I'd dismiss immediately any claims of intelligent artifacts on Mars, but there may be some tantalizing possibilities for primitive forms of life.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
What about the aliens who arranged the stars to look like a sea serpent, a bear, a hunter, or a virgin (obviously with a sense of humor -- it's amusing to conteplate the provocative pose she's taking).
They even signed (or at least initialed it. This is sometimes calle the coathanger cluster, but clearly it's a fancy letter "T").
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Agreed. In New Hampshire there is a natural structure called the "Old Man of the Mountains" that resembles, not surprisingly, the face of an old man in profile. (You can see this on the new quarters that have state-related decorations on them. The "Old Man" is on the NH quarter). Yes, it looks cool and it looks a lot like a face, but it almost certainly wasn't artificial.
http://www.psrw.com/~markc/Articles/May7pred/index .html
Doesn't look much like a face to me.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Ray Bradbury's 'The Silver Locusts' aka 'The Martian Chronicles' is pretty cool. They made a quite spooky TV series of it. There's also 'War of the Worlds', which I haven't read, so I can't comment on it, and Heinlein's 'Red Planet'. Oh no, sorry, that last one sucked badly.
We're going to keep on debunking proof of aliens until they've taken us over.
Then, we still won't really believe it. We'll have all passed it off as some government conspiracy.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Everyone here is so willing to say its all "a lot of crap" ... it disturbs me.
... I don't think so ... looks pretty natural to me .. is it really cool ? You betcha .. check out the Nefertiti face. And the images look really nice. But its all 2D and 2 dimensional images are much easier to generate by accideent than 3d sculptures ... that was why the Face was so intriguing at first. Also well .. its another world, you have to expect unusual things, most of the stuff NASA has been feeding us makes it look too Earth like for comfort ... you are bound to get unusual forms in a different world which only has 1/3 g.
... its a low probability approach to discovery but sometimes it hits paydirt ... usually in unexpected ways.
... he really knows his stuff. Just prefers to take an iconoclastic view. As I said a low probability path .. but its the stuff of scientific revolutions. The physics people especially should appreciate the approach, its what made 20th century physics.
Is it evidence of aliens
At least someone with an eccentric bent is looking at these images in detail
As for Tom Van Flanden. He's an interesting character to argue against
Peter
Bitter and proud of it.
"all your base belongs to us"
Someone you trust is one of us.
On a smaller scale for geometric regularities, think about the hexagonal features of the Giant's causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Not to mention the ability of non-sentient life to form these straight line and circular structures too.
As for your final point, you might enjoy reading "The Olympus Gambit" by William Rollo. It's hard to get, but a fun read about just that possibilty.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
> Actually, the version you saw on the news was ran through a high pass filter before it was released to the public.
What makes you think I referred to that picture?
I can't get through to the site as well ("slashdotted", see other posts), but since I see Cydonia in the URL I doubt to see something really new there.
:-)
t m
Cydonia is the region of the famous "mars face" (which doesn't look like a face anymore on pictures with higher resolutions---thanks to Mars Global Surveyor) and there have been plenty of reports about the mars face and the other "artifical" structures around ("city", "pyramid" and so on.)
See here for an example:
http://www.psrw.com/~markc/marshome.html
Here's a mirror in Germany (if that's slashdotted also
http://home.t-online.de/home/zimmert/marshpge.h
First, the mineral composition of Mars is different from earth. This means new kinds of dust that pile up differently than the earth dust.
Second, Mars has quite a lot of microscopic dust, while on earth all that dust is quickly blown by strong winds to oceans.
Third, the martian low-pressure atmosphere and very peacefully changing weather causes the soil to move in a way very different from earth. On Earth, the weather is much more chaotic.
Seeing unexpected order is nothing special, as it is routinely generated by the self-organization of matter in open thermodynamic systems (such as "weather"). We can see it in stars, we can see it on the Sun, we can see it in the sand desers of Earth. And Mars is nothing but a huge and geologically diverse desert.
Okay, it wasn't Graham Hancock (who believes that there is evidence of a "technological" civilization on Earth upwards of 10,000 years ago) but Erich von Daniken. The plateau was Nazca. But yep, the scale and size is important. Even NASA tend to forget this useful piece of information...
The "exclamation point" shown on http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydonia /asom/artifact_html/slide.asp?image=18 is clearly not "!" but "/." Someone on the surface obviously created a giant palm robot running on parrot and driven by a mutant hamster
Probably the Techno Talking Babes or Neil & Bob
perl -le 's;;uoli;;$a=length;y;g-w;e-u;;$a--;s;j;$a;;print'
That "weird phenomena" [sic] is the fact that Mars' atmosphere is so thin that liquid water can't possibly exist at the surface--it would boil away. And good science is good science; bad science doesn't need NASA's "lies" to be considered bad.
-Legion
-Legion
Wild speculation that Mars was a moon that broke off from another world, where we were part of the same species as the supposed Martian inhabitants (who used the "moon" as a grafitti wall) is not, in any sense of the word, a theory. It's not even a hypothesis. Hell, it doesn't even qualify as a reasonable *guess*, and that's putting it mildly.
These people are fucking kooks, and *that's* putting it mildly too.
-Legion
I hope your server's anguished screams don't keep you up at night.
-Legion
...if the artists or civilization who produced them had contact with all of the different earth lifeforms (espcially the aquatic ones) in the "enhanced" pictures, not to mention the pharoahs of ancient egypt.
it is however more likely, that in any given set of thousands of pictures of desert, espcially ones which are heavily impacted by extra-planetary bodies (like mars or the moon; whos surfaces are both effected heavily by meteor showers), you will find a picture of a dolphin, a scorpian, and probable one with your social security number.
there are most likely going to be good explinations for all of these photographs, even the ones which appear as those they can not occur naturally (like perpendicular lines, which may have been the result of two seperate carbon dioxide flows).
Amazing "facts" I heard on Slashdot for 100, Bob...
We really need a "psuedo-science hogwash" category.
http://www.planetquake.com/unitool/m3a/temp/slide2 3a.jpg
I wonder what geological and climatic processes caused the formation of slashdot ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Really? Think I must have missed it - what books?
Salocin.com
Actually, if you paid attention to Art Bell, you'd know that the "face" photo, as well as some other "artifacts" are most likely forgeries. This does not, however, mean that SOME of the artifacts might be real. Rather, it raises the question, why would someone conduct such a forgery?
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
Ah! That would be when you have then open lines. You should check out his interview with Patch Adams.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
On earth, at least, these perfectly natural formations crop up in Hawaii, California, Australia (Queensland and Victoria), Madagascar, Mauritius and probably lots of other places. So why could they not occur on Mars?
All it would need is a volcano with the right geochemistry, a bit of a slope and copious basalt flows.
Dave Bunnells web site will show you: http://www.goodearthgraphics.com/virtual_tube/virt ube.html
The 'tubes' reminded me very strongly of WAVE ROCK in Australia. There's no doubt wind erosion alone can create some pretty incredible shapes.
For me, these guys lost all their credibility when they failed to give accurate information about where the pictures came from. Why not link back to the original NASA pics?
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
The face on Mars theory hasn't been debunked. Richard Hoagland's website at www.enterprisemission.com has a lot of information on why. The pictures taken recently have been at strange angles and NOT the best resolution the camera can take. The spacecraft needs to crank up it's best resolution and take a good picture of the whole face. The new picture of the eyeball in the socket is good. The area around the face needs some good pictures as well.
Skeptical Inquirer debunks everything and so has no useful scientific purpose. The fact is people don't mistake a saucer flying 15 feet over their car for the moon or Venus! Certainly not thousands of people.
Digital enhancements of pictures often show better detail than the original. A fuzzy picture can be brought into focus.
- James - [IMAGE]
You must not be listening to the Art Bell radio show. The guests on that show mostly talk about the face being an artificial construct. They also say that one of the reasons for keeping the preseence of the aliens a secret is that it will wipe the grin off all the debunkers on slashdot. They will lose interest in life and stop programming.
The reason we have stopped human exploration of space is so that people who can't keep the secret won't see anything. That is why a 'tourist' going into space is such a danger to NASA. People will now see this as a viable and profitable business and lots of people will go into space and reveal what they see.
- James - [IMAGE]
Van Flandern (who wrote the article) is a wellknown crackpot in the usenet physics goups. Here is a page about his theory of FTL gravity waves
Administrative contact: Michael Van Flandern
Technical contact: Kevin Van Flandern
Mouthpiece for: Tom Van Flandern, big-time Cydonia-face, um, "enthusiast".
Have yourself a browse through metaresearch.org and you'll find out all sorts of interesting things. Like, apparently the speed of gravity is "not less than 2 x 10^10 c", and therefore probably infinite.
Feel free to read some stuff on Jerry Pournelle's site about this guy.
Here's another URL that directly addresses the gravity-speed thing Tom Van Flandern loves so dearly.
If he were a bit more dedicated, he'd qualify as a real, quality, Usenet kook. I don't think he quite makes the grade, though.
Well, the server is down so I can't confirm for this example, but if I had a fiver for every image enhancement artifact heralded as evidence of Martian (or Lunar, for that matter) Civilization then I could probably mount my own mission to disprove it.
They are artifacts all right, digital imaging ones. As has been pointed out, this is yet another in the long line of Cydonia wishful thinking.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
For more on that moon thing, by the way, Fortean Times still have an old article up about it.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
So is our Moon, but we spent >$1 trillion dollars to send 11 (?) different astronauts, a golf club + Titleist ball, and a $50 million dollar go-kart (which we neglected to bring back.)
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Yanno, if you took one flake of dead skin off your arm and slipped it into a scanning electron microcsope, it would look exactly like all of the above photos.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you look at a blob-shaped cumulus cloud hoping to see a giraffe, you will see a giraffe.
The presence of sentient life is easy to spot. Symmetrical placement of objects; Placement or creation of objects/material with straight lines and the presence of (near) perfect circular anything. None of these appear naturally according to any rules we can think of. The wind doesn't stack rocks, vegetation or fuel cells in convenient piles near one's hovel.
Wouldn't it be funny though, if Mars is in fact totally dead (like our moon) but we are stumbling across some OTHER civilation's space exploration program?
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The author believes that we are a "transfer" species, and that mars was once the moon of a larger "home-world" that exploded. I admit I'd like to believe that, but, he says that 24.9 days is a martian day. And that coincides with our bio-rythem. However if his hypothesis is correct that mars was once the satelite of another "home-world", and humas are the descendents of that ancient race, wouldn't we have bio rythms of the home-world not the satellite (mars).
There are a lt of interesting theories. Regarding this sort of thing, I tend to beieve our history has missed something. For example it seems clear to me that the ancient Egyptians had exposure to higher technology than we have direct evidence for.
In more recent history we can see how technology can quickly be forgotten when anarchy takes over Read about the dark ages. It does seem possible for me to believe prehistoric "Martians" colonized the Erath, but perhaps crash landed and lost a great deal of technology in doing so. These imigrants peraps had some functional high-tech tools, but lost the knowledge to reproduce them. Perhaps they had a civil war upon landing and destroyed even more of they're technology. Gradually they're legacy became myth, and eventally was forgotten.
My speculation is certainly just that. However, I believe it should be easy to disprove. If we were once for another planet we could presume that earth had existing life before we migrated (we have fossil evidence to indicate that). Therefore humans should have DNA that isdistinctly different from local funa. Which It is not. (we share 99% of our DNA structure with Chimpanzees.) The likely hood that chimps are also migrants from a lost planet seems even more remote.
This site is entertaining, and raises interesting questions about another hominid like race, but does nothing to prove, or even adquetateky postulate that we are decendents of an alien race.
MS2k
Nahn-noo nahn-noo
The interior of the hexagon has parallel rows of white markings suggestive of text.
That's positively absurd. Where do they think text would come from? It's not likely any intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform would stamp a crater with a kilometer-wide message.
Maybe it's the EULA.
When you say good morning, and the sun is setting, now that's living on Martian solar time. When your sunglasses start looking like this (holding up the red-and-blue stereo glasses used to view images in 3-D), that's living on Martian time. When you start admiring strange-looking rocks and giving them names, then telling /., that's living on Martian time. When your days are called Sols, and your nights are called days, that's living on Martian time. But when you start laughing at the engineers' jokes, you know you're living on Martian time.
These pictures are about as scientifically significant as that 'giant thumb' I captured when I was photographing a squirrel on my last camping trip.
----- sXe
Something that is missing from the images is a scale. This can be extremely important in interpreting images. A good example where scale can be miss-used was one of Graham Hancock's (wrote Chariot of the Gods and other twaddle) claims about a plateau in south america (I forget what it is called). Basically this plateau is very high, very large and very flat. it is also very dry. It is covered in marking, some of which Hancock interpreted as alien run-ways, and indeed from the photos they did look remarkably plausable.
The problem though was that the structures were only a few feet wide, he had neglected to put a scale on the images.
Basically, many features look like something they are not, when viewed in the wrong scale. Also these images have no context, ideally there should be a pair of images, the fine resolution ones, together with a larger scale one showing the context. Ask any archiologist and they will tell you, any object is next to useless out of context.
Before I start taking any of these sorts of things seriously, I want scales and context.
Paul Leader
I'm just waiting for them to find the face of the Virgin Mary. My neighbor's window does a pretty good Jesus in the wintertime, though at other times it looks like Satan.
Heck, if those Greek dudes could decide that those five stars look like a crab, and these seven look like a bear, then who knows what they would find on Mars?
What's next? You'll tell me that:
- we never went to the moon
- there are secret codes in Shakespear
- Uri Geller can bend spoons
- Coffee enemas cure cancer (and sharks don't get cancer)
What a load of POPPYCOCK! You guys are just dotcom DOOFUSES!
Spots: ? Looks like they cranked up the contrast like crazy. Tubes 1: Pretty clearly barcan dunes in a valley.
Tubes 2: Ditto
Track: Ditto (ho hum)
Vegetation: Another one where it looks like they cranked up the contrast like crazy - these actually look like sunspots (?). If they're actually from Mars, they are lava flows.
Triangles: No clue - need to see in different light angles
Strange Lines: These are dust devil/tornado tracks - pretty cool, eh?
T: There are a bunch of these near Valles Marineris (which is a 10km+ deep version of these long, blunt-ended vallies. Their formation is a source of major contention. Probably a faulted graben feature.
Remember the "face" on Mars? That one was very effectively debunked with the MGS images. As long as you show individual images, you can pretty much see anything you want, but if you look at them in different light angles, you can start to piece together what the features actually are. However, if they actually showed those (or read the science), they'd have nothing.
huh? They were called canals because people thought that there were martians who were building them. what incorrect translation? what general hysteria? war of the worlds?
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
The "Antlered Animal" looks like a crude version of Bullwinkle. Does this mean that the other drawings were part of a cosmic comic strip?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
That being said, I think that alot of what folks see looking at mars is sort of what you get looking at the old ink blot tests. you can see all kinds of things there, when all it really is, is ink on papaer. Probably most of it is that way.
On the other hand, if there were little green robots out there running around, a place like mars might not be a bad place for a base, although the asteroids would be better suited for most operations. So it spotting structures from space would not be unusual.
Of note in this discussion are this story from last week on ABC News, about a group of 20 ex military and others coming forward and saying that their were just to many weird things going on. You can see the real Video of the original press conferance here: http://www.connectlive.com/events/disclosureprojec t/ in two parts, (p1 = 1h45m, p2 = 0h55m)
If this comes up as legit, then I would be surprised to NOT find something on Mars. but alot of it is likely nothing at all.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This has been taken to heart by a well known site, famous in fringe circles as one of the more serious sites in the fringe science area:
Clarke Item One: http://www.enterprisemission.com/images/arthur.jpg
Clarke Item Two: http://www.enterprisemission.com/sir.htm
An Explanation?: http://www.enterprisemission.com/can.htm
Take with the usual pinch of salt.
Although I can see the possibility for weird politics inside nasa.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
#47, "arranged triangles" is quite clearly one of the Florida vote ballots that, had it been accurately interpreted, would have given Gore his rightful place behind Clinton.
It also happens to be punchcard #4 of the DeCSS code. The MPAA better follow up on that one, there is quite clearly a threat of loss of proportion as never before imagined.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Oh well - atleast we will have plenty of good-quality coffee to enjoy while waiting...
If this stuff's real, then it must be the remnants of NASA's failed attempt to keep up with the 40's and 50's predictions that we'll be living happily in space sometime by the mid 70's.
If, on the other hand, there are little green men on Mars, we'd hear from them by now. After all, they likely have a hefty fine waiting for the guys who keep smashing space probes into their planet.
----------
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Did they find the Starbucks logo yet?
Blarf.
Seriously, this is crap!
^]:wq!^M
If we can pretend crop circles on earth are real, why wouldn't some higher intelligence stop by Mars to build sandcastles on the way by? Maybe the equivalent to a weekend trip to the beach.
Exclamation Point my patoot!! That's a slashdot symbol on Mars! CmdrTaco, is there something we should know?
Sickman's spinfusor catches Anonymous Coward by surprise.
spots, tubes, track, vegetation, trees, triangles, strange lines.... but no tripods
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
And before you mark this as a g**t.cx link, look at the big picture : The big image.
*p*
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Bah! This is just a blurred b&w photo of someones wiring closet.
--
Daniel J. Kelly
Has anyone ever wondered that Italy actually looks like a big shoe. It must be made by intelligent beings! :)
Already slashdotted... anyone have a mirror site for this?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I looked through what they had to show, and some of it was interesting, and they almost had me convinced that maybe they were on to something, and then they started pointing out animal shapes... FREAKIN' ANIMAL SHAPES! WHY would someone expend massive amounts of resources to make multiple Kilometre sized animal shapes? Consider the following:
/dev/null.
Mars has had this climate for long enough that some of the pretty little animals that are represented didn't exist in the forms that we have of them today when the climate is confirmed to be as it is now. So, this would mean that someone would have been 'artistic' enough to put the shapes on now, and now the climate eats away at them.
Also, if there is intelligent life on Mars right now, they would have to know what these animals look like in order to carve them into the surface of their own planet. They could receive our TV brodcasts, but then wouldn't you expect coca cola signs? they are a helluva lot more common than some quadraped mammal on TV. If they sent some kind of supersensitive probe here to look at what our world looks like so they'd have a picture, it is possible that we would have detected it's orbit, and probably shot it down or at least tried some form of stuff against it.
Basically, my argument is that unless the research is WHOLLY scientific, not "look at the pretty animals", we won't get anywhere with dumbasses like these people trying to publish stuff like this. All credibility of the earlier stuff is destroyed with the later stuff, and I'd be ashamed if I had been someone who contributed work to that and then saw that as the end product. I hope that this gets laughed all the way to
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The small lines are where you folded the photos a couple times. The bigger lines are where you folded it a whole lot of times.
This article says a lot about /. editorial discretion.
I used sarcasm to point it out.
As for Art Bell, I have heard pieces of his show when I get up to take my dog outside in the morning, and for the most part its just as valuable as this article.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It must be the weekend.
When do we get stories on hair replacement systems that work? Or how about, amazing 400 pound babies. Or everyones favorite, the "Devil's face seen in smoke of burning building"
Is OMNI still publishing?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This is like to see the clouds and say that some monster are flying in the sky...
Well if your talking about american farmers, I think Monsanto has the rights to give anal probes.
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
It has some entertainment value, but as it is funny to see what some people believe, it is almost equally frightening that they do.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
This is a very impressive collection of photoshopped fossils, bacteria, clouds and other textures.
maybe I don't look at the right places, but references or coordinates are not to be found on this site.
Nevertheless the "pictures" with marvelous magnification of the mars-surface are nice to look at and dream about.
I was thinking about a site about how the martians make crop-circles. I'm looking for some photoshop-artists... anyone?
---
Privacy is terrorism.
ok, i realize this isn't smokedot, but i'm stoned and those mars images are really flipping me out, man
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
Hmm, well that makes sense, but why lay them out in a grid as in the third photo, and that doesn't explain the big geometric diamond shape in the first photo.
Also I started by seeing one long straight line from the plane, then they became more an more clustered, until there was a mass of them in a grid (as per the third photo). After this they started easing off and eventually disappeared altogether. So once the grid and the diamond are explained, I might be able to accept pipelines as an answer...
NB: In the original post "are not roads" should have read "are roads" - sorry!
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Hmm, whilst on the topic of strange lines, I was wondering if anyone here could tell me what these strange geometric lines are that I saw when I was flying over Russia (at about 35,000 ft) on the way back to Europe after a holiday in Japan:
Big white diamond
Thick line
Grid lines
I do not think these are not roads, rivers, or pipelines - all of which have been suggested to me so far...
WARNING: Images are each 1.6Mb in size, and I'm not able to connect to the machine to upload smaller copies right now...
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
exactly.... this is sad; it's like they're using images of the surface of mars as a giant rorschach test... joe (+)
I was in a class where they demonstrated this - we were played a relevant section backwards without being told what we were supposed to be able to hear. It sounded like gibberish. Then we were told what the identified phrase was, and heard the same recording (no enhancement) again. Sure enough - "I saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth." A bit garbled but I HEARD it.
The simple suggestion of the words was enough to make us hear a recognizable semblance of the phrase in what was really just random noises. Now, I can't look at that picture of a bunch of rocks without seeing Neffertiti (I thought she came back as Brendon Fraser's wife?) but, c'mon - she ain't really there. With a big enough field of relatively random information, anyone with sufficient motivation can find apparently meaningful artifacts that anyone can perceive with the help of a little suggestion.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
... or came from?
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydoni
Don't remember the gospel, I definitely have to re-read the trilogy, dang!
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Analysis accompanying several of the images (#49, #52) notes the appearance of "writing". You might wonder what the Martians might wish to communicate at such a grand scale.
"Coincidentally," back in February, I painstakingly "enhanced" the images of magnetite chains in Martian meteorite ALH84001, which NASA announced appeared to be of "biological" origin.
My Photoshop skills are "rudimentary," but, like those intrepid explorers at "Metaresearch," that did not deter me from improving these blurry images to reveal their hidden meaning.
What I have uncovered is quite startling. As you can see, those clever Martians were not content to communicate on the "meta" scale, they made sure to leave us messages at the microscopic level as well.
http://www.galiel.com/aybabtu/magnetitechain.jpg
(the "original" NASA images, clearly "modified" by "agents" of "THEM", can be found here:e s/magneticbacteria/bacteria.html
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01imag
The "press" release is here: http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01_11AR .html
The "truth" is out there, people. It's way, way, waaaaay out there.
P.S. (Ever notice how both "NASA" and "THEM" have four letters? Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it....)
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
Go outside, wait for some clouds to show up.
Usually we recognise all kinds of shapes in these clouds (animals, trees, faces etc).
This is not because there's the secret cloud people sending us messages. It is simply our imagination, and our mind that 'maps' random images to known images, that makes us think we see a known structure. In the same line of reasoning, our mind maps the random rock formations to known structures as well.
Besides that, if there is enough random information (rock structures on mars), there is bound to be some that resembles a known figure. It would be more of a surprise we we *wouldn't* be able to see structure-like formations.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
If you're into this stuff, you may want to check out The Enterprise Mission. There's all kinds of fun stuff like this over there--in fact, they have a few articles devoted to the 'glass tubes', faces, and other 'anomolous structures'. Have fun.
--
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
One of the most incredible books to have been written about this is 'The Mars Mystery' By Graham Hancock. The book postulates at length about these phenomena.
Graham Hancock has a really well written, and comprehensive web page, with a page of links that specifically deal with this subject here.
There is a lot of information there, and on the linked pages, about recent discoveries, and not so recent discoveries. One linked page refers to a set of lunar photographs released by Nasa in 1966.
I am not sure personally that this is evidence of anything too fantastic, aliens, conspiracies or the like, but whether it is or not, it is interesting to note that there are some phenomena that do not fit into our currently accepted scientific world theory, and that the investigation into them is going on quite specifically outside of the mainstream.
As Paul K Feyerabend put it, "Success in science depends not only on rational argument but on a mixture of subterfuge, rhetoric and propaganda."
-- The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
No, you people have it ALL wrong. There IS no face on the moon. There's an Energizer Bunny on the moon, of course! (seriously though, if you look at it in the right way, the shadows that make up the face on the moon really do take on the shape of the Energizer Bunny. The eye on our viewing right is the head and ears, the eye on our viewing left is the drum, and the mouth makes up the body and tail. I don't know very many people that have noticed this, but it would make for a GREAT ad idea for Energizer.)
Where is the indication of scale for these pictures? Are the "trees" mere meters in diameter, or kilometers? You can imagine quite a few possibilities without knowing the scale. If these were put into a better perspective, we might come up with some better explanations.
When you do psy drugs you do tend to see things that aren't *really* there...but the same thing can also happen when you open up your mind to new things. I don't believe that there were aliens on mars, but only becuase i don't *know* there were aliens on mars.
I didn't say that the images were real...only that i found them interesting and possibly more than one would expect...
Listen to my music.
I only stated in the comment that the pictures were "interesting" and that they might consider some actual viewing instead of off the cuff comments. Make your own opinons.
Listen to my music.
You may think the site is a load of crap, but after examination you might think otherwise. Check you beliefs at the door...you might find something interesting...
Listen to my music.
soon we will take over your puny little planet. for i am an ambasador from an alien race who are a million years more technologicaly advanced than you are. prepare to meet your doom. if we do battle against you it will only take us 2 seconds to win this battle.
The "strange lines" picure seems to me a lot like the dust devil paths I've read about. Them NASA folks have actually observed one such line being drawn by one of these small whirlwinds.
:-)
I'm too lazy to post a link. Do a google search on +mars +"dust devils" or something
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Any other opinions?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I know this is (slightly) off-topic, but why are sites which offer very useful information set up so poorly? The site was completely trashed after about 8 comments (IIS to blame there), and even now that its up, the coding of the interface is terrible. How are people supposed to gain as much information as possible from this data, when it's presented in such a messy fashion?
The authors of this site have said it all when they explain, in effect, that *...these images have enormous detail making possible several different interpretations.*
Several people have already provided excellent alternative interpretations, and all that I might add is that what they interpret as trees are most likely boulders. They have done this interpretation on the basis of what appear to be tall, straight shadows toward the upper right-hand corner. These look much more like changes in the exposure of bedrock or underlying soil in the prevailing downwind direction of large boulders.
Another point to keep in mind is that Mars has a gravitational acceleration about one-sixth that of earth, and many landforms may look unfamiliar on aerial photos because of the increased steepness of surfaces this allows.
peering through my shiny new Edmund Scientific 2.5" telescope early this morn, I found the DeCSS code inscribed in a Martian plain!!!
Better send a few MPAA laywers up there with a coupla million gallons of whiteout before the whole world finds out...
High-quality Linux web hosting for geeks and coders.
this is obviously a conspiracy. "They" don't want "Us" to know the truth.
But, seriously, this sounds like the unfortunately named canali, incorrectly translated from Italian, causing general histeria among people who believed that Martians must be bulding all those canals.
It led to some good science fiction, however.
The pictures of the 'tubes' certainly look like interesting features. Whether they are artifacts of some alien civilisation or natural formations, they are surely worth a closer look.
Debunking frauds, kooks, and charlatans has long been part of the scientific process. You only have to compare the original image of the "face" to the "smiley face drawn on it" image to see that this is not digital enhancement; it's creative art. Check the latest SI for a complete comparison of the original and the doctored image. But, for those who really believe in flying saucers, what's a little more fabricated "evidence" among friends, eh? Lunacy: it's not just for the moon anymore!
Most people who have religious beliefs don't believe that their gods are routinely visiting trailer parks and abducting cattle.
This "face" lunacy has been debunked. Note also that you are NOT seeing original images of the "face", but instead "digitally enhanced" photos, which appear to have had a smiley face drawn on them. See the Mar/Apr SI for more details, as well as this special issue:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/
Actually, they were called canali by Schiaparelli ("canali" is the Italian for "channels," with no implication of manufacture--c.f. "the English channel"). They were generally acceped as natural until canali was (incorrectly) translated to "canal," thus originating the supposition that they were artificial.
-- MarkusQ
I thought that some of these pictures were uh... blurry and took some level of interpretation to see but most of these ok looking. But then again, take a look at how many shapes, forms, animals, etc. we've seen and made from the billions of stars in our skies (constellations)! I guess if you take enough pictures of stuff, you'll start to see things in 'em. Especially random hilly terrain pics. Good idea: one of you techheads should program a random terrain generator linked to a webpage and have a voting system to see if a person sees anything in that picture. Would make a great website... name it amisecretmartianface.com or something *snicker*.
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
It's interesting to see what the general public thinks of all this stuff we've been finding lately in Malin's Great Dumps. For a more conservative view (as well as a pretty good view of some Martian dunes) take a look at http://www.geocities.com/marspix_2000/index.htm BTW, just skip over page one and get right to page two; the first page is in dire need of revision, and I haven't had time lately to do that. Also if you don't have a pretty good monitor, then you won't be able to see most of what the site is about. Also, I would appreciate any comments. Send them to badmrd@usa.nett (despam by removing the last "t." That way we won't clog up SlashDot with a lot of flames. Thanks.
After all is said and done, there's usually more said than done.
I (Branden Loizides have nothing to do with any of these comments. Kevin (the real culprit) is a user of the domain that I purchased for him. Big mistake I guess.
Sorry for any problems he's caused.
Please disregard the contact info given as it won't do any good; you got the wrong guy.
---Branden