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Still More Evidence of Life of Mars
dirtyhank writes: "According to this article a group of Hungarian scientists have found another potential evidence of life on Mars. Apparently some groups of dark spots spread every martian spring. They say this could be caused by photosynthetic organisms."
an high resolution view of defrosting dunes in the southern polar region of Mars used in this study is available on discovery.com here
... everything looks like a nail. "We cannot find anything else to explain it," said EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGST Tibor Gant. There are actually lots of seasonal changes on Mars that make colors and things - geologists and meteorologists have lots of explanations for them.
"I mean, yes, we considered deposition and stripping of lighter-colored dust in a seasonal cycle related to wind patterns, which is a common phenomenon on Mars. And of course we pondered simple soil darkening due to partial ice melting; I mean, that's obvious, right? And we'd have been silly not to consider UV-catalyzed changes in soil chemistry which would occur in the spring as the UV-opaque ice layer thins or disappears.
"But," he continued, "Who's going to give us research funding for any of those? Life is our only ticket aboard the ESA 2003 mission. So, in funding terms, we literally couldn't think of anything else."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
observed canali (that's Italian) on Mars. The word "canali" means either "channels" or "canals." There's an obvious difference: a canal is man-made, a channel need not be. There were no dark blotches. They were lines across Mars.
An American astronomer named Percival Lowell went well overboard with the canali, stating that they were, in fact canals and inventing an entire Martian ecology. He wasn't some rich guy with a telescope. Lowell predicted the existence of Pluto and founded the observatory where it was later discovered.
What Giovanni and, to a lesser extent, Lowell observed on Mars is real. They were seeing huge surface features (like Valles Marineris) and the planet's covering of natural channels.
Lowell popularized the observations by turning them into, basically, science fiction of the worst sort. That's a bad deal, indeed, but some of the canali were there.
The important lesson in this story--which is highly relevant given this story--is that Occam's Razor exists for a good reason. Go with the simpler explanation (that these are naturally carved channels) until something comes along that says something wierder is true (that aliens are out farming on Mars).
Simpler: seasonal changes over more complex: alien plant-life.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
JPL has Mars Global Surveyor images online, and this particular can be found at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/du ne_defrost_6_2001/index.html . Also included is a *truly* high resolution image. JPL's image commentary says that the features are defrosting and not life.