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Evidence Found of Lake, Catastrophic Flood on Mars
angkor points to this article on spaceflightnow.com, excerpting: "Scientists 'have discovered a large former lake in the highlands of Mars that would cover an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.'"
... except the massive flood which lasted 40 days and 40 nights was on mars not earth! now i wonder what happened to noah and all the animals?
Of course, it would be more useful to cover arizona and colorado with a lake at the moment.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
with that amount of area wouldn't it be better referred to as an inland sea like the Great Lakes or the Black sea?
Who run Barter Town?
I think I ought to summarize the current 'mars' situation. I don't have anything against exploring mars, etc, but it seems to me like people are trying to make worthwhile stories out of trivia.
I think we have been bombarded with the "news" of water on Mars for long enough so far. First it was the polar ice cape water residue, which was quite important. Then there was the hydrogen-trace confirmation, which is perhaps not so important, though it does show that there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.
Now they have finished a high-resolution altitude map. They used this to calculate the possible origin of the water that shaped a valley, and traced it to something looking like a lake basin. Again, nice, since people theorize that if there were life on mars, there would be a higher chance that it had existed at a lake.
But, is this important? As far as I am concerned, the answer is no, unless someone decides to actually send a mission to the planet to gather hard evidence. Which currently seems impossible, considering the amount of money wasted on the ISS (which has no clear function IMHO).
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
What is it with texas these days ? ./ seems to measure anything extraterestrial in STU (Standard Texas Units).
Just for clarity : is this a metric unit ? Can we count in Millitexi, picotexi, GIGATEXI (drooldrool) ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The BBC website has a related article about the formation of the Ma'adim Vallis. It can be found at News.BBC.Co.Uk
Just you're average nitpicker.
I'm not interested until they find a Martian nudist beach.
I love those Martian chicks!
Exactly what was catastrophic about it? Did people die? Were towns washed away?
This is mars we are talking about. Impressively large flood, yes. Catastrophic flood, I don't think so. Worst case, some large rocks got moved about.
Bob.
Richard C. Hoagland and friends have some odd theories, but one of them has been somewhat predictive along the lines of this finding. The theory is that Mars was in tidal lock in the not-too-distant past, ie. that it used to be a moon of a larger planet (which exploded or something).
Predicted by this theory: the distribution of underground water-ice at the equator being primarily in two areas 180 degrees apart. This is what was found, and funny thing, these are apparently areas of high-elevation, not low-elevation.
Also predicted, climate change on Mars due to cataclismic event as opposed to a slow decline. Such a rapid event would cause exactly the sort of thing described in this mars lake article.
Another good prediction: the 'stains' visible in Mars orbiter pics that look like liquid water on the surface, in fact are liquid water leaking to the surface. Others poo-poo this idea because they say Mars climate change was geologically ancient, and if water was leaking to the surface as frequently as the pics suggest, it would all be gone by now. Hoagland's theory says the climate change was relatively recent (millions of years), so this really is water and its not all gone yet. Look for this to be found next & lets see if the standard model can survive.
www.enterprisemission.com
Richard C. Hoagland is coincidentally is on the Coast to Coast AM (yes, Art Bell's radio show) tonight, not discussing this topic however (hmm, Speilberg producing TV miniseries about what??)
no sig, no plan, no clue
A city where you can't get a drink...
That's easy. Noah's Ark was a spaceship. Duh!
Which reminds me of a German cartoon (http://www.nichtlustig.de/) recently: one sees the Ark in the background, and in the foreground is a small raft with a prophet-like guy and two unicorns. The caption reads "Noah's rival Ishmael was rather less successful", and one of the unicorns says to Ishmael, "By the way, we're gay."
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
'the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.'
FYI, the European version of the article translates this into:
'the size of France'
it's olds for nerds... images from as far back as Pathfinder showed conclusive evidence of catastrophic outburst floods. That's why Mars Odyssey carries the gamma ray spectrometer which is tuned to look for the hydrogen signal from subsurface water in the first place.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Examples of how strange this get are seen here. Ignoring the junk science nonsense, the pictures are interesting. If you scroll about halfway down, there is one mars photo, conveniently linked to the nasa archive, that looks for all the world like an actual sea shore. So much so it is startling.
Of course, the real scientists are taking their sweet time coming to any conclusions (insert plausible reason here), which is driving the hobbyists and others right up a wall.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The problem with pedantary is that you really have to be sure that you're correct.
3. (Geol.) A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes also 3: a sudden violent change in the earth's surface [syn: cataclysm]
Before someone tries to up the pedantry, there's nothing in the greek root of either words that's specific to the third planet of our solar system. ;-P
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The Colorado wasn't always a little stream. Since huge numbers of people started moving to Arizona and Southern California, and others started growing crops in the desert, the Colorado has been tapped for irrigation.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
NASA seems to alternate between press releases of "Water/Life on Mars", "Yet Another Module of a Usless Space Station Launched", "Some 'Kids' Program" and "30 Years Since We Last Did Something (Orbit/Moon etc)".
I am a firm believer in space exploration but I'm really starting to loose faith in NASA. The search for life in the universe is important but should it really be the program's primary goal? IMHO, we should be trying to commercialize space (for humans not just satellites). NASA should help corporations build space hotels, start charging a $million a flight and fund their science that way. The Mars fossils aren't going anywhere! With a good space infrastructure looking for life becomes much easier.
Reply, don't mod.
As a resident of Rhode Island I'm terrified of the possibility that one of those floods "the size of Rhode Island" or wildfires "the size of Rhode Island" will someday actually happen IN Rhode Island.
I know I've asked the this question before: But why is it that everytime there's a story about life on other planets we have someone start talking about the "religious zealots" and how this is going to upset their faith? Like for some reason everyone who is religious will just pack their bags and go home and never give religion another thought.
Well here's a thought... the vast majority of religious people (like the vast majority of the population) probably don't care if there is/was life on other planets. For those that do care the vast majority of them welcome the idea and want to know more about it (myself included).
Yes there are some religious people who are short-sighted and have to put God in a box and declare that everything happened a certain way. For those of us who are not short-sighted its fairly easy to reconcile faith with science. We realize that God is much bigger than any science or logic. The Bible doesn't say that Evolution didn't happen, it just says that God had a hand in creating all that is. For all we know he used evolution to do it and put billions of life-forms all over the universe!
Finally all this begs the question, Why do you care if some people believe that God created the world in a certain way? They have free speech, they don't seem to be here bothering you. If you believe their wrong fine but why bring them up here where has nothing to do with the topic at hand?
Is it because you are equally short-sighted and believe that all religious people in the world believe a certain way because of the acts of a vocal few?
The Anti-Blog
...so damned dangerous.
_ do nt_kill.html
If you (and possibly your community) are the type that have a quiet, personal faith that sustains you during the difficult parts of your life....
...well, even though I (and many others) may find the first principles behind it (that there is an invisible, omnipotent and omniscient being who created us all and who has rules for us that we must all abide by or be consined to the flames) absurd, there's no law against the absurd, and you're not hurting anyone. There's no reason for anyone to piss in your cornflakes.
But you unfortunately - on the surface - share the same faith with a bunch of people who twist religeous writings to serve their own ends, and who simultaniously use these twisted interpretations to absolve them of any responsibility for their actions.
Somebody with the absolute conviction that an otherwise unconsciencable act is sanctioned by their God is a VERY dangerous person, the same way that a psychopath or sociopath is dangerous. The normal rules of conduct no longer apply.
So you get people who feel very strongly that "abortion is murder", but believe that killing doctors who perform abortions is just fine (because it is sanctioned by God,and thus not "murder")
And so on and so forth. There are so many examples that I don't think it's necessary to trot them all out. You don't have to search very hard to find examples of religiously-motivated abhorrant behaviour.
And this behaviour is very much inter-faith. All the major world religions preach peace, tolerence, understanding, and a virtuous life, and evey one of them has bred fanatics who have killed, raped, burned, and opressed (from individuals to entire populations) in the name of their God.
A common theme amongst these fanatics is an insistance on the absolute infallibility of their scriptures and the letter of these scriptures (or at least the part of it that they feel gives them leave to do whatever it is they want to do) Anything that can debunk or disprove these scriptures makes is more difficult to gain converts and continue spreading the disease. A world with no religious zealots would be a very fine place indeed.
So it's not that anyone believes that "all religious people believe a certain thing because of the acts of a vocal few" but rather that "the acts of the vocal few are so damned dangerous that they have to be contained somehow".
Note that you don't necessarily have to be burning witches or firebombing abortion clinics to be dangerous. If you seek the supression of the teaching of truth (because it contradicts your scriptures) you are dangerous. If you seek to deny people certain rights (because your scriptures claim such people are hated by your God) then you are dangerous. If you seek the supression of certain books or works of art because you feel they are counter to the wishes of your God, you are dangerous. Etc etc ad nausium.
Probably the best illustration of what I'm taking about here comes from the fine folks at The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/god_clarifies
The fanatics are the ones speaking for you, like it or not. They tar you with the same brush.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I'll get modded down by the atheists
No, if I had mod points I'd be modding it up - "funny".
A 300 cubit or approximately 450 foot ship is pretty big (not quite as big as the Navy supply ship my son is serving on, but still big). There were reasons wooden ships were not often made that large - even the best shipwrights with the strongest woods have trouble achieving enough structural strength to withstand wave action beyond about 300 feet length, the ship becomes too hard to maneuver with sails or oars, it's too big for most old-time harbors, and you can't drag it up on the beach to scrape barnacles and re-stuff the seams. Noah wouldn't have had to worry about the last two, but he was no boatwright, and for his first large construction to have held together in the rough waters of a flood would have been indeed miraculous. Managing to keep control of it sufficiently to not get the bottom ripped out as flood waters dragged it across submerged forests and rocks would have been another miracle. Getting the animals there would have been another...
If I was inclined to believe in this at all, I could probably swallow those three miracles. The big problem is that it would have been utterly impossible for that one ship to have carried all the species of bacteria in the world. (Mark Twain first noticed this little discrepancy, over a century ago.)
(We seem to be in agreement on the issue of the danger of fanatics - of any stripe - so I promise not to beat you up too badly :)
But the issue of Biblical "truth" is an interesting one, because so many people's concepts of what "Biblical truth" actually *means* are so different and so contradictory - often self-contraditictory.
If I understand your position correctly (and I agree that text is not a perfect communications medium), you believe:
1) Everything in the Bible is True
2) Mistakes may be made in translation, such that a False version of what was once a True statement may appear in later versions.
3) Even given a perfect translation, people may (intentionally or accidently) misconstrue what a passage actually means, and so the version of the passage as it exists in their heads may become False.
I agree wholeheartedly with statements 2 and 3 from the above summary.
Now let me make the following observations
1) There are some parts of the Bible that are very obviously False - the Earth was not built 6 days, for example. The four Gospels (which all discuss the same events) often contradict each other on dates, places, and sequences of events.
So there are passages to one can point to and state "this is False" and other passages one can point to and state "up to three of these may be False, but we don't know which"
2) Given the lack of access to early copies (which may not necessarily track the original texts themselves) and the lack of ability of most Christians to read the ancient languages (usually Greek) in which they were written, most people must thus read the Bible in the translation to their native language, and thus get the full force of any translation and copy errors.
This in turn means that in their copy of the Bible, there exist passages which are not the same as the "True" Bible, and so are False.
3) For a given person, there is some level of probability that they will misconstrue a given passage at any given time, and so their "internal model" of the passage becomes False.
When you tie this all together, this means that:
1) for a given passage, there is some probability that the passage is False
2) You have no way of determining what that probability is
This means that _every single passage in the Bible is suspect_!
How can one choose to base a life, make decisions, or answer questions, based on the contents of the Bible, if there is no way to know if the answer is True or not?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Why do americans feel the need to express everything in space, in how it relates to the size of texas?
Bruce willis: How big is that thing?
Some guy: It's as big as texas
Nasa nerd 1: I've found a lake on mars!
Nasa nerd 2: Really? where?
Nasa nerd 3: Up there on your left... It's about 1.2 texas'.
Picard: Number one, how fast are we currently travelling?
Riker: Approximately 200 million texas' per hour sir
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.