Martian Rock Found In Morocco

daeley writes "The BBC is reporting that a rock found in 2001 in Morocco is originally from Mars, similar in composition to the 1977 Antartica find. 'The meteorite would have been blasted off the Red Planet by an impact and may hold clues to Mars' watery past... scientists say the fragments are magmatic rocks. Magmatism is the main process by which water moves from the core of planets to their surface.'"

Comments

Re: That explains it

[dublin]

> It never ceases to amaze me that in the world of "science" that theory is most always talked of as proven fact. If the probability that object x doesn't exist is 80%, that object is talked about as if it doesn't exist conclusively, even though the possiblity that it exists is in the other 20%t. The age of the universe is a good example. Scientist y estimates to to being x Billion years old, and every textbook, news article, journal, documentary, etc states that the universe is x billion years old as if proven fact. The truth is that no-one currently knows exactly whether it's one billion or a billion billion years old.

That's why scientists prefer convergent evidence over one individual's opinion.

BTW, AFAICT astronomers are now nearly unanimous on an age of 13.7 billion years. This is a fairly recent result.

Your "convergent evidence", though, is not really any such thing, but just a general agreement on what is politically acceptable, not scientifically justified.

It's vitally important to understand that these dates are in reality based solely on conjecture, since every radioactive dating method rests on unfounded assumptions - assumptions that produce results that are known to be grossly and wildly inconsistent in the few cases we have where the ages of rocks *are* known precisely. The assumptions are "tweaked" to produce the desired age, not the other way around...