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Free Associating On The Surface Of Mars
jdaily writes "Apparently, while NASA scientists are busy analyzing the more than 10 gigabits of data returned by the rovers thus far, earnest space enthusiasts are dissecting the images and reporting discoveries of fossils, letters of the alphabet, and a white bunny. The 'Net really needs a kook hall of fame."
Seems there already is a crank hall of fame. Thisone didn't reach that site yet though.
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To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Scientists reported today that they have finally found an infinute number of typewriters, keyed by an infinite number of monkeys. This much was expected. The real surprise was that they weren't working on Shakespeare; the only data scientists found was the source code to Windows XP.
The 'Net really needs a kook hall of fame.
I thought that's what Slashdot was for.
-b
PS. Joke, not a troll. Get it?
I would love to see a list of all the anomalous photographs from the missions. I'm sure all the tin foil hat types are moving on this, but not necessarily in a constructive way. I saw the so called fossil rock (interesting, but not compelling enough to be likely over chance), and the bunny (a piece of the craft) and a couple of others, but it would be funny to get them organized into one place with the raw images (not photoshop altered) so we could play with statistics, so to speak.
-Sean
The letters, the fossils, everything was left by the ancients long ago before the Goa'uld came and destroyed the StarGate.
If you haven't read the article, do not do so while consuming a beverage. I think someone owes me a keyboard.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I used to see all sorts of things in the rocky landscape. A lot of the things I saw looked liked gremlins to me, which featured prominently in my nightmares. Now that I look back on it, putting the mural on the wall was maybe not a good idea.
At least I had the sense to realize that it was just my imagination. I never once thought there was anything actually living on the Moon.
Check it out: Granted, it's probably just a tire track, or something, but, last I checked, they hadn't outlawed armchair quarterbacking...
... down the rabbit hole!
The aspect of these stories I find most interesting is the sheer number of people that have Photoshop and are using it to alter these photographs. Few if any of these folks strike me as the graphic design type. It is strange then that they would shell out $649 for an app they seemingly only use to retouch NASA photographs.
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<knowing chuckle
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I know this sounds like a troll but I was having a look on the website and these rovers don't move very much do they?
:)We send lumps of plastic, metal and silicon hurtling throught the big black to crash land on a ball of red rock only to have them creep around slower than an arthritic ant with a particulalrly large tree on its back. Nearly half a century after getting the first man-made object into space we're still playing with very expensive, very slow, very delecate, short-lived radio controlled cars. If computers had advanced at the same rate we'd still be using mercury delay lines.
Good talent for understatement you have there
Yes, I'm very impressed that NASA can get overgrown fireworks off the ground most of the time. They don't even need the blue touchpaper these days. But I just wish someone would decide it'd be a good idea to divert some of the billions spent on finding ways to blow eahc other up towards developing decent manned space exploration. Preferably while there are still people to do the exploration.
Fossils are fragile, but they are rocks. You see people being careful with them in movies like Jurassic Park because they are often embedded in other rock, and in your zeal to remove the rock from the rock sometimes it gets hurt.
But no real "fossil" could be obliterated by rolling over in, in Martian gravity no less. The same thing promoting righteous outrage proves that it wasn't a rock in the first place. Even if it "broke up", you'd still see pieces.
Mars isn't the moon, it has an atmosphere; if it broke completely into dust when subjected to such a small force, it would have long since weathered to nothing. A fossil would have to be a rock that has survived millions or billions of years already; rolling over it isn't going to do any more then the wind that would have 'exposed' it, as it would have blown right away with the surrounding dirt.
Right - it was probably just an impression made in the dust by the tire.
Nevertheless, it is a curious little impression, isn't it?
And remember, if there really is [or was] "life" on Mars, we do not necessarily have any clue what it [or its "fossilized" remnants] might be [or have been] made of. Hell, we might not even have an adequate definition of just what "it" is, or was [prions, anyone?].
Wait...10 gigabites is about 1 gigabyte. I use up more disk space after a weekend with my digital camera. 1 gigabyte? That's it?
Advice: on VPS providers
If you notice the raw image names given, they begin with:
1M131201699EFF
1M131212854EFF 1------------- Opportunity
-M------------ Microscopic Imager
--iiiiiiiii--- Time taken, unsigned integer seconds since ?MEpoch?...
-----------EFF Full-Frame 'EDR' (not linearized)
#man meredr
So those two images are both 'microscopic.' ;)
Tire tracks? Did Opportunity goof off and play with some MicroMachines(tm) for 3 hours?
There are lots of unusual objects, particularly in micro images. Being genious enough to know I'm an idiot; I go 'hmm can't wait until someone explains the process that makes that biological looking shape.'
You have to remmember that the surface of mars is at a nice -81 F (-63 C) and there is no oxygen
, so an internal combustion or any other "burning" propellant to produce motion is out of the question. You're stuck with either bringing your own energy, or having to rely on solar cells to power your vehicle.
Not everything that works so well on Earth will work on other planets. I'd recommend reading a part of this article (search for "thermal expansion" and read that paragraph).
I was trying to link to "this" above at http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venera11.htm, but it didn't work...
These discussions bring to mind a quote of Carl Sagan's:
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." (from Billions and Billions, iirc)
Whether it's little green men, intelligent design or gun control, people have a tendency to shape their arguments (and distort the facts) to reflect their desire for how they would like the universe (world, society, whatever) to operate, without regard for how it actually functions. I think it's our greatest failure as a species.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I most certainly paid for that software! Unfortunately... I washed my pants with the receipt... and um... the box too.
Fossil's on Mars! Yes! Finally! Proof of The Creation of the Great Watch Maker! The Rapture isn't far now! Dibs on your Beemer. Bwuhahaha! http://www.fossil.com
Parent and grandparent provide classic examples of the very free association we're talking about here. Given a photo taken with a microscope, they assume it's on a much bigger scale (their own scale), and decide that a microscopic concretion is tire tracks! The image provides a pretty big clue with the word 'grindz'. This small rock surface was ground down with the RAT tool. The alleged fossil is curiously wrapped around the entrance to a lens-shaped concavity. I think this may be a case of a particular mineral inclusion being dissolved by the water, with perhaps some sort of chemical reaction between these dissolved components and the surrounding rock to create the 'fossil'.
"Secretly, deep down, we all hope there's life beyond our own home planet."
After reading the article, I'm left wondering if there's intelligent life on our own planet.
NASA scientists believe the "bunny" was probably a piece of the landing air bag or some other bit of human-generated trash, Christensen said. On one Web site, an outraged writer accused NASA of intentionally running over the bunny with the rover.
First road-kill on another planet. Another first for Opportunity!
I guess my mind is messin' with me also. I did see something that looked just like a miniture pair of eyeglasses in one photo. Maybe they belonged to the bunny, like the nearsighted Captain Kangoroo bunny.
Table-ized A.I.
"The 'Net really needs a kook hall of fame."
The site for display and archive of awards for kooks on usenet is at plonk.com. The associated newsgroup is alt.usenet.kooks (warning: excessive signal to noise ratio, even for usenet). The award relevant to the article, the finding of artifacts on Mars, would be the Victor Von Frankenstein Weird Science Award. The drawback here is the requirement that the kookishness be on usenet, a holdover from when that was pretty much the entire public part of the net (before WWW). Anything that appeared strictly on web sites wouldn't qualify.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That is an image of a rock taken with the rovers microscopic imager. They photographed the rock, then they ground a shallow hole in it and took another picture to try to get an idea of what the structure of the rock was. I still don't see how someone could possibly think that was a fossil though.
Fine.. Mod me down but am I the only one who gets annoyed by news stories the obviously call for pictures but don't include any. It would be interesting and ammusing to see the pictures that kooks are referring to. ug..
It's funny... for all the silly crap the nutzo's are claiming to see in Mars images, hardly anything has been made of the unidentified flying object in this image (large streak near the bottom). That's a 15-second exposure of part of the early morning Martian sky, a segment of a panorama series designed to also grab the Earth... the streak is likely one of the 30-some or so defunct and/or lost spacecraft that may be orbiting Mars right now.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
Has anyone else seen the Plover?
I think it's our greatest failure as a species.
We're built to find patterns. Small wonder we find them. We even have a word for things that look like patterns but aren't, coincidence. Is it really so surprising that this breaks down when we're confronted by a world much larger than we were built for? I'm ont a fan of ignorance, but to some extent it's to be expected.
Must be the one from Monty python, those rovers better watch their backs! Or their necks I should say.
Maybe I missed something, but as far as i see there are no links to those mars-pictures in the article... Does anynody know where i can take a look at these "findings" myself?
This is mildly OT, but is there an accepted name fot this fallacy? I want to shoot one, have it stuffed, and mount it over my fireplace.
Helium balloons want to be free.
I'm fairly certain that image is from the microscopic imager which means that it's not a tire track. The folks at enterprise mission are grade A kooks but that is an interesting photo. I'd be curious to see if the size of this particular 'fossil' is similar to the rottini artifact. They look strikingly similar and this was taken pre-RAT-drilling which means that it can't be an artifact of the drilling process.
If I was something like those artifacts on Earth, the first thing I'd think of was that I'd just found a fossil and I know that a lot of people at NASA are thinking the same. I wonder if there's any criterion that could be used to prove or disprove the authenticity of these fossils with therover instruments?
Couldn't be a tire track - too small, and not whre they drove.
On the other hand, it could be lots of things other than a fossil. This Hoagland person is the grand high poobah of wishful thinking.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Where is the picture of the bunny?
Did it have any painted eggs with it?
How about small, colored, sugary spheroids?
Was it munching a carrot?
The conspiracy theorists have it all wrong. NASA isn't trying to hide their knowledge that life exists elsewhere, as George Filer asserts in that article. If you read up on some of NASA's astrobiology research, you'll see that if anything there are teams of motivated people desparately searching for evidence... Evidence being the key word. We need more than the insertion of patterns by our marvelous nervous systems onto boulders (seeing giraffes in the clouds) to show the existence of life elsewhere. Unfortunately the cranks and nutbags discredit the whole effort, much like they do for the environmentalist and conservation movements. Pesky nutbags.
who wannts odds that the "bunny" picture shows up in next month's Playboy?