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."

Comments

Hall of fame

[noselasd]

Seems there already is a crank hall of fame. Thisone didn't reach that site yet though.

Re:Hall of fame

[sporktoast]

Back in the day, Donna Kossy was always the first person to turn to for this sort of thing. She's still around, if you are looking for this sort of stuff in dead tree format.

If you look around, you can find a couple of good sites around that carry the torch.

Look and Ye shall find

[leoaugust]

It sounds funny when you first hear it, but it is scary how serious this is to some people. In many ways this mentality also captures the state of the evolution versus "intelligent design" debate. And an ungodly number of people believe in intelligent design.

George Filer is not deterred. In a boulder photographed by Spirit on its 44th Martian day, he said, there's a distinct white E and a G, though the E may be closed off at the top, like a P. The letters appear to be 3 to 4 inches tall, Filer said.

In his living room, he enlarged the picture on his wide-screen television. He still had to point out the E and the G. They looked like they might have been chiseled or spray-painted or they might have been created by streaks of light that happened to look like letters.

"I could see easily how NASA would miss them," he said. "What we do is blow them up, so to speak, on the computer, using Photoshop and the like. If you believe there's something out there, you look for evidence."

If you believe these's something out there, you will find someone to tell you there is something out there. And that someone will also want to tell you what that something out there is telling you to do ...

.

Re:Look and Ye shall find

[homerjs42]

And an ungodly number of people believe in intelligent design.

Shouldn't that be godly?

"A Kook Hall of Fame"

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Post pictures

[smoondog]

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 ancients did it

[dylan_baxter]

The letters, the fossils, everything was left by the ancients long ago before the Goa'uld came and destroyed the StarGate.

Re:The ancients did it

[noselasd]

That's what the ancient want you to believe. Look a bit further, you'll see ruins, probably of the Lost City.

Disclaimer Needed

[cybermage]

I know the story called these people kooks, but:

On one Web site, an outraged writer accused NASA of intentionally running over the bunny with the rover.

If you haven't read the article, do not do so while consuming a beverage. I think someone owes me a keyboard.

Life on the Moon?

[starfarer42]

When I was a kid I had a large mural on my bedroom wall that showed the classic photo of the Earth viewed from the surface of the Moon.

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.

Actually, the fossil picture is pretty interesting

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Check it out:

http://www.enterprisemission.com/images/Spirit/Fos sil.jpg

Granted, it's probably just a tire track, or something, but, last I checked, they hadn't outlawed armchair quarterbacking...

Beagle is there!

[cloudless.net]

... down the rabbit hole!

Diet Rite and Powdered Cocoa

[Graymalkin]

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.

<knowing chuckle />

Re:Actually, the fossil picture is pretty interest

[Jerf]

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.

Definitely not that...

[mynameis (mother ...]

Eeeks, you've all slid down the same slippery slope :)

Granted, it's probably just a tire track, or something

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.'

Re:Right.

[Jerf]

Regardless of what a fossil is made of, it must be sturdy to survive millions of years, or the process of being exposed to the surface. Saying "we don't know what a fossil on Mars might be made out of" doesn't mean that it might be made out of Jelly Bellies; I may not be able to speak to the exact composition but there are certain properties that must hold true, or you'd never have seen it in the first place.

I mention this mostly because it's a common fallacy, that some amount of non-knowlege implies total non-knowlege. As soon as you say it, it sounds stupid and is obviously false, but it sneaks up on a lot of people, and is the foundation of entire pervasive modern philosophies. (It is, for instance, an essential philosophical foundation of Strong Post-Modernism.) I do not and can not know everything about the putative fossil on Mars but I can determine some things and make certain observations with great confidence, including observations that lead to the conclusion that it isn't a fossil. ;-)

Re:spirit/opportunity

[Tree131]

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).

Carl Sagan

[robbo]

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.

Re:Carl Sagan

[Ieshan]

If you're interested, there's a lot of relevant psychological research on this topic (past the clever Sagan quote). Basically, the big finding is that humans like to take lots of ambiguous data, pick a relevant category, and fit it in any way they can.

There has been much research into stereotyping from this angle - that is, People take ambiguous data (Suzie is good at Math and Reading but has trouble with English and Science) and generalize to positive or negative impressions of this person's academic achievement based on previous priming with a stereotype (Suzie is Black, Suzie is Latino, Suzie is White, etc). Asked why these pick these things, participants point to skewed examples from the ambiguous facts: "Suzie is bad at Science, therefore she has trouble", or "Suzie is good at Reading, therefore she is a good student".

This is basically the same phenomena we're witnessing here. There's a whole lot of ambiguous data (there *might* be life, there *might* not be), and these guys approach it from the "There IS life" mentality. Given all that ambiguous data, one can surely find outlier examples which seem to support their hypothesis.

A good review of the 'Positive Test Strategy', 'Expectacy Confirmation Bias', or 'Hypothesis Conformation Bias' can be read in "Social Cognition", by Kunda et al.

No intelligent life down here

[Nynaeve]

"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.

You killed the bunny wabbit!

[Tablizer]

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.

plonk.com

[DynaSoar]

"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.

Actually it can't be a tire track

[fredmosby]

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

UFO on Mars

[notyou2]

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.