Slashdot Mirror
Making Tracks on Mars
An anonymous reader writes "In a remarkable series of orbital pictures, the Mars Global Surveyor's cameras have imaged the tracks of the Spirit rover on the surface. Individual debris pieces including the backshell and lander are visible with remarkable clarity using an innovative roll of the satellite."
Can't we go to just ONE other planet without scattering our garbage about willy-nilly?!?!
Any chance that they can use this process to search for Beagle?
You know the Surveyor guys are like "oh, sure, NOW you can look around and tell us what's interesting to investigate!"
-Styopa
First, it's astronomy, not astrology. One is a science with reproducible experiments and predictable results; the other is a pagan near-religion whose results are entirely vague, and impossibly subjective.
m l).
Second, you're talking about a statistical sample of 2 planets (out of what, thousands of billions?). (And I daresay we've hardly explored #2 - heck, there are great chunks of EARTH we haven't explored.) To wash your hands of it saying 'well, haven't found life yet, we must be alone' is a bit presumptuous.
Second "Things like irreducible complexity in bacterial flagelli or the inability to intentionally design life from scratch while claiming that a roll of the dice made all this seems absurd." NOBODY (except Creationists commonly hiding behind the title of 'intelligent design theory' and busily building strawman arguments) has ever suggested that life is the result of the 'roll of the dice'.
We KNOW that in the presence of radiation, complex hydrocarbon chains such as those found around the universe will form amino acids (found both in liquid water on earth, and in insterstellar dust clouds http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0328/p11s01-stss.ht
We KNOW that these acids can spontaneously form proteins and quinones, among lots of other stuff, which in turn form proteins and (it's surmised) possibly the precursors to RNA.
Granted, we're not clear on that last, teeny step. But give scientists some benefit of the doubt - they've resolved the simplest forms of life down to the point where serious research projects are going on now to create life at a molecular level; to the credit of the researchers in the field, there seems to be a hesitation going on while some of the ethical and moral issues are discussed before proceeding.
I don't dispute with you your essential point - it IS pretty amazing when you think about it. I find the system of the universe a glorious and joyful ballet of energy, matter, and life. I don't know why people feel compelled to assume that God isn't competent enough to build it from the beginning to do what He wanted, and that He would have to stick his hand in and 'make' stuff happen.
-Styopa
Give it time.
Most (if not all, I'm not an astrophysicist) of the planets we've discovered in other solar systems are Jupiter-like - enormous and gaseous. (They've also mostly been almost as close to their suns as Mercury is to ours).
Jupiter-like planets may be easier to detect, but they're not very hospitable to life. Give it time, we'll find something.
So it's old news to people who worked on the project - however, I think it's safe to say that doesn't include the vast majority of people reading this.
No, I don't want a free iPod
Yeah, but you didn't design and build your car from scratch to get to your "exotic location". I'd be taking pictures of my car if it landed on another planet.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Do the AnswersInGenesis people know that you're trying to defend their point of view? Maybe you should just link to the site and leave it at that. Yours has to be one of the worst arguments for your point I've seen in a long time, and that's saying something. Let's take a few swings, shall we?
...the mysteries of an apparent Cambrian explosion in the fossil record?
> People have been discussing Asimov's three laws of robotics for decades. But we're no closer to robots with synthetic intelligence than we were in the glory days of AI research. (i.e. we're not close at all).
And you know this exactly how? In 1899, the vast majority of the world's brightest minds were openly saying that there was very little left to learn in the realm of physics, since Newtonian mechanics had been quite thoroughly explored by that point. It only took six years to turn that on its ear, and nobody (not even Einstein) knew it was coming. How you propose to know what technological or innovative breakthroughs will or won't occur in AI is beyond my understanding. As simple (to us) a device as the steam engine took more than 300 years to develop, and societies as far back as the Romans had the materials to make it happen, just not the innovation.
> There is no evidence these projects that you say are "going on now to create life at a molecular level" are likely to succeed.
Nice spin, but to reverse it, there's also no evidence that they're likely to fail, either. See above. Isn't acting clairvoyant a violation of Christian ethics?
> See this for reasons why the 1950s Miller experiment was not an accurate replica of supposed primordial conditions...
Since that particular experiment doesn't have much to do with current efforts (because, y'know, it was not an accurate replica of supposed primordial conditions) this point is irrelevant. If they simply wanted to replicate the old experiment, then they'd have done so.
> You must have considered the apparently unique earth we have: it's wonderfully balanced Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycles, the temperature and the position of earth w.r.t. to the sun, the qualities of water, and the wonder that is the water cycle,the wonderful balance of plant and animal life...
I'm familiar with this argument, but it's not valid because it's two-sided. You argue that the Earth is perfectly designed for humans, and I argue that humans developed specifically to survive Earth conditions, and these things support both points, so they support neither point.
>
I agree that there's no good explanation for this as yet. Again, though, it doesn't disprove any reasonable theory, it puts bumps in the road for the theories. Whether we will learn what caused it will remain for time to tell, but I see no reason to accept the young-Earth theory on the strength of this alone, and so far it's the only thing you mentioned that I can't answer directly.
> Consider how the continents were one supercontinent to begin with (as the Bible describes in Genesis) or how the Bible, rather off-handedly, describes the earth as a sphere (Book of Job).
In a book the size and scope of the Bible, you will find plenty of references to stuff that turns out to be true. However, you must counter mentions in the Bible of stuff that turned out false as well, if you care to use it as a scientific reference. You might start by Googling for "geocentrism".
> And then there are the smaller details: look up and consider how the sun, and the the moon have the same relative size...
What? What relevance could this possibly have? If you think this is anywhere approaching a good piece of evidence in defense of the existence of God, you're going to be very easy to dismiss. Besides, they're not all that close, unless 20 percent different is "close enough".
> how all humanly-recorded history begins 5000 years ago...
> I studied AI while working toward an MS in Computer science a few years ago.
:( Here are my reasons for the apparently arbitrary 5800 ring count: the Bible says that the existing world was destroyed in a deluge that occured about 5000 years ago. Now most trees add one tree ring a year. In extremely rare cases, trees have been known to grow more than a single ring a year. Hence, I chose the 5800 ring count (to sufficiently account for ring aberrations). Now, I probably should not have stated 5800 -- 5100-5200 rings should be sufficient. :)
My pointing out the thinking of physicists in 1899 was to demonstrate that even those who have studied a field extensively can't usually predict watershed changes in the field any better than layfolks, so it's a bad exercise to say "we're no closer to..." about it. Studying AI makes you better informed about the current state of AI, but it doesn't help you predict the future.
> Advances in "AI" (a badly named field) are very interesting to me - I hope to see them continue to occur for some time. I said synthetic intelligence (as in "pass the Turing test" intelligence) is unlikely. That belief is based on the current state of AI research and my understanding of the Bible.
See above, and remember that your understanding of the Bible doesn't speak very well toward what we'll discover in the field of AI.
> Its sad to see you angry without just cause.
I almost don't want to get into this, because it's such a bothersome dance, but I must ask you one thing. If all the trees on Earth were destroyed by a deluge, where'd the new trees come from? Most importantly, though, why do you say that there's nothing stopping them from living longer? Random chance virtually guarantees that any living object will die due to accident or disease give enough time. Sure, there's no one specific thing that guarantees that a tree will die in 5000 years but the amount of luck an immobile living object would need to fail to have anything lethal occur to it in that span of time would be significant. The fact that the number of trees that measure past 4000 years can be counted in single digits indicates that a tree some significant amount older than them would be even more rare, to the likely point of non-existence. Again I present, you've given no reasonable argument that the age of the Earth can be determined by the age of trees in any case.
> Please back that up with suitable observations of an evolutionary process adding information to the genome.
This is my just cause for being angry, by the way. It's a broken argument, and you present it broken on purpose. The failure is this. I can't present the mechanism for how it works. You can't present any evidence that it's not possible. However, because I can't prove it does work, you take that as proof that it doesn't work, and that's broken.
To counter, I can simply present gravity. It's easy to see that gravity works. Two massive bodies attract each other in very predictable ways. Ready for the twist? Nobody on Earth can tell you why. That's right, nobody. There are plenty of theories, but not a single one of them can be conclusively proven. The fact that nobody understands why gravity works does not mean that it doesn't. I can't conclusively prove that ceramic yard gnomes are not the mechanism for gravitation, so I can't directly refute a theory that states that yard gnomes cause gravity. However, I can present a theory (like graviton particles or dark matter or whatever) that's more likely based on the evidence.
To get back to the point, the most likely mechanism in science for the development of the species is currently evolution driven by natural selection. And before you get started, any theory based on the Bible isn't science, it's theology. "Because God said so" doesn't work in science, so feel free to argue that it's how things happened, but don't present it as evidence that ev