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Scientist Says Potential Signs of Ancient Life in Mars Rover Photos
mpicpp notes that a scientist named Nora Noffke says she thinks that the Curiosity rover may have found fossils on Mars. "Time and time again, as we carefully scrutinize the amazing high-resolution imagery flowing to Earth from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, we see weird things etched in Martian rocks. Most of the time our brains are playing tricks on us. At other times, however, those familiar rocky features can be interpreted as processes that also occur on Earth. Now, in a paper published in the journal Astrobiology, a geobiologist has related structures photographed by Curiosity of Martian sedimentary rock with structures on Earth that are known to be created by microbial lifeforms."
It's not that NASA is covering up the proof of life they've found on Mars, it's just that they're trying to figure out who this Kilroy guy was before publishing the report.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Seven comments in, so far there's 4 jokes, 2 anti-us spam/trolls, and 1 crank. Quality discussion there.
I guess the populace just likes eggin' them on...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
bad experiment. I was mostly wrong.. She's German though, I'm claiming a "Close enough" on that one. And the pictures are blurry and not helpful as well. 1.5 out of 3 ain't bad! She does have a real degree though... doh!
Is it me, or does NASA seem scared to get the answer to the question of is/was there life on Mars?
Viking’s results where ambiguous, so we decided – NO LIFE – no need to go back for over 20 years.
Now we keep getting a tantalizing clues, but can’t seem to summon the will to do a sample return mission. How many sample return missions could the ISS fund? How much more scientific benefit would come from it?
Of late it almost seems like they want to be just shy of proof so they can keep sending missions, getting us just a little closer each time. Call it the scientific method if you want but as Keynes once observed – “in the long run, we are all dead.” How-about we get our answers now?
How about a real microscope on one of these missions, not just a camera that can take photos of small objects -- far short of microbial dimensions – then insist on calling it a microscopic imager. Hell, why not a scanning electron microscope?
Most of the scientific instrumentation seems focused on geology. Granted Geology can be related to conditions for life and is important knowledge, but what we really want answered is “is there life on Mars”, not “is there hematite on Mars?” OK hematite on Mars is cool to know, but not as important I think as the Life question.
When we went to the moon there were far less important questions to be answered. How can the Life question on Mars be so much less a priority when it could up-end so much of scientific knowledge?
One final note to my rant – is it possible there is some drag on this quest so as to maintain the status quo and not upset a largely religious electorate that assumes we should only be concerned with our fate here on Earth as their God has decreed, or that life on Mars might raise too many uncomfortable questions.
Letter To Iran
I only had time to skim, but the need to be hear the top is overpowering because of the obvious relevance. What's the scale in these pictures? I know microbes make macro-sized imprints, but certainly the parallels being proposed require some sort of scale? E.g. if the martian structures are hundreds of miles across they are not the same scale, and so are less likely to be from the same cause. Not that I disbelieve, but skepticism in science leads to truer truths.
This list was compiled before 911, so it does not even include all the destruction and chaos that followed. May this be a good history lesson for you young hipsters brainwashed by your media.
links or it didn't happen. also the islamists just shot up a newspaper in france, so glass houses my friend.
Most of the identified structures are cm to tens of cm and metre scale. The area in the picture in the web article is maybe couple of metres across. There are scale bars on the pictures in the paper. The microbes are tiny, but (on Earth) they form microbial mat communities that look like a thin carpet of algae and bacteria that covers the sediment surface. This changes the way the sediment surface behaves, and (on Earth) leaves characteristic features that can be recognized as sedimentary structures preserved in the rocks at a macroscopic scale. Putting it another way, you can tell there was once a mat there and affected the sediment surface even if the mat itself doesn't ultimately preserve.
That being said, I don't buy these supposed examples from Mars at all.
I keep waiting for the report that evidence of past life was found on the tire treads of one of the rovers.
"Look: proof life used to exist on Mars! Quick, send a command to rotate the tire some before the press notices we ran over the last one on the planet..."
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
1. The scientist in question is arguably the foremost in her (admittedly obscure) field, the study of microbial mats and their effects on sediments on Earth. She literally wrote the book on the subject and has a very extensive publication record on it. She is a well-known and respected researcher for this work, although admittedly it's obscure stuff at the interface between sedimentology and paleontology.
2. The pictures themselves are quite clear and are from the mastcam on the Curiosity rover. They aren't distant blurry pictures with huge blocky pixels and horrible processing, although they could be better. The structures interpreted from them, not so convincing, IMHO, but that has little to do with image resolution issues.
3. She's an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
I think you scored a 0.5/3. Don't trust your prejudices.
That being said, I think the interpretations in the paper aren't correct.
thanks for the laugh.
For example the moon is not even grey when looked at from a close distance
do you think it's possible that things look a little different from the surface of the moon than from 238k miles away?
but civilian tech is reaching the point of civilian space travel
thanks to NASA, yes.
Otherwise they'd have planted flags all over the moon by now
the moon is an airless, waterless rock. we haven't been back because it's incredibly, incredibly expensive and there's no financial or political reason to do so.
but they were warned to fuck off that's why they haven't been back to
i'm confused. we used alien tech to get to the moon, but those same aliens won't even let us land there? why'd they give us the tech in the first place? all the tech that was used in the moon mission is well understood and surpassed by current tech.
also, what exactly are those aliens doing on the moon? mining moon dust? these aliens can travel between solar systems but they can't find any better world to inhabit than the moon?
I mean, it only makes sense to send a mars rover to scout out Eden Prime. Hopefully, the first person to land there will be able to understand the vision.
Offtopic I know, but after today we're going to double down.
It's weird in your timeline, isn't it?
From a link on microbial lifeforms found on Earth http://www.astrobio.net/news-e... "What’s more, MISS have remained unchanged over the last 3 billion years" MISS: microbially-induced sedimentary structure.
Says a lot really, it's considered a fact you will get cancer (a mutation of the a cell) if you live long enough.
"A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances: mutations can never be absolutely avoided, because they are an inescapable consequence of fundamental limitations on the accuracy of DNA replication" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo...
3 billion years and little if any mutations in a microbe life or it's off spring.
“But it also raised the question: why are they so identical?” she adds. “And what does that mean about the organisms that created them?”
Why would Mars need to be flat to be attached to the ceiling? It could be an embedded sphere. Spherical lights are easier to construct, and would cause no obvious impediment to the rotation of the sky.
/. has Bennett Haselton... but this is not the joke your looking for.
you could at least provide links to a bunch of whacko conspiracy sites? how thoughtless of you.
do you wonder why your comment was downvoted to a point where no one will ever see it? i guess ALL of the slashdot readers are also idiots or shills huh? when you walk around life thinking everyone else is an idiot or stupid, that's an indication it's time to turn your inspection inward.
Next you're going to tell me NASA never air brushed their photos.
i'm going to tell you that there are no domes or shields or man-made structures on the moon. if there were, one of the tens of thousands of amateur astronomers around the world would have seen them. but anyway, i do realize that one of the issues with paranoid delusion is that you are going to explain away any evidence presented to you, so just ignore what i said.
i'm also going to suggest you have the medication levels checked.
I doubt that the Germans would be as rude about your technical knowledge on the basis of your original address as you are of theirs.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"