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It's funny. Laugh. Space Science

Free Associating On The Surface Of Mars 55

Posted by timothy from the stream-of-less-consciousness dept.
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."
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Free Associating On The Surface Of Mars More

Free Associating On The Surface Of Mars

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  • Hall of fame (Score:5, Informative)

    by noselasd ( 594905 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @08:14AM (#8508501)
    Seems there already is a crank hall of fame [crank.net]. Thisone didn't reach that site yet though.

  • Look and Ye shall find (Score:5, Insightful)

    by leoaugust ( 665240 ) <leoaugust@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @08:34AM (#8508579) Journal
    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 ...

    .

  • "A Kook Hall of Fame" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @09:17AM (#8508763)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @09:38AM (#8508935)
    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.

  • Disclaimer Needed (Score:5, Funny)

    by cybermage ( 112274 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @09:59AM (#8509103) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starfarer42 ( 682198 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @10:34AM (#8509411)
    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.

    • "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."

      If it was the same one I had then it wasn't real. I noticed that the picture of the earth was "north is up," but with most of the lunar landing taking place near the moon's equator and the earth being so close to the horizon north would be sideways.

      I believe it was a picture of the earth taken by an Apollow crew en route and then pasted onto a picture of a reasonable-l

  • Actually, the fossil picture is pretty interesting (Score:5, Informative)

    by mosel-saar-ruwer ( 732341 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @10:36AM (#8509438)

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

    • Re:Actually, the fossil picture is pretty interest (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @11:03AM (#8509735) Journal
      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?].

        • Re:Right. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @01:24PM (#8510876) Journal
          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. ;-)

          • Fallacy (Score:2)

            by Cujo ( 19106 )

            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.

      • mod parents funny (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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 particula
      • 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.
    • 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 [nasa.gov]

      So those two images are both 'microscopic.'
      Tire tracks? Did Opportunity goof off and play with som

    • 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 jus

    • 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.

  • ... down the rabbit hole!

  • Diet Rite and Powdered Cocoa (Score:5, Funny)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @10:58AM (#8509657)
    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 />

  • That's it? (Score:2, Funny)

    by afabbro ( 33948 )
    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?

  • Carl Sagan (Score:4, Insightful)

    by robbo ( 4388 ) <slashdot&simra,net> on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @01:51PM (#8511174)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ieshan ( 409693 )
      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 achi

  • No intelligent life down here (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nynaeve ( 163450 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @02:31PM (#8511664)
    "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 Kangor

  • plonk.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @02:55PM (#8511981) Journal
    "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.

  • Fine... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by notyou2 ( 202944 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @05:28PM (#8513825) Homepage
    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 [nasa.gov] (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.
  • 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?
  • 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. U

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