'Mushrooms on Mars is a Hoax. Stop Believing Hacks' (thenextweb.com) 79
Several science web sites are strongly disputing a China-based journal's claim that time-lapse photos of Mars show growing mushrooms.
TNW Neural headlined their story "Mushrooms on Mars is a hoax — stop believing hack 'scientists'" If you believe those images demonstrate fungus growing on Mars, I'm about to blow your frickin' mind. Check out this pic. You see that? To heck with fungus, that's an entire highway growing out of the sand in front of a moving bus. You can clearly see that the Earth's sandy crust is being broken apart as the expanding highway organism grows beneath it.
Or, if you're the "Occam's Razor" type: the wind is just blowing sand around. I've never been to Mars, but I'm led to believe there are rocks, dust, and wind. Do we really need to go any further in debunking this nonsense?
They also link to Retraction Watch's page about the story's lead author, Rhawn Gabriel Joseph. IFL Science picks up the story: Nicknamed the Space Tiger King — due to the photographs posted on his frankly ridiculous personal website — Joseph has spent decades erroneously claiming that life has already been discovered on other planets. Back in the 1970s, he began alleging that NASA's Viking lander had found biological matter, despite the agency stating the exact opposite of this.
After setting up his own journal in an attempt to air his unscientific assertions, he later filed a lawsuit against NASA in order to force them to investigate a structure which he claimed resembled a "putative biological organism", but which later turned out to be a rock.
CNET adds: "Claiming that mushrooms are sprouting all over Mars is an extraordinary claim that requires better evidence than an analysis of photographic morphology by a known crank who has claimed, on the basis of the same kind of analysis, that he has seen fields of skulls on Mars," says Paul Myers, a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has followed Joseph's work in the past...
After being alerted to the new paper on Wednesday, I sent emails to the associate editors-in-chief of Advances in Microbiology, asking for clarification around the peer review process. They have not responded to requests for comment. I also emailed members of the editorial board listed on SCIRP's website, including Jian Li, a microbiologist at Monash University in Australia. He says he has not been on the journal's editorial board "for at least five to six years" and has not handled any of the papers in the journal.
The "mushrooms" theory was also dismissed by several actual scientists, reports Futurism: "The conditions on Mars are so extreme that you're not going to see fungi or any kind of life growing at that sort of speed under conditions like coldness and low air pressure," Jonathan Clarke, president of Mars Society Australia, told the South China Morning Post. "Life can barely survive, let alone thrive."
Clarke also took issue with the paper claiming that mushrooms were actually growing on Mars. "It's just like if you go to a beach and there are shells," he told the newspaper. "If the wind blows, the sand moves and exposes more shells. But we won't say the shells are growing there, it's just that they become visible..."
"We have more than photos, records, instruments that tell us what these materials are made of," David Flannery, lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology who is a member of NASA's Mars 2020 mission science team, told SCMP. "And we have models for the features we see around us.... Robots are sending back huge amounts of data," he added. "We have plenty of information but it's just that no one is interpreting the features that we see as something like fungi. There's zero evidence for that."
"This paper, which is really not credible, will be ignored by the scientific community," Flannery said.
TNW Neural headlined their story "Mushrooms on Mars is a hoax — stop believing hack 'scientists'" If you believe those images demonstrate fungus growing on Mars, I'm about to blow your frickin' mind. Check out this pic. You see that? To heck with fungus, that's an entire highway growing out of the sand in front of a moving bus. You can clearly see that the Earth's sandy crust is being broken apart as the expanding highway organism grows beneath it.
Or, if you're the "Occam's Razor" type: the wind is just blowing sand around. I've never been to Mars, but I'm led to believe there are rocks, dust, and wind. Do we really need to go any further in debunking this nonsense?
They also link to Retraction Watch's page about the story's lead author, Rhawn Gabriel Joseph. IFL Science picks up the story: Nicknamed the Space Tiger King — due to the photographs posted on his frankly ridiculous personal website — Joseph has spent decades erroneously claiming that life has already been discovered on other planets. Back in the 1970s, he began alleging that NASA's Viking lander had found biological matter, despite the agency stating the exact opposite of this.
After setting up his own journal in an attempt to air his unscientific assertions, he later filed a lawsuit against NASA in order to force them to investigate a structure which he claimed resembled a "putative biological organism", but which later turned out to be a rock.
CNET adds: "Claiming that mushrooms are sprouting all over Mars is an extraordinary claim that requires better evidence than an analysis of photographic morphology by a known crank who has claimed, on the basis of the same kind of analysis, that he has seen fields of skulls on Mars," says Paul Myers, a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has followed Joseph's work in the past...
After being alerted to the new paper on Wednesday, I sent emails to the associate editors-in-chief of Advances in Microbiology, asking for clarification around the peer review process. They have not responded to requests for comment. I also emailed members of the editorial board listed on SCIRP's website, including Jian Li, a microbiologist at Monash University in Australia. He says he has not been on the journal's editorial board "for at least five to six years" and has not handled any of the papers in the journal.
The "mushrooms" theory was also dismissed by several actual scientists, reports Futurism: "The conditions on Mars are so extreme that you're not going to see fungi or any kind of life growing at that sort of speed under conditions like coldness and low air pressure," Jonathan Clarke, president of Mars Society Australia, told the South China Morning Post. "Life can barely survive, let alone thrive."
Clarke also took issue with the paper claiming that mushrooms were actually growing on Mars. "It's just like if you go to a beach and there are shells," he told the newspaper. "If the wind blows, the sand moves and exposes more shells. But we won't say the shells are growing there, it's just that they become visible..."
"We have more than photos, records, instruments that tell us what these materials are made of," David Flannery, lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology who is a member of NASA's Mars 2020 mission science team, told SCMP. "And we have models for the features we see around us.... Robots are sending back huge amounts of data," he added. "We have plenty of information but it's just that no one is interpreting the features that we see as something like fungi. There's zero evidence for that."
"This paper, which is really not credible, will be ignored by the scientific community," Flannery said.
Barsoom patriots (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Barsoom patriots (Score:2)
Re: Climate change is real folks! (Score:2)
You know Mars is further from the sun, right?
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Energy of sunlight reaching Earth - 1,360 watts / m2
Energy of sunlight reaching Mars - 590 watts / m2
So the warmest place on Mars, at the equator during summer at solar apogee, receives less energy than the average for Churchill, on Hudson Bay. Because of the solar isolation from the high concentration of CO2 water may occasionally melt there.
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Mars has roughly the same amount of CO2 in its atmosphere as Earth. Yes, the atmosphere is almost pure CO2, but there's roughly 100x less atmosphere.
Mars also lacks water, which is a powerful greenhouse gas in its own right, and amplifies the effect of CO2 - as the planet gets warmer the average amount of water vapor in the air increases, trapping even more heat.
And as others point out, Mars only gets about 40% of the sunlight intensity. So in fact the greenhouse effect is keeping Mars considerably warme
Cut it out (Score:5, Funny)
The Lizard People get upset when you try to reveal the secret Mars fungal farms, I'd stop doing that if I were you.
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You have never heard of the lizard people. This is your last warning.
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And what do they eat? (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes this suspect right away is that, at least as far as we know, most life forms are part of a larger ecosystem. Living things are usually dependent on other living things. In absence of any evidence of an ecosystem, the idea that something like a mushroom would evolve in isolation seems rather far-fetched.
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Maybe they eat the tardigrades.
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> the idea that something like a mushroom would evolve in isolation seems rather far-fetched.
If you wanted to form hypothesis here you could look at transpermia and the lichens. We don't know if there is any extremophile bacteria in the soil there. There's water around and CO2 in the atmosphere so it can't be ruled out as impossible. Such life would have to withstand huge temperature swings, dry periods, and perhaps extreme UV. We have life on Earth that can do each of these things but there hasn't b
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Not to mention the only experiment we've done to specifically look for evidence of life, with a minimum of preconceptions, found it. As I recall the first lander took a sample of Martian soil and added isotope-tagged simple organic molecules that were thought to exist on Mars and likely be food for any life that existed there, and then looked for those isotopes to appear in CO2, as evidence that they had been consumed. It found them, strongly suggesting the organic molecules had been metabolized, but the
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Do at least try to stay in the same decade as the rest of us.
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The obvious stupidity about this whole thing aside, I agree with what you are saying, except for when it applies to fungus. I am under the impression that fungus was effectively the first form of life and the ecosystem you seek developed around it. Wasn't it the evolution of fungus in isolation that ultimately lead to the developing of soil and rotting which actually allowed plant based lift to start to develop in the first place?
My knowledge about this is very limited so happy to be schooled by someone wit
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Nah, fungi are actually surprisingly sophisticated multicellular organisms that didn't emerge until life had already existed for about 2.5 billion years, and multicellular life for over half a billion. Plus, fungi feed on other organic matter, they couldn't possibly colonize a lifeless area.
The current leading candidates for the first life are protocells that formed from the amino acids produced by lightning (and possibly celestial sources) within the early atmosphere raining down on the surface and accumu
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Thankyou my man!
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You're most welcome!
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>the idea that something like a mushroom would evolve in isolation seems rather far-fetched.
To be clear, I don't believe they were mushrooms. But if they were, who said anything about them evolving in isolation?
Billions of years ago Mars was probably a wet and temperate world somewhat similar to Earth today - if the speed with which early life emerged on Earth is remotely typical, it probably emerged on Mars as well, and had hundreds of millions if not billions of years to evolve before Mars lost its at
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As far as what they'd eat: Earth plants use sunlight and chemical processes to create complex sugars from nothing but water, CO2 and sunlight, all of which exist on Mars as well.
Viking (Score:3)
It would be a much stronger story without mentioning the Viking lander. Don't mention that unless you want to go into it, because some of the conclusions were controversial. Basically, there were chemical processes in the samples that were not understood to happen except in the presence of life. It led to important discoveries about chemistry, and the possibilities available for early life, but that was mostly never discussed because of the assholes shouting at the top of their lungs that there is no life, while also refusing to talk about the details of the results.
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Do note there are still unsolved puzzles from the Viking experiments, such as possible circadian rhythms. [scientificamerican.com] It's not "mushroom-level" life, but still possible life.
Re:Viking (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it is chemistry. If it is "life" is philosophical; it isn't life in the sense that people care about.
It is like asking if a photon has free will; the distribution of photons at a detector follows the same natural distribution (bell curve) that human decisions and opinions follow. Does that mean that probability is thought? Does it mean free will is a mirage? It isn't really a biological question.
But at the time that the results were first analyzed, the chemistry that is responsible wasn't well understood; the results were legitimately ambiguous. The idea that there might be life in the samples was the honest evaluation before the details were worked out. And yet, lots of assholes stamped their feet, "that's impwossuble!" like a bunch of cartoon morons. Their feefies were too triggered by the ambiguity, and resulting speculation, to be honest about the results. And now today, a lot of people with the same specious attitude do the same foot-stamping, mention Viking, and don't even realize how daft they are to invoke it. And their idiocy interferes with the efforts to debunk this really stupid mushroom hoax, because honesty is critically important to science. Being right all the time is not; and being certain in the face of ambiguity is caustic idiocy.
It's life, Jim (Score:2)
but not as we know it!
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We don't know that yet.
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LOL
Yes, we do know that.
(Hint: Quantum mechanics unified physics and chemistry; there is no such thing as theoretical chemistry anymore, that's just physics now)
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Link?
First they'd have to show that chemistry can recreate the circadian rhythms observed, and then show that chemistry is actually in Mars soil. Until that point, it's only speculative.
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That's some real stupid-sauce you got there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You apparently were listening to some AM radio, or one of your friends blathering, and you didn't bother to look up "circadian rhythm" before you went all woo-woo.
You don't comprehend that everything is chemistry. You don't know what "chemistry" means in the context of the Standard Model. This prevents you from joining the conversation.
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Sorry, but I don't understand your (rude) criticism. Anybody else want to clarify or restate?
We can generally categorize such phenomena into life-generated chemistry and non-life generated chemistry. Yes, there are probably grey areas, but they usually are not common enough to bother mention in casual discussion.
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>there is no such thing as theoretical chemistry anymore
There very definitely is. QM theoretically allows us to predict chemistry, but actually predicting the properties of anything much more complicated than an H2 molecule is so computationally complicated as to be completely impossible with existing resources.
QM has added some additional clues and heuristics, but for now at least theoretical chemistry is alive and well.
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You haven't even made it up to the Feynman Lectures from the 1960s, and you're going to try to 'splain science to me.
Just shut your pie hole.
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Sure we do. Life is just sophisticated chemistry, so it's *definitely* chemistry. We don't yet know for sure if it's "only" chemistry, or also life.
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To clarify, it's "just chemistry" versus "life using chemistry". When I'm super-explicit, many complain I'm too verbose. Hard to please everybody.
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> If it is "life" is philosophical; it isn't life in the sense that people care about.
We don't know that. There could very well be something resembling bacteria living in the Martian soil, possibly even far more sophisticated organisms akin to fungi. We haven't yet done any experiments to conclusively rule that out, and the only experiment we've ever done to look for direct evidence of life came back positive, though inconclusive in the face of other results that would counter-indicate life (though sig
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The ambiguous results from the Viking samples were not the result of anything like bacteria, that's been known since the late 80s.
It has nothing to do with if there is bacteria in the Martial substrate generally. (If there isn't any, than there also isn't any soil. No soil has yet been discovered on Mars.)
What was found was something much simpler. But you don't know the details, so why are you blathering? Go and spend a weekend reading about it, then next time it comes up, you'll say less stupid shit. Hopef
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Why are you so rude to everybody re Viking? Either educate us with your brilliance or don't bother replying. "You're dumb but not worth my time to explain why" is not a useful reply and just wastes text. Do it right or don't do it at all. Half-ass is worse than nothing.
mods on crack (Score:2)
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The article isn't about "life on mars," it is about a contemporary mushroom hoax.
If you don't understand my point, it means that you also don't understand the history I'm talking about, and you should just recognize you have nothing to add.
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If it self-replicates effectively enough to be common, it almost certainly qualifies as life by any reasonable definition. There is not really any "stopping short" of being life on a large scale. There's some debate as to whether things like viruses should qualify as life, but such things can only exist as parasites on definitely-alive organisms possessing a metabolism and replication capacity that can be hijacked.
The question that mostly gets asked when considering potential evidence of life doesn't care
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Don't forget, they also invented gun powder, which then gave rise to rampant school shootings and other tragedies. So much death.
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Beau Of The Fifth Column (Score:2)
The problem isn't just believing hacks. The problem is retractions don't always come or if they do they're done quietly. So you now have a bunch of people who believe in Space Mushrooms.
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How can you not believe in space mushrooms? How else do you explain the discussions over at fark politics.
Ignore the discussions (Score:2)
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"This paper, which is really not credible, will be ignored by the scientific community,"
Unfortunately most of the general public doesn't get its news from the scientific community but by uncredible hacks.
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Perhaps if real scientific research wasn't locked behind paywalls, misinformation would be harder to spread.
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Doubtful, very people even read free sits like sciencenews.org, archaeologica.org, or phys.com. If you want to see a flaming pile of stupidity try looking up how the megalithic sites of Peru or Mexico were built, and the Spanish documented how they were being built when they arrived. Instead you see absurd claims of they were cut by solar mirrors, were some type of concrete, "laser levitation" (really), and of course aliens.
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I meant to write "try looking up on YouTube how".
Being informed takes some work, and people are lazy.
Clickbait (Score:2)
Let's just leave it to peer reviewed analysis, like the rest of science. Let's stay calm until it appears in Nature. And ignore single papers, or internet personalities.
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What space mushroom have you been hiding under the past five-six years? That’s not how people do things anymore.
Please stop abusing Occam's razor. (Score:2)
You are ruining an easy win, by using the fallacious misinterpretation of Occam's razor.
It does not say that the simplest explanation is the most correct one. That is wishful thinking with no basis in reality and both quantum physics and relativity clearly showing it's nonsense.
In reality, all it says, is that you shoud *check* the simplest explanation first.
Because it's more efficient.
It's not guaranteed to actually *be* that first choice that suits your laziness. Otherwise we'd still say "$deity did it" f
Is Slashdot now authoritative then ? (Score:1)
Why should anyone believe anything witten on this site, where the editors make many mistakes that never corrected ?
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Believe it when you SEE it (Score:2)
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How about we set up proper labs on Mars instead, before bringing anything back?
If there is life on Mars, it's been evolving for billions of years in a much harsher environment than Earth - it has the potential to be highly invasive. And if just one single sufficiently invasive Martian microbe managed to escape quarantine on Earth it could mean the end of life as we know it. (And there's not really any way to quarantine the dirty outside of ship returning to Earth)
Is that *likely*? Probably not, but we're
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So we wait a few more years to avoid the risk of human extinction. So what?
Again: There's not any way to quarantine the dirty outside of ship returning to Earth. Dirt is going to be shedding into the atmosphere the whole way down, and much of it will never be exposed to the heat of reentry. Even if we assume some sort of handover from the launch vehicle to a return vehicle that never touches Mars, if there are microbes, the handover process will transfer some of them to the outside of the return vehicle.
W
I don't see why not (Score:2)
After all there is mushroom on Mars.
This is cute (Score:2)
I think it's really cute how seriously stupid most people really are. Like little toddlers, they believe and say the darndest things! Of course, stupid people suffer too, but that's fine because they don't know they are suffering. Saint Dunning-Kruger still loves them!
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Beware the Fungus Among Us? (Score:1)
Check out his website..... (Score:2)
Not at the level of timecube, but still pretty good.
He even references his hookers on there.
Fake Night Sky Photos (Score:2)
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Did you even read the page you link to, where it says :
OK, it's not perfect grammar, but it is identifiable as something in the English
Only mushrooms? (Score:2)
No badgers? No African snakes? Must be fake.