China Moon Rover Will Investigate Cube-shaped 'Mystery' Object on Lunar Far Side (cnet.com) 65
The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It's been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019 as part of China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance. From a report: Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space program for SpaceNews and Space.com, highlighted a new rover update in a series of tweets Friday. The nickname for the cube-shaped object translates to "mystery house." The rover team is planning to drive over and get a closer look at the object. As with Yutu-2's intriguing discovery of a "gel-like" substance inside a crater in 2019, don't get too excited for aliens. That substance turned out to be glassy-looking rock. And as far as I know, Stanley Kubrick never planted a monolith on the real moon, and those metal sculptures that were once all the rage on Earth haven't made the trek across space. Yutu-2's view of the cube is fuzzy and far-off, so the object's true nature should become clearer as the rover gets closer. The most likely explanation is a boulder. This part of the moon is pockmarked with impact craters, which can feature quite a bit of chunky debris.
Conspiracy soup (Score:5, Interesting)
Mon landings, China, obilisks... The conspiracy soup is going to be thick with this one.
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It's a lunar Kaaba [wikipedia.org]. Once they realize that they'll be apologizing to all those Uyghurs.
Re:Conspiracy soup (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm okay with that. I miss the days when the conspiracy nuts spent all their time talking about monuments on mars and other harmless fantasies instead of killing themselves, others, and democracy.
Re: Conspiracy soup (Score:2)
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Ahh, I miss Art Bell at 2am interviewing Richard Hoagland about the Martian face and the conspiracy to hide the real story behind the Martian pyramid.
It was like listening to a televangelist rant about evolution: you know it's all bullshit but the convincing delivery is so impressive, mesmerizing even. No wonder people buy snake oil when it is offered.
Re:Dogmatic stew (Score:2)
I miss the days when the conspiracy nuts spent all their time talking about monuments on mars and other harmless fantasies instead of killing themselves, others, and democracy.
I miss the days when dogmatic skeptics spent all their time telling people they were wearing tin foil hats for telling us the government was spying on people until Edward Snowden released the supporting evidence.
That demonstrated that dogmatic skeptics are too cognitively lazy and arrogant to be taken seriously without any supporting evidence.
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for telling us the government was spying on people until Edward Snowden released the supporting evidence.
except nobody doubted that.
Judging from your userid and miniscule posting history it was way before your time here.
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Conspiracy soup
Worst E! [wikipedia.org] show *and* Campbell's [wikipedia.org] flavor ever.
Re:Conspiracy soup (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Conspiracy soup (Score:2)
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What makes you think that "sending a rover over" for a look-see would have shut the wingnuts up?
I'm having to struggle to remember where Cydonia Mensae is on Mars. I recall the hill had fairly obvious horizontal-ish layering (well, obvious to a geologist) but where was it ? ..."situated at 40.75Â north latitude and 9.46Â west longitude" [Wikipedia], on the edge of the "Hemispheric Dichotomy". About t
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Or at least fake sending one over. Geez, they really need to put in more effort or else they're going to leave a whole generation of conspiracy nuts wondering "Why won't the molester molest me?"
Re:Conspiracy soup (Score:5, Funny)
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Good one! :clap clap:
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"That box is the building where NASA faked the moon landings from."
Ah, so that explains all the video drop outs when I watched it live on my parents black and white television on July 20th, 1969.
You gotta hand it to the producers of that moon landing hoax, they went all out to make it authentic.
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I don't post enough to become a Mod, but you win the internet today.
Thank You!
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Mon landings, China, obilisks... The conspiracy soup is going to be thick with this one.
But in space, no one can hear it playing Strauss.
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> Mon landings
I wasn't aware the Jamaicans had a space program, mon.
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I guess the bobsled team got the funding they requested.
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Hah! Cool Runnings [wikipedia.org] was a fun movie.
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You forgot the secret flying saucer project from the Nazi's who have build a base on the far side of the moon....
Well, that was part of the plot from the 'Iron Sky' movie. Yet now the Chinese rover discovered an mysterious square object....a builder's tool box!
The saucer project is real!!!!
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If concealing evidence wasn't a thing used to conceal a conspiracy then there wouldn't be a need to construct a "theory". Government's conceal evidence, lies exist in plain sight, that's why freedom of speech is important.
Being humble enough to realize that truth is a balance and revising opinions based on fact is required to have an opinion that approximates reality. If evidence wasn't being concealed then there wouldn't be a need for secrecy that coerced people, legally, to conceal it.
Saying "I
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It's obviously an Amazon package. Did people think Chang'e-4 would skip out on Cyber Monday just because it's away on business travel?
"... In Minecraft" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: "... In Minecraft" (Score:2)
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Resistance is futile (Score:3)
Investigate a cube, what could go wrong?
My mom and probability (Score:5, Insightful)
My mother once asked me if the fact that horses were so well suited to being ridden by humans in both temperament and physiology didn't change my mind concerning there being a creator. I replied that the millions of creatures that can't be ridden tells me it can be attributed to probability.
I apply the same rationale to funny-shaped geographical features.
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My mother once asked me if the fact that horses were so well suited to being ridden by humans in both temperament and physiology didn't change my mind concerning there being a creator. I replied that the millions of creatures that can't be ridden tells me it can be attributed to probability.
Both arguments ignore the probability of selective breeding. Like with other domesticated animals, people chose and bred the horses most amenable to human companionship and control -- or some animals (like wolves/dogs) chose to be with humans, for safety and easy food, etc... Those attributes were reinforced over time.
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To be fair, we cannot assess what the likelihood is that there is a creator. One might assume that we can find no evidence of one, but the fact that anything exists at all can easily be construed as an equally compelling agument that it was created. Further, even while what we might call the laws of physics may have made it somehow possible for the universe to spontaneously come into being, that does not remotely refute the possibility that these so-called laws of physics are not simply our own limited i
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Correct, and full stop. Agnosticism is the only logically defensible position on that issue. What we do know for sure is "qualia exist." And really, that's about it.
To elaborate, I experience things (like, typing on a computer right now). I have no way to objectively verify that this computer is real, nor that other people are real, nor that any of my sense-data tell me any truth at all. I might be in a simulation that lies to
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Well, I do go on.
But yes... objectively that is where things really have to stop.
People can still have individual leanings one way or the other on the matter, however. Some people staunchly refuse to believe in any sort of creator, while others devoutly worship a creator that satisfies some particular set of assumptions. Objectively, however, both views are unknowable. That does not mean that any of them are wrong, however. To explain where my own particular view lands on t
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To be fair, we cannot assess what the likelihood is that there is a creator.
Correct, and full stop. Agnosticism is the only logically defensible position on that issue.
Incorrect, and neither one of you stopped there, so obviously not full stop. We certainly can assess the likelihood of certain kinds of creator. The probability is very low that any of the specific creators posited by Earthlings in the last several thousand years exists.
Richard Dawkins points out that when the probability is low enough, there is no practical difference between agnosticism and atheism. There could be invisible magical fairies at the bottom of the garden, but there almost certainly aren't,
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You cannot meaningfully assign any probability to the likelihood that a materially transcendant entity did not create the universe, and the existence of such a creator has long since been posited by humanity.
The most honest answer is "I don't know", and regardless of whether you might choose to believe in it or not, trying to correlate the probability of such a being's existence wi
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Well, you are now assuming that the creator is some particular god, an aspect that is untestable.
However, to address your opening question, we know from direct observation that the universe had a beginning, a point "prior" (actually a poor choice of words, but language is too limited to otherwise correctly address the concept, so hopefully the meaning is clear) to which the laws of physics as we know them did not even exist, the laws which themselves are supposedly responsible for spontaneous creation of
Re:My mom and probability (Score:4, Funny)
Can't be ridden? HOLD MY BEER...
(As a one-quarter-redneck, I always wanted to try that meme!)
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My mother once asked me if the fact that horses were so well suited to being ridden by humans in both temperament and physiology didn't change my mind concerning there being a creator. I replied that the millions of creatures that can't be ridden tells me it can be attributed to probability.
I apply the same rationale to funny-shaped geographical features.
I still remember a guy on kuro5hin who said he had run simulations on the domestication of farm animals but couldn't get it to happen as fast as historical records tells us unless he factored in bestiality. Said he didn't dare to publish his findings until retirement but that he had collected accounts of bestiality from ancient cultures around the world. I sometimes wonder what happened to that guy, if he ever got around to trying to get it published? If he ever does, please tell me you'll explain it to yo
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How ... the fuck did he think that was going to work? That is someone seriously deficient in either genetics education or sex education.
As the actress said to the bishop, "Not even wrong!"
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The same arguments go for when evangelists tell us that the Creator made Earth as a paradise for people. Well, there are a total of about 20 staple crops in the entire world, about 100 fruits and vegetables we eat regularly, call it several hundred that we *can* eat (to one degree or another) - out of several million species of plants (you can lump fungus in with that too to include mushrooms). Made just for us? Nope, not buying it.
8-bit games (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't press "enlarge image" (Score:2)
It's a fuzzy cube. Plainly, it's one of the dice that was hanging from the rear-view of the alien space-ship. Checkmate, atheists.
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I saw the photo. It looks exactly like my lousy digital TV reception. I get blocks all the time in strange places. Sometimes Spock has a block on his head, sometimes Alabama throws a pass and a block appears on the ball mid-air. No investigation needed!
TMA-1? (Score:2)
Could it be TMA-1?
But then, it was found to be buried, in 2001... !
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Near a feature called Tycho (the "T" in "TMA-1"), which you can see from Earth for several weeks each month, quite close to the middle of the visible side. So, nowhere near the Chinese rover.
In terrestrial comparison, that would be like calling the Ninety-East Ridge (a feature that runs through the Indian Ocean north-south near 90degE, the Ten West Ridge.
I wonder what it could be (Score:4, Funny)
My money is on rock. But another possibility is regolith-covered rock.
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My money is on rock. But another possibility is regolith-covered rock.
But if it's a moss-covered rock, the conspiracy theorists are back in business.
Buzz Aldrin said there's a monolith on Phobos (Score:2)
Vaguely square? Two bright dots? (Score:3)
To me, it looks like someone is shaking their shiny metal ass at the rover :-)
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I saw a movie called Cube once (Score:1)
I prefer pyramids now
Let's hope they don't send an iPad (Score:3)
The Space-Nazis will invade otherwise.
Death Ray (Score:2)
Spoiler alert (Score:1)
spoiler...it's a rock.
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Bad Pixel on their CCD (Score:2)
They'll find a large rock with ... (Score:1)