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Moon China

China Finds Explanation For 'Mystery Hut' Spotted On the Moon (cbsnews.com) 64

Posted by BeauHD from the sorry-to-burst-your-bubble dept.
"It's a rock. A small rock," writes Slashdot reader BeerFartMoron. CBS News reports: China has discovered the explanation for the mysterious "hut" its Yutu 2 rover spotted on the moon late last year. As the lunar rover made a closer approach, a log of its activities revealed the object was actually just a rock on a crater rim. The revelation came as the lunar rover drove closer to the formation that was once believed to be as tall as Paris' Arc de Triomphe, according to a post published Friday on "Our Space," a Chinese media channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration. Instead, it was much smaller and had a peculiar shape. Upon a closer view, the rock looked like a "jade rabbit" holding carrots, the post said. "The Moon's surface is 38 million square kilometres of rocks, so it would have been astronomically exceptional for it to be anything else," Space News journalist Andrew Jones wrote on Twitter. "But while small, the jade rabbit/ rock will also be a monumental disappointment to some."
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China Finds Explanation For 'Mystery Hut' Spotted On the Moon More

China Finds Explanation For 'Mystery Hut' Spotted On the Moon

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  • Pareidolia is weird. Chinese scientists see a rabbit holding carrots where I see a dead baby mammoth
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Pareidolia is weird. Chinese scientists see a rabbit holding carrots where I see a dead baby mammoth

      I see a pair of tits.

      My shrink says I have a sex obsession. Can't see why, she's the one with all the dirty pictures.

  • I think the information from NASA and China on the Mars exploration is still more interesting.

    NASA https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    China https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • When they need to identify something or someone, they normally call up images from the nearest surveillance camera. No CCTV cameras on the moon yet though...

  • So it was a rock. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @04:05AM (#62163283)
    I'll try to contain my amazement.

  • Great. Now I doubt the existence of the moon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Isn't this exactly what happened with the USSR back in the 50s? Everyone thought they were barely above subsistence farming, and even after they put up the first satellite people doubted their scientific and engineering capabilities.

      • Isn't this exactly what happened with the USSR back in the 50s? Everyone thought they were barely above subsistence farming, and even after they put up the first satellite people doubted their scientific and engineering capabilities.

        Did the Soviets discover a rabbit holding carrots in orbit?

      • Somewhere (I don't recall where) I read that many in the US didn't believe that Japanese could have flown the Pearl Harbor raid, because they weren't good enough. (I guess they thought the pilots were German.) And there was a joke about why the Soviet pilots (supposedly flying the north's jets in the Korean War) were the world's best: they flew with no hands on the stick. Why? Because they had to use their hands to make their eyes slant. Racism.

    • Chinese scientists...Now I doubt the existence of the moon.

      Everyone knows the moon is fake, believe me! CNN put it up there to advertise their logo, but the logo fell off, and now we just see the scratched up mounting plate, ugly loser stuff; un-pro-fessional hack-job, and I know hack-jobs. I spoke with Apollo Armstrong and he confirmed it's all fake, he was paid bigly money to act it out in Hillary's pedo pizza basement for the cameras, so sad. The milk people saw it all happen from their cancer windmills.

  • https://imgur.com/gallery/QJuW... [imgur.com] "These cows are small, but the ones out there are far away" - Father Ted

  • It's unusual to think it's a very large rock, then think it's a small one. For it is possible to gauge size and distance even with monocular vision and no other context, if the rover can move a bit. So, it could've been an intentionnally inflated Chinese PR event right off the bat, to remind everyone they have some kit on the Moon

    • Not everything is a conspiracy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by robi5 ( 1261542 )

        I agree. China engages in a quite consistent pattern of overblown PR, including in relation to their science projects, so conspiracy theory or not isn't relevant in this case

    • Re: Weird (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      The problems caused by shadows, other nearby rocks, limited resolution and limited contrast make edge detection truly evil.

    • Well, I guess it was obvious for everyone that it would turn out to be a rock.
      And as the rover is traveling around anyway, why would they do some silly detour just to get more pictures to estimate the size beforehand?

      No idea why for you guys everything a Chiinese is doing or reporting, "is a bad thing" ...

  • It is never aliens (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @06:35AM (#62163451)

    We are the only alive things in the universe. The universe only figured out how to make alive things one time. Even on earth, we all evolved from the one chemical reaction, that started life. Bacteria, trees, fungi, humans, apes, fucking birds all of that. We all evolved from the one cell that figured it out. We know that because the RNA code for the ribosomal shit is conserved. Think about that, all the dna translation and transcription genes of life look almost exactly the same. Surely there are a hundred different ways to code a dna transcription machine, yet ALL life uses the same coding. Now how is that? Why does all life have a common ancestor? If life can just emerge easily, there would be life that came up with different dna transcription machinery. It would have RNA polymerases coded differently.. or fuck that not even use DNA at all. Yet no such life exists on Earth. Earth, the supposedly ideal place for life to take hold.

    • There are two major problems in your argument.
      First, you assume that the current conditions on Earth are suitable for the appearance of life. This is far from certain. Life appeared 4 billions years ago in a very different environment : Temperature, salinity of the oceans, oxygen levels, ...
      Second, the fact that we can trace all current life forms to a common ancestor does not necessarily imply that life appeared only once on the planet. Darwin described evolution as the survival of the fittest. Any new kin

    • Re: It is never aliens (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @08:01AM (#62163573) Homepage Journal

      Your logic is severely impaired.

      To meet your observation, all that is required is that the life we see today out-competed all other alternatives inside the first three to four billion years.

      We can, however, determine if this is likely. Some organisms use variants of the nucleic bases that don't exist in other species. No, I am not including RNA's use of U here. This is possible through mutations, yes, but it invalidates your premise that all life is identical under the hood and that's all I need to show.

      Then there's mitochondria, the DNA from what was an independent organism that has no relationship to other organisms that has now been absorbed into eukaryotic life.

      Then, because organisms can take dna from other organisms, at the very early stage it's entirely possible to have no actual common ancestors but still appear to because at that stage borrowed dna would be a significant fraction of the whole.

      Finally, we don't have the DNA for charnian-era organisms, so we've no evidence they share a common ancestor with anything alive today. That is an assumption.

      Your next premise is that if life formed only once on Earth (and you've obviously not shown that) then the probability is less than one in a septillion that life will appear.

      (This being roughly the number of inhabitable bodies in the observable universe at any given time.)

      Firstly, even with odds that low, life could still exist on every inhabitable world, it would just be less likely.

      Secondly, the Earth hasn't had the necessary conditions for at least 3.8 billion years, and it wasn't around for a septillion years prior to that. Which means that you can't derive odds that low from one point of datum over a very brief interval of time.

      We just don't have the information to test your claim, or even to meaningfully derive a probability.

      We won't have that before all five inhabitable bodies in our solar system are studied AND the Square Kilometre Array has checked a significant number of worlds within a hundred or so lightyears.

      It is pointless inventing arguments you just can't support.

      • You present a bunch of easily verifiable as false assertions and then use that as the premise of your argument. For example you say "Then there's mitochondria, the DNA from what was an independent organism that has no relationship to other organisms that has now been absorbed into eukaryotic life."

        Mitochondria is related to bacteria. It uses bacteria-like ribosome. The 16S rRNA is very similar to the prokaryotic 23S and eukaryotic 28S subunit. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Mitochondria is a de

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      Now how is that? Why does all life have a common ancestor? If life can just emerge easily, there would be life that came up with different dna transcription machinery. It would have RNA polymerases coded differently.. or fuck that not even use DNA at all. Yet no such life exists on Earth. Earth, the supposedly ideal place for life to take hold.

      One simple answer is that life evolves in a competitive environment with other life. If a new form of life comes along that concentrates resources and doesn't have a niche to hide in, then something comes along and eats it relatively quickly or kills it with its defenses.

      • Really? Then how is there a huge variety of life today? Somehow the early cell was able to go on a 100% efficient global hunt & destroy?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          There's a huge first-mover advantage. Any completely new form of life would have to start as micro-organisms. There are already micro-organisms on everything. There's no more primordial soup because it got eaten. Brand new forms of life would need to be able to feed themselves and avoid being eaten. That leaves them at a huge disadvantage against organisms that have been feeding themselves and avoiding being eaten for millions and millions of years. If you can't move, can't resist chemical attacks, can't mo

          • You are making a lot of assumptions, for example that the only niche on Earth for life to form is the one in which DNA based life formed. And that it was toxic to other types of life early on. And that there was only one primordial soup. And, that it somehow quickly managed a monopoly on resources. Yet today life seems to have lost its monopoly. There are many things that have energy yet existing life is slow in or cannot metabolize it. Somehow, the descendent of LUCA ( last universal common ancestor ) disp

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tragedy ( 27079 )

              You are making a lot of assumptions, for example that the only niche on Earth for life to form is the one in which DNA based life formed.

              I don't discount the possibility of a shadow biosphere with a completely different form of life that we just have not discovered. However, it has to be very, very good at hiding, or very, very unconventional, or we would be noticing it when examining the natural world. So, sure, we could have very interesting organisms living in magma below the crust, or in the Earth's core itself, or flitting around through the ionosphere. Maybe there's an entire ecosystem of dark matter-based organisms or, I don't know, o

    • quite easy to explain, our form of life out competed any other form of life, life in its infancy is extremely fragile, for all we know literally billions of other forms of life may have started on earth and become extinct seconds/minutes/hours later due to existing life.

      • Really, then how are there a hugely diverse lifeforms today? Somehow the earliest cell and its progeny was able to go global hunt & destroy for other life forms? That is assigning a huge amount of destructive capability to something that barely emerged. If it was that good it would have zeroed all the earth's resources too.

  • I was kinda hoping the rover would knock on the door of the hut and Yoda would come out.
  • Damn, those are all over the place and spreading fast - don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I just never imagined one would be on the moon already. The best value is the Big Dinner Box featuring two medium one-topping pizzas, an order of breadsticks, and your choice of wings, pasta, or a third pizza for $19.99.

  • I've seen plenty about this rock reported, from the initial 'mystery' to the current comparison to a rabbit eating a carrot, but what I've seen no mention of is "How big is the rock, and what are its general measurements?". Anyone know? Seems, I dunno, relevant?

  • If you're going to hide a hut on the moon, of course you're going to make it look like a rock.

    I just wonder what happened to the huts of straw and sticks.

  • A: So you wanna play "I spy"?
    B: Mmmh.. alright, I go first
    A: M'kay.
    B: I spy something ... grey.
    A: ... Rock
    B: Aww!

    A: My turn?
    B: Yeah
    A: M'kay I spy something... big
    B: Uh... Rock.
    A: M'kay

    B: Uhh, I spy something... with pores?
    A: Rock?
    A: M'kay I spy something... a spherical object
    B: Rock.
    A: Yeah
    B: I spy som..
    A: Rock
    B: Urrh!
    A: M'kay my turn...
    B: Rock
    A: No, I di..
    B: No, it counts!
    A: I didn't even spy anything!!
    B: IT COUNTS!
    A: ...
    A: Rock.
    B: Let's play something else

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