Posted on 11/19/2021 10:15:45 AM PST by BenLurkin
Mars rover Perseverance lists, among its mission objectives, a first for red planet exploration. The robotic explorer has been tasked with searching for signs of ancient microbial life on the dusty, dry planet – tiny microfossils that would be evidence that Mars was once habitable.
That would indeed be an astounding, incredible discovery – but the new paper urges caution in interpreting what we find, in both this and future sources.
According to astrobiologist Sean McMahon of the University of Edinburgh and geobiologist Julie Cosmidis of the University of Oxford in the UK, scientists will have to keep an eye out for non-biological mineral deposits that look a heck of a lot like fossils.
In a new paper, the pair have outlined dozens of non-biological, or abiotic, processes that can produce pseudofossils – structures that look like fossils of microscopic organisms like those that may have once existed on Mars.
Microfossils might therefore be quite problematic. Even here on Earth, we struggle to tell the difference between really old rocks and fossils of ancient microbes.
But, if we enter analysis of any potential microfossils on Mars knowing the processes that can produce pseudofossils, we have a better chance of accurately interpreting what we're seeing.
Many physical processes associated with weathering and the depositing of sedimentary layers can produce rocks that look eerily like fossils.
Another mechanism is the chemical garden, in which chemicals mixing can produce structures that look biological. Many different types of minerals can also combine to produce pseudofossils known as biomorphs, which look strikingly biological.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
Yeah, right.
Never see any trilobites running around but there sure were a lot of fossil&fauna-like remains that sure looked like they used to.
Fake fossils to go with the fake landing?
“Wouldn’t it be great to make everyone think we had landed on the moon?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw
False fossils like the one an earlier mission ground off to see what was underneath? So anything seen in the images that has not been removed before release is false. Got it. A NASA CYA procedure, like turning the red all the way up on a color balanced monitor to give the expected red Martian colors?
They don’t want to give folks the wrong idea about Martian conditions or the things that are odd in the images.
Maybe these fakes were manufactured by the same people that wrote the Steel papers?
That’s hilarious!
Who is seeding Mars with false fossils? China? MSNBC?
there is a constant stream of videos from mars—or videos that seem to be from mars—that show images of stuff that looks like fossils or ruins of structures.
Damn, there were dinosaurs on Mars? They find any bones yet?
They are pre-arguing the Mars meteor found up toward the North Pole.
There’s a false fossil in the White House, apart from the nights where he sleeps in his home in Delaware because he can’t find the toilet otherwise.
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