Posted on 02/20/2004 11:46:05 AM PST by ElkGroveDan
At NASA's Thursday JPL briefing on the Mars rovers, the issue of an unusual object in one of the photos from the microscopic imager at the Opportunity landing site was discussed.
On SOL 19, several images taken with the microscopic imager of the soil and the "mars berries" appear to show a hair-like object. Steve Squires with NASA has speculated that the airbags bouncing around that crater may have shed a whole lot of fabric and this could simply be a stray thread. Squires also suggested that as they move away from the bounce-down sites they will continue to look for these objects. He noted that if we continue to see them, well then we'll have to reconsider what we are looking at here.
For your interest, here is one of the pictures that shows a thread (or hair, or root, or beastie). You probably can't see it in this smaller shot, but if you click on the photo it will take you to an even larger image. Look in the upper right hand corner, immediately below the largest pebble in that corner.
Anyone care to speculate? Is this a thread from the airbag fabric? Is it something else?
As far as the ball being in my court here is what you need to establish with Occam's razor no less
1. A meteror that evaporated on contact would send debris containing a fungus into space. (Maybe what ? 1 in a 100,000?)
Thats 1 chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 give or take a few.
This has got to be the all time record for the wildest use of Occam's razor.
Yep. It is either thread from the airbag fabric or something else.
Opportunity and Spirit don't have instruments designed to answer this question. Of course we could always send a new $400 million mission with a new tool designed to answer this new question. And then yet another for the new questions that mission turned up, ad nauseum. But if we sent a human to Mars they could just come up with a test on the spot, costing probably $1.98. But sending people is so inefficient! We musn't do THAT!
lol...that was a HUGE amount of little balls. Did the rover land in the middle of Marian fungus mating season?
Maybe they're not dormant. What about the possibility that the rover only has surfaced the upper regions of the fungal 'colonies?' Perhaps the hyphae clusters or interactions occur at a deeper level where the conjectured water/permafrost levels are and the strands are outgrowths for nutrients, light or temp interaction, or expansion.
Just poking the fun wacko theory with a stick. :-)
Here, try a simple experiment.
Buy two gallon jugs of milk. Take the first jug, and set it on a fencepost, oh, say about 10 yards in front of your barn (or a similar structure).
Step back about 50 yards. Aim your .30-'06 at the center of the milk jug. Fire the rifle.
Now, examine the milk jug, and the barn.
To ruin the suspense, you won't find much (if any) of the milk jug. You will find milk spattered all over your barn.
Now, scrape some milk residue samples from your barn. Make sure to take them from a variety of locations (i.e., center of splat, edge, mid-way, etc.), send them -- and, a sample from the other (untouched) milk jug's contents, to a lab for analysis.
You're looking for things like bacterial (and other microorganism) counts, and, you want to find out what, if any, physical damage has occurred to the samples scraped from your barn. A scanning electron microscope might help.
You might want to repeat the experiment with two units of blood (in separate bags, of course).
You're doubtless mighty pissed after not seeing what you expect in both of those lab reports, so let's see if we can help get you over the hump.
Get a 50 pound bag of dirt. Then, get a pound of dry yeast.
Mix the yeast in with the dirt.
Take the dirt, and a half stick of dynamite (you'll need a licensed explosives handler for this part of the experiment), and place the dirt on top of the dynamite. (By the way, you'll need to perform this test inside of a large, robust structure.)
Now, step outside the building, and have your licensed demolitions guy set off the charge.
Go back inside, and scrape samples off the walls, ceiling, etc.
Send them to the lab.
Damn! OK, all's not lost. Scrape a few more samples, and put them in a freeze-dryer unit.
Double-damn!
OK, I guess all is lost.
Are you at all familiar with the scale of the impact that occurred at Yucatan? At the amount of dirt that was ejected?
Do you really believe that it was all incinerated, and not merely shocked out of its happy place on the ground?
Every cubic foot of soil has a staggering quantity of spores in it. Multiply that by the trillions and trillions of cubic feet of dirt suddenly sent skyward.
Then, stop thinking in terms of precision aimed fire. It's like we're standing outside in a cloudburst, and you're arguing with me over the probability of any one raindrop coming from one specific point in the sky and landing on the tip of my nose.
This is not precision aimed fire with a target rifle. This is a high-pressure spraygun painting the side of a barn. The whole region between Earth and Mars was quite likely "all fogged up" with dirt, pebbles, rocks, spores, and so on.
If this scenario occurred -- and it's quite possible, perhaps even quite likely, then I'd be surprised if the surface of Mars wasn't peppered with spores and so on due to the impact. It would be like a car driving through a carwash, and managing to duck every drop of water!
I'm not saying that this happened. I'm saying that it very well may have happened, and, that it's not at all far-fetched.
Finally, please recall that a number of Mars rocks have been found on Earth. And simple logic would suggest that only a tiny fraction of the total number were found.
The rovers are equipped with an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer with the purpose of examining rocks and soils but I would think it could distinguish between an inorganic, synthetic bag or insulation fiber and a possible organic.
I don't think you have any concept of the vast space between us.
It wasn't the scenario suggested because besides it being infentestimentally likely its still possible that our planet has infected another with life.
What I get testy about is when folks abuse logic and orderly thought. In this case its using Occam's razor in the exact opposite way to rule out the most likely explanation and to rule in one that has no evidence that it occurred and if it did it had occurred, it would require a string of several virtually impossible events perfectly following one after the other.
You stood Occam's razor on its head.
And they got there by being carried on the feet of mystical birds which travel from planet to planet seeding the universe with life.
Lets stay with your analogy. You blew up a cubic foot of dirt, in New York city, how much landed in Japan ? Now multiply distance that distance by 5,000 and you have the minimum direct flight. It would take your fungus 5,000 roundtrips from Japan to NY and thats if it went straight.
Now think of the earth as a globe and the infinite directions that something leaving earth can take.
With all that the chances that Mars is in the right place when your spores from the dirt pass by is equally infinitesimal.
It only seems impossible to you because you do not understand the nature of -- or number of -- fungal spores on this planet.
I've had similar discussions with people who don't understand the nature of radio wave propagation. They cannot accept the notion of a little shirt-pocket sized radio putting out half of a watt, filling over 100,000 cubic miles with a usable signal -- yet, it can, and does happen. One injured climber used his FRS radio, output of maybe 350 milliwatts, to call for help from the side of a mountain. A kid in his backyard heard him -- from about 75 miles away. In another case, two guys talked to each other with similar radios from two mountaintops, about 110 miles apart. How can such a tiny amount of power reach out so far?
The thing is, its ability to traverse that distance is not contingent on your ability to comprehend how it could happen.
So, how do you explain the Mars rocks found on Earth? Or do you dismiss them too, because you don't accept that they could happen?
It's important (IMO, at least) not to stand logic on its head by declaring what can and cannot exist on the basis of preconceived assumptions.
I've shot rabbits using very small shot, that patterned quite wide. I guess "the odds of any one of those pellets hitting the rabbit was laughably, impossibly small", but, the rabbit wasn't laughing.
I have no doubt that an expanding cloud of dirt, dust, and spores, could travel the distance to mars -- just as its rocks (and doubtless other stuff too, like dirt and dust) reached here. And, I have no doubt that once reaching Mars' orbital position, it would create a wide enough pattern to pepper the planet nicely.
And, I've no doubt that once there, they'd likely have found a variety of "landing zones" conducive to growth.
You seem to be disimssing everything I say, as if you know so much more than I, about... everything. And, that assumption proves (to you) that whatever I say on the subject is therefore unworthy of anything but dismissal. I don't see you either comprehending, or even stopping to consider what I've been trying to explain to you. Instead, I'm met with arrogance, and a measure of demeaning hostility. Strange, very strange.
When pressed for a reason for the hostility, you provide an answer that basically boils down to me being a dummy.
In other words, I'm weighing whether or not I should dismiss you as someone who's got issues that he doesn't feel like resolving, other than by taking a free shot or ten at me. And frankly I must say it's not looking too good for you at the moment (in terms of my willingness to further engage you in this discussion).
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