No, Congressman, There's No Evidence of an Ancient Mars Civilization

Space.com ^

[TigerClaws]

In case you were wondering, there's no evidence that Mars hosted an alien civilization thousands of years ago.

Nonetheless, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked a panel of planetary scientists to speculate about this possibility today (July 18), during a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Space Subcommittee.

[al_c]

Yep ... colonies on Mars and Guam is going to capsize.

How do these people get elected?!

[txrefugee]

Perhaps the CA Congressman thinks Spielberg’s “StarTrek” is a documentary.

[Carl Vehse]

But... but... but... what about all those pictures of Martians in the National Enquirer? \sarc

[hal ogen]

The fool is searching for his home planet. To think these people are our “leaders”!!! What a pathetic bad joke.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

[Jim W N]

More dumbness from government women.

[Ouderkirk]

Spielberg’s “Star Trek”

Good one....LOL

[Jim W N]

Correction: More dumbness from government men with names that sound like a woman.

[Bringbackthedraft]

Our astronauts who landed there found no evidence after they planted the flag.

[plain talk]

For life to have existed on Mars would also require a magnetic field which Mars (Venus or the moon) does not have. Our moon and its tides supposedly plays a role in keeping our core molten which helps maintain the magnetic field.

[Mr. K]

I don’t know... there are some awfully suspicious anomalies found on Mars.

You won’t see a building with windows and doors, it if is hundreds of thousands of years old. (or even millions)

Mars looks very much like a planet that USED TO have water, that has evaporated away. It also has a distribution of rocks all over that look like they were all distributed by some catastrophic event.

I would accept a theory that it was inhabited, it was hit by a massive asteroid that caused millions of rocks to go up into the sky and land ALL OVER, and that the weak magnetic field caused the water to get evaporated away.

The only reason the earth has a magnetic field is that the core spins at a different rate than the mantle. How does something like that happen? I have a theory that the earth’s crust was hit by a meteor that set its outer mantle shifting, and it swings back and forth like a screen door against the elastic core.

This would explain the magnetic pole reversals.

[SandRat]

That’s why a GREEN Puppy was whelped in England, I think.

[kingu]

I find it absolutely fascinating that such a small question would extrapolate into some wide eyed belief that there was some ancient Martian civilization that NASA is covering up.

Can you rule that out? No, of course they can't. And what's really interesting is when you put it in context with a recently published report which NASA co-funded about a rock core extraction in Canada - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/03/01/oldest-fossil-ever-found-earth-shows-alien-life-mars-likely/

So while mainstream media can make such rational and thoughtful extractions, a question by a Republican is framed as a wacko delusion fed by incorrect data. No, it was a simple question; though a better one would be: how would you apply the techniques used to recover the estimated 4.2bn year old fossil in Canada that showed evidence of microbial life on Earth to see if similar evidence exists on Mars?

And if the surface probe being set to arrive in 2020 doesn't rely upon such technologies, then what's the point of it? It is a useless waste of money if it can't provide similar data and NASA’s focus should be in supporting the manned exploration of Mars rather than creating a multi-billion dollar rock collection which ‘they might someday be able to retrieve.’ Yeah, some real value there, NASA.

[wally_bert]

Maybe he watched the Dr. Who episode with the ice warriors and British army guys.

[ScaniaBoy]

Oh boy! And yesterday I saw a video with rep Maxine Waters wanting to impeach President Trump because he supported the Russian invasion of Korea (sic!).

You don’t find the sharpest intellects in the Congress, do you?

[prophetic]

Meanwhile the inspection general office found that there is no signs of intellegence anywhere in nasa, notwithstanding that they have thousands of employees with Masters & PhD on their payroll and claim to be producing results of research on esoteric physics. Upon hearing of a pending massive budget cut rumors began to fly of a legendary breakthrough which allege to turn base metals into gold, cold fusion breakthroughs, warp speeds technologies and cures for cancers.

The Nasa administration said that it's imperative that we don't stop now at this critical time and demanded that their budget be increased from $20 billion to $980 billion, exceeding the us military budget.
/sarcasm off

[Fiji Hill]

"If God intended we should go to Mars, why'd he put it so far away?"
--Billy Hughes, 1953

[ek_hornbeck]

The belief that intelligent aliens may call Mars home has a rich and eventful history. For example, more than a century ago, American astronomer Percival Lowell claimed to have spotted canals on Mars, which he hypothesized had been built to bring water from the planet's polar ice caps down to the midlatitudes.

Lowell thought this was the case 100 years ago, when we knew nothing about Mars and it seemed like a halfway plausible hypothesis to informed people. What's Rohrbacher's excuse 100 years later?

[Axenolith]

Rohrabacher Is a dude and probably in the 95th percentile of what your average Freeper is looking for in a conservative...