You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
Oh yes, Shaun, insofar as the commonality of the 20 amino acids as a baseline, but, if the late Sir Fred Hoyle is right about his panspermia idea, would it be likely, perhaps, that that 20 amino acids baseline could find itself upon a plethora of suitable worlds, where-in all life in a given solar system would trully be "kissing cousins?" As regards as to what could blow up a terrestrial type planet, what if a group of really hateful or otherwise evil personages had made the ultimate doomsday device like you see in science fiction, like maybe they made lots of anti-matter separated from matter by some sort of containment field whilst still enveloped in some big hollow cylinder? Shaun, do you think it is reasonably possible that we, sometime within our lifetimes, will witness at some level a 10,000 megaton global nuclear exchange that at least TTAPS was so worried about when their book "The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War," came out in the early eighties (of course, I had to have read that one which ended up keeping both myself and my beloved Brenda awake into the wee hours!)? In my view, I'm still hedging a bet within good reason (I fervently hope) that nuclear war will never happen, at least on such a global scale. However, Shaun, let us keep thinking and support the effort to send men, women, and equipment to Mars by at least 2015 (You've heard it here first: they will be bringing someone with some formal training in archeology!). wccmarsface@msn.com
If I may, the foregoing is something of an addendum to the discussion raised by Shaun Barrett's various entries re the marsface controversy....I have recently read the Mars Tidal theory paper by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara on the TEM website. What impressed me was their idea that Mars, at one time, was a natural satellite of a somewhat larger world that catastrophically broke apart for whatever reasons around 65 million years ago. Of course, I have heard of this before regarding the exploded planet hypothesis championed by one Dr. Thomas C. VanFlandern: both researchers believe that, for one thing, the puzzling hemispheric Mars datum dichotomy is best explained by what happens when a large natural satellite is liberally blasted when, again for reasons yet to be discovered, the parent world goes kaboom on an unimaginably cosmic scale! Irrespective of what might cause such a vast cosmic catastrophe, both VanFlandern and Hoagland appear to be very confident in the proposal that we have at hand ostensible ruins of a long extinct technical civilization scattered hither and yon about the martian surface. VanFlandern thinks the terminal event took place 3.2 million years ago whilst Hoagland and Bara suggest 65 million years, give or take a decade, before the 21st Century! All right? Well, if I am not totally mistaken, Hoagland believes the old relics littering Mars (my favorite planet, I'll have you know) were intrinsically the product of us, or, at least ancestors that could only be homo sapiens sapiens, albeit in very distant antiquity indeed. Query: are we missing something here re the established (terrestrial, of course!) evolution of anatomically modern humans? Could an alien species of primate, nonetheless a placental mammal, have independently evolved on the presumably exploded "twin" of earth right at the very end of the Cretaceous Period here on earth when the largest terrestrial placental mammal was no bigger than a housecat? If, for the sake of argument along such seemingly fantastical lines (at least in consideration of the sensibilities of most ostensibly rationally minded people), our race, though we really don't know for sure where and whence we came to be, especially since it could be argued, perhaps, that all the extinct terrestrial hominids could be examples of a kind of parallel evolution of an unrelated taxonomic lineage, might we have just somehow drifted upon the scene a few hundred thousand years ago (like by way of some kind of relativistic spacecraft [or several such] that might have fled the massively blown away original homeworld with just enough survivors that could take up permanent residence upon that veritable "twin" world that lies just a bit closer to the sun millions of years in their future; I suppose, if they had planned it in this way, they could have selected the future timeframe of 65 million years where-in they might feel confident enough that a robust and diverse mammalian evolutionary period has progressed sufficiently enough to ensure the continued survival of those who were lucky enough to escape the great cosmic cataclysm, and thus, in so doing, averting irreversible extinction? In the speculative consideration of the foregoing, could Hoagland have really hit on something when he asserts that human history may be enormously greater than most, by far, could even dare to imagine? If be this truth, however unlikely any one of us might be willing to step out that far on that cracked branch, as fascinating as this might be for people who can really imagine the veritably unimaginable, isn't all this just a wee bit spooky?! wccmarsface@msn.com
Hi Cindy! I am so very new to the Mars Society and the message boards here. I am new to online communication and my wccmarsface e-mail address I've had for only a couple of months. My name is Bill. I've recently moved to the state of Washington in the Puget Sound area after having spent the past 25 years in San Antonio, Texas. My education, at least at the formal level, is nil: I've never gotten past the ninth grade in high school and I've never been to college. I've been married once, very happily so, but my wife, after about five years of wonderful matrimony, passed away from cardiac arrest from a heart condition at the tender age of 36 back in 1989 (my beloved Brenda was four years older than me; we had no children because of her heart condition). Cindy, I so very much enjoy the entries of ecrasez_l_inflame. I'd like to view myself as somewhat of an independent thinker with, at least, some ability to work things out irrespective of my educational background, or lack thereof. In regards to your aunt and mother, and please note that in no way do I wish to come off in any sort of way disingenuous toward people that you love, but they, much like my Christian fundementalist brother, have no use what-so-ever for the only tried and true means of garnering the truth: show me the kind of evidence that can be independently verifiable from a redundant variety of sources. The universe is expanding: the light we see from the vast majority of distant galaxies are red-shifted, you know, the doppler-effect of the light seen in the red spectrum because of the long wavelengths screaming at us: "we're moving away from you, so long!" There is a clear anatomical link between birds and theropod dinosaurs (cladistic taxonomy). Humans have a definable fossil record along hominid ancestors stemming from Africa going at least back to mid or early Pliocene times. During Project Apollo, twelve American men walked on the moon from 1969 to 1972. Europa might have something alive in that watery subsurface ocean that most planetary scientists agree is there which makes it absolutely incumbent upon us to have a look-see. Cindy, Mars beckons us, most of all. If we give in to those who cannot ostensibly "see the forest for the trees," then we all lose in the long-run. Eventually, our future as a sentient race will likely depend on where we go from here. Mars beckons us, Cindy. At risk of the fine folks "who know better than me, which is, of course, possible!" I'm hedging a bet that when we finally send women and men to Mars, we will find, dare I even say it, "Hoagland's" ruins..........ruins, Cindy, that really might be there, built by none other than homo sapiens sapiens, because I have seen controversial peer-reviewed palaeoanthropological papers indicating that "anatomically modern" humans may go back as far as 350,000 years. Then again, I see one Professor Charles H. Hapgood as a careful investigator and free thinker who checked his thesis with people like the U.S. Air Force Cartography Section at Westover Air Force Base. Cindy, if the ruins simply aren't there, Mars ever-so-much beckons us to have that unambiguous look-see. Look forward to more of your wonderful entries, as well as all the other fine people chatting on the Mars Society message boards, Cindy! wccmarsface@msn.com
I've recently purchased a rare first-edition (Chilton Books,1966) copy of: "Maps of The Ancient Sea Kings," with the subtitle: "Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age," by the late Professor Charles H. Hapgood. The read was engrossing and so utterly fascinating; of course, there should be skeptics of Professor Hapgood's claims, no matter how well done his thesis may be, but, to the professional debunkers of the world: who has given you an uncontestable monopoly on the truth, lest you have incontrivertable proof that certain ideas or claims are unequivocably impossible........anyone's reasoned skepticism should follow the guidelines of: "show me evidence that is, at least, plainly evident enough to satisfy me!" wccmarsface@msn.com
A 200-mile-wide asteroid hitting the earth! Whoa! It couldn't happen: not one that big (the KT impactor was around six or so miles across with a kinetic energy yield of at least one hundred million megatons!). A killer rock that size probably hasn't been seen within Earth's vicinity for very likely more than four billion years. A dense white dwarf colliding with the sun might be as great a likelyhood as a space rock hundreds of miles across, but wait: what about giant comets that size that could make it careering across our planet's orbit!? Haven't some of these been spotted in the Kuiper Belt? Yikes!! wccmarsface@msn.com
I've seen the book "1421" at my local Barnes & Noble bookstore. Even had the Chinese accomplished this, it wouldn't have mattered: they were no where even close to one day solving the problem of longitude; they would never have been as good at clock-making that free-thinking European society would foster (especially England!) wccmarsface@msn.com
My favorite "sci-fi" movie was a made-for-TV miniseries that was really a horror story rather than anything with a science theme: Stephen King's "The Stand." Years later I read the novel (all 1241 pages!), so at least I knew what many of the characters looked like, you know, Stuart Redman is, of course, Gary Sinise and Randall Flagg is, obviously, Jamie Sheridan, etc. etc. I confess I've always had a rather morbid fascination with, not so much end-of-the-world stories, but end-of-the-global-civilization scenarios that I fervantly hope not to be around to actually witness! Didn't you know, though different from Stephen King's escaped manufactured super-flu scenario, the Yellowstone magma chamber may be overdue to catastrophically burst with a kinetic energy yield of perhaps 2,500 Mount St. Helens? I can just hear that oh-so-spooky slide guitar just a twangin'........ wccmarsface@msn.com
In regards to Byron's query on SF novels on Mars: I have read Ben Bova's "Mars" and "Return to Mars." His two novels encompassed the spirit of first time explorers on the red planet, and in that vain, we follow along with the crew as they live and work and explore and even, right toward the end of the first novel, that half Navaho geologist just happens to spot "something" strange at some far off distance that looks like, oh no! It couldn't be....... wccmarsface@msn.com
On the "nuclear event" possibility suggested by Cindy: No way to "sugar-coat" this: what with the advent of so many nations either possessing nuclear weapons or developing the means to acquire them, at some point some nation-state will probably use them against somebody they just don't like. Perhaps the scariest aspect of this lies in the fact that, irrespective of the end of the so-called "Cold War," both the U.S. and Russia still possess nuclear weapons to the tune of nearly 60,000 warheads with a total yield of about 13,000 megatons between them. In the TTAPS study in the early eighties, it was shown that a "baseline" 5,000 megaton global nuclear exchange, under certain conditions, would result in the much-discussed "nuclear winter" effect, although, very significant and dangerously, people over the years are so wont to "downplay" the nuclear winter finding as though such could never happen, so, perhaps the "unthinkable" might be, for some, "thinkable!" If, say, India and Pakistan once and for all resort to nuclear hostilities, how can we be at all certain that some domino effect won't occur where-by, perhaps due to a series of miscalculations or miscommunications, the counterforce arsenals of, say, the Russians, doesn't become active in some misperceived retaliatory response? Suddenly, a number of U.S. cities and various targets of strategic value are now under the horrific pall of numerous hydrogen bomb bursts. Now, in this event, the U.S. must respond with its own counterforce measures! Hopefully, Cindy, the foregoing possibility is realistically a "bit of a stretch!" But, I think, though the "Cold War" is ostensibly over, the threat of nuclear war, either regionally or global (or both!), will be something we will always have to live with. I was five years old during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time, unbeknownst to us until many years later, it was a huge miracle that nuclear war was avoided. I was a little boy living near Tacoma, Washington, which probably would have escaped direct nuclear incineration. Sometimes I wonder how different my life would have been, growing up in a world severely damaged in a nuclear holocaust at least a few short years shy of the vast "overkill" capability that could result in nuclear winter! Such could make a chilling alternate history novel! wccmarsface@msn.com
Shaun Barrett's 14 April entry is very interesting. While we can never be sure how any sort of "telltale" signs of "obvious" artificiality signatures might play out hundreds or several thousand millenia after the permanent end of our current global societal infrastructure here on very dynamic earth, there is one geophysical activity that has been going on repetitively over at least the last two million years and should repetitively continue for probably the next hundred million years: the Pleistocene ice ages. I say ice ages rather than "the Great Ice Age" because recent geological evidence has shown as many as 20 massive glacial advances and retreats during the Pleistocene. In the last glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago in North America, the "Great Wisconsinian Ice Sheet" covering much of the North American continent reached as far south as St.Louis, Missouri (at the same time most of Europe was ice-covered during the simultaneous Wurm III Glacial Maximum). Around 11,000 years ago the Wisconsin/Wurm III Glacial ended, after a duration of roughly 100,000 years, with the beginning of the present Holocene Interglacial, which is why our wonderful global cooperative flourishes so well. There is recent evidence to suggest that the transition between glacial to interglacial stages, and vice versa, occur far more rapidly than previously thought, leading to rapid glacial meltoff and the runoff resulting in massive continental flooding the likes of which we've never seen in current historical experience. The next glacial advance, which some observers think is due or perhaps even overdue, will literally pulverize a great many continental interior cities and towns, superhighways, dams and whatever else. The massive floodings of the following glacial retreat might, not only significantly raise global sea levels, but erode or otherwise obliterate whatever's left along continental coastal margins. We've been around as an emergent global society only over the last 250 years or so. Some distant future archeologist 300,000 years from now might not have much of anything to go on in regards as to the former existence of "some unknown previous technical civilization in distant antiquity" that could be construed as enough marginally conclusive evidence that might convince a general concensus. Very likely, Human Beings being what they are, some distant future general concensus would be busy endlessly debunking the anomalous physical or even chemical traces that might seriously pose not insignificant challenges to whatever might be their epistemological construct. Finally, regarding Richard Hoagland's suggestion of the 500,000 years ago timeframe for the "anomalous" landforms in Cydonia (or, isn't it now somewhat revised to 330,000 years in accordance to refinements in Hoagland's ancient martian obliquity studies?), perhaps much of the infrastructure has been severely degraded from possible cosmic scale catastrophic agencies to even being buried in a lot of windblown dust which could completely cover what highways or roadways there might have been. Why don't we just go to Mars with real people for a very detailed looksee? Real, honest, hard-working people, with no particular axes to grind, on the ground on Mars. People who are willing to do the science (and do it right) and are prepared to live with the results regardless of where the chips might fall! Regardless of however what we might find on a tantillizingly somewhat earthlike world of which we really know next to nothing about simply because we've never been there in person might affect the socio-political process back home. Whether Hoagland is right (it is not impossible that he might be!), or whether any of you fine people are: who cares! Let's go to Mars in person with real people at least just for a looksee! wccmarsface@msn.com
To: Josh Cryer, Shaun Barrett, ecrasez_l_inflame, Mark S,et al; why all this discussion on the so-called face on mars and those people who somehow think that Mars is ostensibly littered with ancient ruins of some sort of extinct spacefaring civilization in remote antiquity? After all, and please correct me if I am misled, but isn't it true that, given the great epistemology of our knowledge, ancient ruins on other planetary bodies in the solar system are by all means, impossible? Isn't it true that this subject can never ever be a serious scientific query, because, if it were, and if such ruins really existed, it would have the innate potential to undermine everything we know about the history of man and could include some very nasty ideas like: maybe the history of homo sapiens sapiens is vaster and far more than we at present trully know and that, perhaps several hundred thousand years ago, our "unknown ancestors" developed a global technical culture that went to the moon and Mars in a very big way before they, of course, got obliterated in some terrible catastrophe and, a powerful civilization endures total collapse and societal extinction and we are then, therefore, the very distant future descendants of the few survivors on the great Pleistocene Ice Age ravaged earth. It seems that one Richard C. Hoagland champions something like this. And I do not mean to denigrate Mr. Hoagland: I find him to be a very intelligent and well spoken individual and very interesting to listen to on various media venues, but, could he and his friends be right about their basic assertions, at least? Isn't all this about faces and five sided pyramidal structures on Mars very easily debunkable since we have so much unequivocal proof that such "anomalous" structures are exclusively the work of purely natural geological processes? In the end, of course, without ever having yet sent women and men to Mars, how really sure can we be about what is and what is not on the martian surface which is, so inconveniently for us, most of the time hundreds of millions of kilometers away? If those at TEM, SPSR, Mac Tonnies' "Cydonian Imperative" and others of such a pseudo-scientific bent are right about their basic tenet, why should we, given the potential for such great sociological consequences, even bother to seek out this kind of truth, if truth it may be? In the history of science, has there ever been a case of pseudo-science having eventually become accepted by the general at-large scientific community? If there really are ruins of very ancient cities on Mars ( of course, isn't all this so much unadulterated nonsense!), where is the evidence of such here on earth? Is the geological dynamism of our planet so great as to virtually eliminate the traces of sizable cities on earth of say a quarter of a million years ago, the so-called "ooparts", the "Baalbek Terrace" and various claims of underwater ruins off the continental shelves notwithstanding? If our present global culture collapses and dies out, which it very well might due to numerous possible planetary events far outside modern experience, and then there are survivors living at somewhat prehistorical levels for many tens of thousands of years, and a new advanced global society emerges a quarter of a million years from now, how much of our infrastructure could they encounter inwhich they could have a clearly discernable history of our former societal existence? Shouldn't they be able to recover lots of our stuff? Or would they only find curious anomalous traces here and there from time to time, but not enough to change or build a new scientific paradigm? The essence of skepticism is an essential altruism in science. Science requires high, or, I should say, very high standards of evidence. Hypotheses should never be scientifically provable, but only disprovable. Also, the "art" of skepticism should not be outright debunkery based on personal opinions (and never be the grounds for making personal attacks on the character of others regardless of the subject matter of whatever claims they proffer) but, rather, suspension of belief at least if or until the required evidence becomes, well, plainly evident! Indeed, extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence, and, most of the time, such extraordinary evidence simply just isn't there. On Mars, all bets are off when women and men are finally on the ground there. I should predict that we will find no such traces of ostensible ruins or any other artifacts of sentient intelligence on the surface of Mars. Perhaps, just in case, the crew should include a woman or a man with some training in anthropology, archeology, or even, philology. You know, just in case is all! wccmarsface@msn.com
I have read "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon In The Universe," by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee with great interest. It would seem we have complex life here on the earth for two not insignificant reasons: first, massive Jupiter is located at just the right spot to keep our cozy little world from getting smacked by Oort Cloud comets at a far greater frequency, and, second, we've got a super-giant moon orbiting our planet which resulted from a most unlikely impact of a Mars-size protoplanet during the formative stages of solar system history; our wonderful moon ostensibly acting as a great stabilizer of the earth's obliquity! In that light, perhaps our sentience and our civilization is unique in the entire 14 billion year history of the universe! For me, this is reasonable, but could it really be true that we're it? Maybe so, or maybe not: unfortunately, this hypothesis is probably not likely to be amenable to testing, and thus can only remain a somewhat reasonable speculation in lue of real hands on data. Also, when you look at the data of extrasolar planet hunters like Geoff Marcy and others wherein we typically find gas giants either very close to their parent stars (we're talking other stars similar to our sun, of course) or otherwise in very chaotic elliptical orbits, our very own solar system may be itself a considerable exception from the norm! It would seem that any alien civilizations that might be out there are exceedingly inconspiquous by their complete absence.:;):
Pages: 1