New Mars Forums

I wouldn't call it a flame, although I suppose it was a bit sharp. I'm not going to stop people from asking questions for their homework in these forums, and I don't want to discourage people from answering them if they want to. These are simply my personal views.

However, I do feel that there is a difference between asking a simple question like 'Can you tell me what science the rovers have produced?' and it being for a school paper. The difference is that you are supposed to research school papers largely independently, unless there's a good reason not to. Perhaps reading every press release is over the top, but there have been good stories about the rovers' discoveries on all sorts of news websites like the BBC, CNN, SpaceDaily, Scientific American and New Scientist. In the top 20 results for a Google search on 'Mars Rovers' are links to a BBC News story about Opportunity sitting on an ancient beach and Space.com's comprehensive Mars Rover portal. It really isn't *that* difficult, and if you're proficient enough to register on these forums and post a question (a feat that challenges not a few), you are certainly proficient enough to do a Google search. How do you think people find these forums, after all?

Now, if the question was a bit more difficult or the poster had made it a bit more interesting, then fine, I wouldn't be bothered. As it is, no, I'm not impressed.

Don't get me wrong, I am flattered that people consider New Mars to be a good resource of information about Mars. At the same time, homework is not just about asking someone to get you information on a topic, it's about learning how to research independently and evaluate sources. I wouldn't be happy as a teacher if I found out that someone had 'written' a paper by merely asking about it on a forum and doing little more than cut-and-pasting the replies (which in this thread are more than good enough for a school paper). It reminds me of people emailing a literary mailing list I belong to saying 'I need to write a paper about x book for next week, please tell me what the key conflicts between the characters are.'

Edit: I just realised that many people may not have seen that the question is for an astronomy paper - look to the title of his post, 'Results of Spirit and Opportunity, a quick question for my astronomy paper'.

Edited By Adrian on 1083277906

It's a good suggestion... might be worth archiving or retiring some of the older threads to see if that'd help. Will look at it in a bit (Josh, feel free to explore options as well).

Okay, thread closed. Take it to Free Chat, or open a new Russians to Mars thread if you want to talk about that 

This is getting *way* too weird. If you want to talk about an ISA, please do it in an relevant topic, not in one about Russian to Mars - I don't want any more off-topic posts here, and if I do see any, they'll be deleted.

Clark, it'd be a tough job. Almost as hard as explaining what red looks like More of a philosophical question than anything else.

While I can sympathise with those who are willing to keep an open mind about the Face on Mars - even though I don't think it looks anything like a face - I feel that people haven't thought through the natural consequences of the Face being of intelligent origin.

If the Face was created by aliens, the list of difficult questions this raises is literally endless. Why did they make it? If they wanted to leave a calling card, why not do it on Earth? Why not on the Moon? Where have they gone, and where did they come from? If they had such high technology, why not throw a satellite into Earth orbit and leave it there for a few million years? Why make a face? Why not a binary message in primes? When did they make it? If they wanted it to last, surely they should have made it from more durable material. It just makes absolutely no sense at all. I would hope that if there *were* ETs that landed on Mars, they'd have more brains than this.

Quite apart from this, so what if Hoaglund makes one correct prediction among his dozens or hundreds of incorrect ones? What does it mean if one side of the face looks like a lion? And surely it was simply a safe bet to predict that the face would be asymmetric rather than symmetric given that that's a more likely finding, artificial or natural?

I find the whole thing absurd and to be a waste of time. Here we are, talking about something that at low resolutions looks like a face on Mars (just like countless other natural formations in the universe, given our brain's preference for recognising faces) when there are so many other wonderful things to think about, like the *real* possibility of extant microbial life on Mars. The face on Mars is just another example of lazy thinking and an undisprovable hypothesis.

I'm sorry to go on like this, as a scientist it irks me to see people chasing after ghosts and misunderstanding the scientific method :realllymad: . In fact, I started - and then deleted - a rant about the misconceptions of what 'science' is but then decided for the better. This is why I don't like talking about the face on Mars  :bars2:

Edited By Adrian on 1080310419

The dimension of a cell is anywhere from 1um to 100um, with 10um being a reasonable average. The microscopic imager therefore would be basically unable to resolve a unicellular organism. However, if there were multicellular organisms, I don't think it would be out of the question for the imager to resolve them - the only problem is, how would you recognise them? It's no good just looking for blobs or stuff like that, as people here insist on doing - if you're going to make a claim for past life on Mars, you have to be absolutely sure, and I don't think that the imager is up to the job.

That said, I do think it may be able to pick up tantalizing evidence...

A brief outline on the format - there is an introduction/editorial, usually about current events in space and Mars. Then there are several links and commentory on interesting topics on the forums, most of which should be space or Mars related. Next we have news about the forum itself (maintanence, special events), and then links and commentary on interesting news stories and websites on the Internet. That's it!

People are welcome to write suggestions for all parts although I imagine most people would be happy writing the links and commentary on forum topics or Internet sites/stories.

Thanks for pointing this out. I've just spent the last hour deleting over 150 comment spams and have just downloaded a new plugin that will let me do it much quicker and automatically in the future. It should also screen against most spam as well.

I just spotted [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3503430.stm]an interesting article on the BBC that mentions 'scientists recently made new estimates of the rovers' lifetime on the planet, that extend their working life from 90 days to 240 days.'

240 days? What a result! It simply boggles the mind how much rover technology is improving these days. These things could travel miles!

Thread locked - see 'Spirit & Opportunity *4*'

I did add some nice new smilies for you guys though   :band: