New Mars Forums

Thanks for the comments, Euler. I knew perfectly well that my assertion of Western societal superiority sounded arrogant. I considered that aspect of it, not for the first time, and deliberately went ahead and wrote it - again, not for the first time.
    You agree that our civilisation "is preferable to theirs". I'm not surprised to hear it! The reason you do is that our civilisation is obviously a far better one than theirs, i.e. superior. I didn't say I am better in every way. I said our system is superior in almost every department.
    I think I have every justification to be proud of Western civilisation and, if that looks like arrogance, let it look like arrogance. I can't help what people think of me; I can only say and do what I believe to be the correct thing. You will note I don't claim societal perfection for the West, by any stretch of the imagination, but so far this is as good as it's ever been and as good as it gets. If you disagree, pick a place and a time in which you would rather have been born - I'll listen!
                                                   

My apologies, Bill!
    I didn't really mean to attack you, as such. I know you to be a very intelligent and well-meaning man, as I'm quite sure Euler is also. I can get quite frustrated with how some people see Islamic terrorists. You can't negotiate with them so, yes, you have to eliminate them.
    By the way, I don't just talk tough. When CC is running things (and I hope to be called to assist in some small way), you can be sure we won't disappoint you by behaving in a wimpish Bush-like fashion.
                                               :;):   :laugh:

    You're right, of course, that President Bush is too 'wet'. We're all agreed (CC, you and me) that he's been showing lily-livered Leftist weakness lately and needs to shape up. I didn't mean to overlook your well-aired views on this very point, which you've made perfectly clear in various posts.
    I believe we need to be tougher and I'm glad to have you on side in this regard. We're probably much closer in our views than some of your comments have tended to make me think at times. My mistake, I'm sure.
                                                     :up:   

"Busy" is a nice bland way to put it.
    How about  .....  S C A R E Y ! ! !         

Yeah .. Get the hell outa here, MGS!!   :angry:

    Damned party pooper ... !   :bars2:
    Dragging Donovan into the Atlantis discussion, too. Sheesh .. what next?!!
                               :realllymad:

[Just kidding, MadGrad.       ]

Democracies are notoriously difficult to persuade to wage serious war, which may be a good thing, or not, depending on the circumstances. I believe part of the relative ease of the German conquests early in WWII stemmed from the fact that WWI had only finished some twenty years before. European democracies had no stomach for another war and couldn't quite believe they were embroiled in yet another one so soon!
    America, too, was very hard to get motivated, even though half of Europe was under the Nazi jackboot. She had the paradigm of isolationism to overcome ("it ain't our war!"), as well as the recent memory of WWI.

    Nowadays, most Western democracies have had two whole generations without any 'on-your-doorstep' wars. We've almost convinced ourselves that the age of wars has passed and that we've entered a new and enlightened era of common sense and negotiation, with blue skies ahead and increasing prosperity for all. The idea of a real war, with real casualties and real sacrifice, is a fictional concept to us; something we see in movies or on T.V.

    But now the world has turned nasty again. There are people out there again with agendas we can't agree with, who can't be negotiated with, and who want to change our way of life.
    People are saying: "This can't be so!"  So they look for someone to blame, for some way out of it.  Ahah!! It's probably our fault; we've driven these people to it by our insensitivity. All they want is a peaceful life, just like us, and all we have to do is identify their grievances and resolve them.  Ahah!! It's our capitalist lifestyle and our warmongering leaders. All we have to do is give these people money and vote in Kerry, instead of Bush, and all the nastiness will go away.

    Unfortunately, it's not that easy. However much the Left, with its own aims and political agenda, would like to use this latest assault on our freedom to further its interests, we're sooner or later going to have to face up to the fact that these terrorists are "not for turning".
    It would be interesting to see how far Al-Qa'ida has to go before the Left and the cohorts of pro-Left journalists finally stop and realise: "Hey! These bastards really are the enemy!"  Would a mushroom cloud over Paris or New York suffice? Or would even that be construed as "no more than we deserve for our wicked capitalist ways"?

    People here are asking whether America can afford the money and the troops to take on Iran as well as Iraq. These are, of course, very valid and pertinent questions. But I would suggest that Iran isn't a separate conflict. America (not to mention Britain and Australia) is already fighting Iranian terrorists and/or Iranian-funded terrorists as we speak - in Iraq.
    Iran's clerical leadership hates the West, it hates our freedom (decadence to them), it despises our secular views, it hates the equality of our women, and it loathes America as the wealthiest and most influential part of all this.
    Soon, Iran will have a nuclear bomb and nobody is sure they aren't stupid enough to actually use it.

    Can America, and Israel too, afford not to stop them?    ???

    If we act, things are going to get dirtier.
    If we don't act, things are going to get dirtier anyway - but maybe in London and Canberra and Washington DC.
                                               :bars:

If there was ever an Atlantis, I think it must have been where Plato said it was - west of the Pillars of Hercules, in the North Atlantic.
    The other places put forward, such as the island of Thera in the Mediterranean, strike me as being too small to support a civilisation of such wealth, power, and sophistication as Atlantis is reported to have been.

    Depth soundings in that part of the world have failed to come up with anything resembling a continent, as such, but I often wonder about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This is an area of upwelling magma so powerful in its action that it's pushing apart the Americas and Africa/Europe and creating millions of square kilometres of new ocean bed in the process. Suppose for a moment that the forcing apart of those continents was 'briefly' (in geological terms) interrupted, perhaps by a short-lived extra resistance elsewhere in Earth's crust. The unimaginable forces now driving apart the continental plates might have instead pushed the floor of the Atlantic upwards. The spine of the Ridge may have surfaced in the middle of the ocean, forming a long narrow mini-continent of volcanic peaks and islands interspersed with solidified lava plains. Over some tens of thousands of years, the newly exposed volcanic rock would have been weathered into rich soil and colonised by plants and birds from North and South America to the west, and from Europe and Africa to the east. With majestic volcanic peaks, hot springs, a near-perfect sub-tropical climate, and fertile soils, the new continent could have been a virtual paradise on Earth. Atlantis!

    This hypothetical explanation for the legend then requires that, in about 9000 BC, the continental drift suddenly resumed for some reason. No longer obstructed by the resistance we've conjured up, the Mid-Atlantic-Ridge collapsed back into the depths, taking Atlantis with it to the bottom of the ocean. According to Plato, this catastrophe occurred in the space of one day. A tectonic event of the magnitude discussed might just conceivably allow for such a time-frame.
    In addition, its violence would have destroyed most of the evidence that anything man-made ever stood in the area of the Ridge. The volcanic eruptions on the sea floor which must surely have accompanied the subsidence, together with 11,000 years of constant sedimentary deposition, would have covered up anything that was left.

    I suppose my little reverie here actually qualifies as a scientific hypothesis on one point at least. The relatively sudden subsidence of such a land mass should have caused significant waves - tsunamis - which would have left their mark on the coasts on both sides of the Atlantic. So my hypothesis is easily falsifiable, if no such evidence of large waves is found by geologists.

    Anybody here know anything about big waves on the Atlantic coast in about 9000 BC?!!   ???       

    But on a more down-to-Earth level, there are some quirky things which call into question the completeness of our archeological and historical knowledge.
    My father was Irish and used to tell me about a great warrior from the golden age of Irish legend. This heroic figure, a kind of Celtic Hercules, was called Cuchullain (pronounced Koo-kullen). It was years later that I read or heard about a hero of the ancient Mayas of Central America. This half-man/half-god was called Kukulkan (pronounced Koo-kool-kahn) ... !
    Just to add a little more spice to this remarkable phonic coincidence, Kukulkan was described by the Maya as a fair-skinned, bearded man with emerald eyes. (Hmmm.)

    Nearly finished! There are some linguistic enigmas, too, which I find interesting. There's a pre-Columbian city in Mexico called Teotihuacan, which means 'City of the Gods'. The pre-Columbian word for temple, or 'house of god', is Teocalli.
    What I'm trying to point out here is that the ancient Mexican word for god is 'Teo'. In latin, Deo means 'of god', Deus means 'god'  (Zeus, in Greek). In English, the prefix 'theo-' means 'of god' - as in theology and theocracy.

    People have made lists of such enigmatic links between peoples who, according to mainstream history and archeology, were never in contact. Atlantis supporters have used such lists as (circumstantial) evidence that all ancient civilisations sprang from one great early civilisation whose shattered remains now lie under metres of mud in the cold dark depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
    I wouldn't go quite that far on such scanty evidence but the enigmas nevertheless remain, indicating we've probably still got a great deal to learn about our own pre-history.
                                                  :;):   

Some images of Mars show varying shades of dust and sand which give an almost eerie impression of dark pools of liquid water.
Take a look at the bottom of http://images.spaceref.com/news/2004/20 … 0.gif]this image and check out the 'water'!
    [If you place your cursor on the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, an 'expander button' will appear, allowing you to get the full magnification. Apologies to computer lits. here who see these instructions as trivial and self-evident. I like to treat others as being just as stupid as I am, just in case!     ]

Yes Rik, 'chassis' is the right English word.   :up:

    Your marvellous command of English, colloquial English included, is quite remarkable and I certainly envy your skills in the linguistics department.
    Well done!
                               

    As for Opportunity's upcoming trek to Victoria crater, I'm with Cindy in hoping they turn up a nice big fossil sea-shell or some such. What a rush that would be!
                                           

Quite right, MR!
    But CC has quoted the popular understanding of how that situation came about, rather than the actual truth of the matter. While the reptiloids of Alpha Draconis were certainly involved, it wasn't in the way so many of us believe. No psychic motivator ray was ever used.
    As revealed to me via telepathic transfer across interstellar space by the troglodytes of Beta Centauri 2, the Rothschilds actually were reptiloids from Alpha Draconis, bent on invading Earth by first weakening the world's economy.
    Churchill was in fact killed in 1900 during the Boer War. His bodily appearance was assumed by an undercover agent of the amphibian cephalopods of Epsilon Eridani 3. The switch was barely noticed and no suspicions were aroused - except on those occasions when he would slump in a chair and begin to resemble a bullfrog.

    The rest, as they say, is history.

Many thanks, Doug!
    That map certainly puts the upcoming journey into sharp perspective .. and what a journey!   

    My gast has rarely been so flabbered.

    I'm not quite sure Oppy's up to it but I'm impressed with NASA's chutzpah in trying for it. Go little rover,go!!!
                       :up:   

It almost sounds like Alex is half expecting life to appear on Mars simply because the environment is changed for the better.
    If there is no life on Mars today, simply making the place warmer and wetter won't cause it to appear - except perhaps if the climate change is permanent and we wait for a few hundred million years! 

    On the other hand, a human presence on Mars to initiate the environmental improvement, will necessarily introduce microbial life. (We are, after all, essentially mobile bags of bacteria-contaminated salt-water, which leak rather badly!       )

    If we introduce bacteria or if bacteria are already there (which, to me, is more likely), creating a benign environment will almost certainly trigger the 'greening' of the surface. I can see no reason why life there shouldn't continue the process of evolution, just as it has on Earth for eons. Over time, I'm sure some amazing and exotic forms of life would develop.
                                       :up:

Any danger of 'flash freezing' your nose right off?!!         :laugh:

No, Cindy, you're not the only one and I'm sorry I didn't comment on this article you very kindly linked for us.   
    I think everyone here knows I believe Mars has a biosphere of some kind. This article is just more evidence supporting an idea which, to me, seems quite logical already. I'm almost afraid to get on my soap box when I see things like this because I imagine people are sick of my lecturing on it!

    The mainstream view, still rooted to a large extent in the Viking data, is that there's no unequivocal evidence of life on Mars. I can't argue with this in any definitive way because I have no incontrovertible evidence either!
    I have doubts about superoxides in the martian soil and I believe the indications that Mars must have at least microbial life are very compelling.
    But until we see macro-fossils in the MER photos or an astronaut digs one up, articles like these probably can't achieve much toward changing the paradigm. I don't need convincing and the mainstream can't be convinced!
    Frustrating but true!