New Mars Forums

I suppose it all depends how small your world is.
    If your world revolves around hunting geese and ducks, you will tend to describe things very precisely and other hunters will know exactly what it is you're referring to with a minimum of explanation.
    I believe eskimos have many adjectives for 'white' and dozens of names for ice of different consistencies. It's not hard to see why, given their environment, but it looks like overkill from our perspective!

    But, putting all that aside, I do agree with Robert and Cindy.   

Quote from Dickbill:-

    Very true!

    As for the unofficial opinions of "the big guys at NASA", my view is that O'Keefe probably doesn't have an opinion. (He's an accountant - only one step away from being an actuary. And you know what they say about actuaries: An actuary is an accountant who left accounting because s/he couldn't stand the excitement! ) In other words he's just a bean-counter ... albeit a supposedly good one.
    I don't remember anyone commenting about Von Braun's opinions regarding purported artificial structures on Mars. I suspect he was far more interested in the engineering aspects of going to Mars than in what to expect when we got there. Maybe I'm wrong.
    Carl Sagan spoke of "enigmatic landforms" on Mars after the Viking missions but, again, I don't think he would have allowed any personal suspicions about intelligently designed structures to 'leak out', even if he had any. He was already the subject of some criticism by his peers for 'overly glamourising' space research in TV programs like the popular "Cosmos" series. (Probably jealousy on the part of scientists who lacked his ability to communicate the wonders of science to the ordinary person.) Anyone in his position would naturally avoid getting involved in anything too near 'the fringe'.
    Sagan was, nevertheless, probably more inclined to believe in the possibility of higher life-forms on Mars than most of his scientific colleagues. As I mentioned once before at New Mars, he was keen to install lights on the Viking landers so that any nocturnal Martian animals could be photographed as they foraged around in the freezing (but UV-free) darkness! Such a willingness to believe in the possibility of creatures adapting even to the appallingly hostile conditions on present-day Mars, reveals a mind which was refreshingly open for a man so high up the professional ladder, where many minds seem inclined to close up for fear of ridicule.
    How interesting it would have been to talk to him for a while and find out what he really thought about Mars.
                                     

I believe "The Passion" uses only latin and aramaic - with no subtitles! Impenetrable to most audiences ... especially me!!
                                           

    Wasn't the emperor in "Gladiator" Marcus Aurelius? He lived from AD121 to 180.
    Or is my memory of the movie faulty?

Oops!
    Sorry, Josh.   

    I spotted your birthday coming up and made a mental note to check closer to the time. The website problems pushed it to the back of my mind and, sadly, there it stayed!

    But anyhow, HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOSH !!!   

    And to you, too, Immortal ... whoever you are!   

As always, the amount of detail discernible in these pictures leaves any definitive interpretation impossible to arrive at.
    In the general context of the images, an artificial interpretation seems unlikely to me. I've yet to see anything unequivocally 'manufactured' in any image of the Martian surface. The so-called Face on Mars is the closest thing I've seen to what could conceivably be intelligent design - but even there, I have to say it must remain inconclusive until better information becomes available.
    A very sobering revelation for me, as far as Cydonia goes, involved the Viking image of one of the structures in the 'city complex'. To me it looked very much like a triangular pyramid in a state of either incompleteness or dilapidation. A much better MGS image more recently showed this same object to be an irregular mesa with an impact crater on it!!
    That was a catharsis for me in that it demonstrated how deceptive a poor-resolution image can be and how easily we see what we want to see! It became very apparent to me that my standards of judgment were too low. I've since raised them much higher.
    Even though I'd like to see a building on Mars - I love a good mystery as well as a good conspiracy theory! - you have yet to convince me I'm looking at anything other than rocks and sand in peculiar lighting conditions! But I believe I'm open minded on most things and I look forward to you persuading me.
                                     

    I've never heard of military bases under the ocean bed and I find it hard to imagine why any country would want to go to such enormous trouble and expense to build them.
                                      ???

Don't look at me ... I'm a husband and parent!
    Nobody tells me anything.
                                         

    [In fact, I think being kept in the dark is part of the job description!! ]

I agree with you 100%, Dickbill. The geology of Mars is absolutely fascinating!
    All the news items I've read over the years tell me that even the experts are amazed and perplexed at the sheer complexity of Martian geology. There seems to be no single hypothesis which explains all the data we've accumulated so far.
    If your list of important questions could be answered, we would probably be at least 90% of the way to a basic understanding of Mars' history.

    I, too, have always wondered about those three enormous volcanoes, Ascraeus, Pavonis and Arsia. Why are they on an almost straight line hundreds of kilometres long? Why do they sit atop the anomalous Tharsis bulge? Is it just a coincidence that Tharsis is almost exactly opposite the vast Hellas impact basin on the other side of the planet?

    What if our dating of Martian surface features is completely wrong? What if there have been more recent episodes of impact events on Mars, not manifested to the same extent in other regions of the solar system? What if our usual method of crater counting on Mars is therefore leading us astray? Could the fringe theory you mentioned, that Mars was once a moon of a larger rocky planet between Earth and Jupiter, actually have any basis in fact?

    And that question about plate tectonics is a tantalising one. As I'm sure you know, there is actually quite good evidence of tectonic activity in Mars' early days. Or at least the remnant crustal magnetism in the southern highlands seems to indicate this.
    Just in case you, Dickbill, or some others here at New Mars haven't seen the colour-coded map of the remnant Martian magnetic fields yet, have a look at this site.
    The striped pattern of magnetic reversals is almost exactly like the ones found either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge here on Earth. This terrestrial ridge is recognised as a region of crustal spreading at the junction of two plates. The big difference, of course, is that here the process is continuing today, while on Mars it appears to have stopped billions of years ago.
    How to reconcile what looks like early tectonic plate movement on a planet with no evidence anywhere else of the existence of tectonic plates is a puzzle! Perhaps there were originally several mobile plates on Mars but evidence of them has since been obscured by impacts and volcanic resurfacing of much of the planet's surface.

    One of the many enigmas Mars has presented us with in recent years involves sand dunes. I can't find the article right now (I'll look harder if anyone's interested? ) but it seems there are quite newly formed wind-blown sand dunes in the caldera of Olympus Mons, 27 kms above datum where the air pressure is about 2 millibars!
    Geologists cannot explain how sand could have been blown into characteristic dune shapes at such an altitude. The air is too thin to lift the sand grains. The almost complete lack of impact craters suggests the dunes are very young.
    The obvious implication here is that the Martian atmosphere must have been substantially denser, even 27 kms up, in the very recent past - perhaps only centuries or a few thousand years ago, who knows?!
    I speculate that, if the air was dense enough to blow sand around on top of Olympus, the atmospheric pressure at datum may have been as high as 30 or 40 millibars (high enough to greatly expand and extend the opportunities for liquid water at the surface). And this kind of pressure elevation may be a fairly frequent and regular occurrence on Mars, helping to explain what looks like very recent fluvial activity(? ).

    There are many more questions than answers, of course, at this stage! But I'm hoping to live long enough to see some of these mysteries solved.
    To my way of thinking, only sending humans to Mars will do the trick ... I wish they'd get on with it!!!
                                        ???

    Do others here have any pet theories about how Mars has developed geologically, either in the distant past or more recently? I'm sure you, Dickbill, must have one or two thoughts yourself?!
                                           

I think maybe we shouldn't rake up 60-year-old lists of GI grievances about the French. It seems counterproductive to do such a thing, and then to publish it and distribute it in France!
    I wonder who would want to do such a thing ... I mean who would want to foment ever more Anti-American feeling among the French people? And just when things were starting to settle down and the post-Iraq resentments on both sides beginning to subside, too.

    Hmmm. I just can't imagine which groups would be interested in such muck-raking and rabble-rousing ... can you?
                                     :;):

I think placing instruments on the Pluto Express, designed specifically to investigate the anomalous force, is a great idea! If new physics comes of it, the added expense would surely be worth it.
                                         

    Btubill may well be onto something with his hypothesis about unrecognised forces in the vicinity of Mars. I'm sure most of us here at New Mars are familiar with the 'Great Galactic Ghoul'!
    Scientists gradually came to realise, due to the very high disaster rate with Mars probes, that an invisible demon lurks near Mars - jamming thrusters, causing onboard explosions, and writing glitches into software!!

    Btubill is merely attempting to explain the inexplicable by dressing it up in fancy mathematics.
    I believe you're wasting your time, Bill.
    Garlic, crucifixes, silver bullets or wooden stakes might save us from the 'Great Galactic Ghoul', but science and mathematics can't help us!
    The 2 MERs and Mars Express are all doomed ... Doomed I tell you!!!
                                     

I'm now in a position to respond to Free Spirit and, at the same time, provide the link BGD has requested.

    For a nice summary of the 'anomalous probe behaviour' story, Click Here.

    Apparently, the configuration of the Voyager probes makes it difficult to detect and measure any anomalous behaviour on their part. But some unexplained force, directed towards the Sun, has been detected with both the Pioneer probes and Ulysses. (And even Galileo was found to be affected in a similar way, but the data are regarded as unreliable because of factors associated with its relative proximity to the Sun.)
                                       

    [Spooky stuff, huh?!!    :;):  ]

Yeh, I just read today (in this week's edition of the same paper) that this whole thing was somebody's idea of a joke.
    What some people do with their lives!! Or is it that they don't actually have a life?!   ???

Well, coincidences do happen. There's no reason a meteorite shouldn't fall in Siberia in 2002 just because of the 1908 airburst.

    The reports of radioactivity are interesting though because there were disputed reports of radioactivity in the soil at Tunguska also.
    This makes me wonder about our knowledge of nuclear reactions. The phenomenon of cold fusion has been officially dismissed by conventional science as nonsense. However, there have been numerous anomalous experimental results which seem to show that some kind of nuclear reaction may occur at room temperature in a glass jar. Unfortunately, such results have not been reliably reproducible. Since reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of scientific credibility, cold fusion cannot be admitted into the realm of science and must remain a mere curiosity - though to many, including me, a most intriguing curiosity!  :;):

    During the passage of a massive object through our atmosphere at very high velocity, the enormous temperatures generated and the energy released could conceivably give rise to reactions of a nuclear nature. I can imagine a region in front of the object where atmospheric water vapour is broken down, ionised, and compressed to pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres. Conditions in such a region might closely resemble the plasma produced in our experimental fusion reactors. Who is to say that mother nature cannot produce fusion reactions on a small scale during the few moments of a meteoric airburst?
    This might account for these reports of radioactivity, without recourse to speculation about nuclear-powered starships travelling light years across the abyss of space without mishap, only to blow up when they arrive at their destination! How frustrating for their occupants!!
                                   

    Sorry, I couldn't help that little joke! I know I shouldn't make fun of things I don't fully understand, but it just strikes me as so very unlikely that extraterrestrials could be advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel but be unable to control their nuclear engines at the last minute, and crash!
    It makes for good science-fiction, but Occam's Razor dictates that we examine more plausible possibilities first.