New Mars Forums

A sad day for Russia indeed.
   It reminds us how dangerous rockets are, doesn't it? And puts into perspective how infrequently a Russian rocket fails these days - they're so reliable that this event comes as a shock.

   My condolences to the distraught parents who have lost a son.

Hey, turbo!
    I think Earthfirst is only kidding around ( ... I hope! ).

    I had trouble interpreting what he said, though. Who was it, speaking of America and Britain, who described them as two peoples divided by a common language?!!
                                     

I'd take my wife, 'cos she's cool !

    And I think it would be great to have Chris McKay along to explain points of interest and discuss future terraforming.

    And, if by some magic I could beat the Reaper, I'd absolutely love to have Carl Sagan come with us. Nobody would appreciate the trip more than he!
    And I couldn't leave out Pete Conrad, commander of Apollo 12 and my favourite astronaut of all time. Such a wonderful sense of humour and what a supremely capable pilot - and definitely someone you would want around if the chips were down!
                                         

Why the fascination with Earth-Moon L1?
    According to what I've read, L1, L2, and L3 are 'meta-stable' points. In other words, they are points of unstable equilibrium, and a station placed at any of them will require 'station-keeping' fuel because of a tendency to drift from the desired position at the slightest provocation.

    Why not put a station at L4, which is like a shallow gravity well? A station at L4, even if gently pushed away from its position, will tend to return to the vicinity of L4 all by itself.
    It may be marginally more costly to get to L4, but at least we wouldn't need any fuel to stay there.

                                           ???

CALLING JOSH CRYER!

    Hey, Josh! ... Are you out there anywhere?

    The Enterprise Mission is back on deck at a temporary server (or something) and its files are now accessible again.
    As you will remember, we were all hanging out for the so-called 'real' IR image of cydonia - the one Laney alleges he downloaded on July 25th, at the laboured behest of Noel Gorelick at ASU.

    I think you said something to the effect that as and when the raw TIF became available, you would try to find time to analyse it and tell us what those artificial looking shapes really are.
    If you've been following this thread, you will have seen that Tripp McCann has already given his verdict. He maintains that grossly inappropriate processing of the data has given rise to what looks like right-angled structures in the image. In other words, they are easily explained and easily duplicated introduced artifacts.

    For my sake, and the sake of other interested parties, would you please take a look at the data and provide us with a 'second opinion' about it?
    If you corroborate Tripp's evaluation, I think it must very severely compromise the whole TEM position, probably beyond redemption.

    Waddyasay, Josh? Can you spare the time?           :0

Thanks for trying Phobos!

    But I'm a bit concerned about you putting on your metal helmet....

    PUTTING IT ON !!! .... GOOD GOD, MAN !! ... WHATEVER POSSESSED YOU TO TAKE IT OFF IN THE FIRST PLACE ?!!!

    I took mine off once. And that was when I woke up face down in the dirt, just outside the perimeter fence of Area 51, with the strange red marks on my forehead and the bar-code behind my left ear .... and the headaches ... Oh God, the awful headaches ... !!!
                                          :0

Hi Austin!
    Your mention of the KSR-type ice habitat as a possibility for polar expeditions on Mars might be workable.
    I read somewhere lately that layering in the polar ice indicated an age in the hundreds of thousands of years at the north pole (if memory serves), and maybe up to five million years at the south pole!
    Don't quote me on the actual figures here, in case I'm off base a little.
    Anyway, the point is that man-made ice caves would probably be stable over long periods. And, as you said, would be relatively easy to create and would provide their own very effective insulation.

    I have reservations, though, about the necessity or desirability of landing at the poles, for the reasons you mentioned. Considering it now looks as though water will be easier to find at various places all over the planet than we once thought, do we really need the aggravation of high winds and searing cold?
    Mind you, the suggestions made so far about the MGS camera having possibly snapped shots of 'things' growing on Mars' surface, are at least predominantly (if not exclusively) related to polar regions. But then, I have trouble with these suggestions for exactly the same reasons again: Why would vegetation on a freezing planet deliberately choose the coldest areas to live in?!!

    Isidis Planitia's southern extremes recently featured on a list of places where it has been found to be theoretically possible for liquid water to persist at the surface. Nobody said there was actually any water there, but that liquid water is possible for certain portions of the Martian year because of the ambient pressures and temperatures.
    That would be one place I'd be interested in exploring. Especially since it quite probably formed an inlet of the Oceanus Borealis in Mars' balmier youth, and former shorelines, and maybe even fossils, might be found.
    Besides, it's almost at the equator and I could wear short pants and a T-shirt under my pressure suit!!
                                           

Thankyou, Tripp!
    This is just the sort of thing I've been looking forward to hearing .... opinions by people skilled in image processing.
    In view of the obvious frustration (and what I perceive to be almost righteous anger! ) in your tone, no doubt in large part caused by the admitted ignorance of your audience (me), I'm reluctant to confess I didn't understand all of what you said.
    But I did get the general idea and I understand you are trying to tell me that I, and thousands like me, have been misled. As I have always been careful to make clear, someone in my position is easily fooled and is obliged to rely on those with a proper understanding of what is undeniably a specialised field.

    I'm now looking forward to hearing from Josh Cryer, who is also, I believe, skilled in this kind of thing. No doubt he will corroborate what you have said, namely that the apparent structures below the surface of Cydonia are artifacts of totally inappropriate processing of the ASU image, performed by an incompetent Laney and exacerbated and endorsed by an unscrupulous Hoagland.

    If this is found to be the case by everyone with the training to analyse such images, it must surely be a fatal blow to the reputation of The Enterprise Mission in general, and Richard Hoagland in particular.
    It should prove fascinating to see how the TEM team tries to wriggle out of it, if it comes down to that!!
                                         

    Incidentally, if you have time, I am still interested to hear of any other geologists who agree with your assessment that some of the Mariner Valley surface features constitute indisputable proof of intelligent activity there.
    And also a question: You have remarked that you were approached by an employee of United Space Alliances (a subsidiary of NASA), because of your expertise in these matters, to analyse the Mariner Valley images. The point being, I think, to emphasise that you didn't set out on your own initiative to find evidence of artificiality on Mars, though the reason for the request apparently related to what you described as "mildly specific reportings of extraordinary evidences on Mars". Have you reported your findings to the appropriate NASA personnel and, if so, what was their reaction?

You bet!!               

    P.S. Welcome aboard, Quiet Storm.

Hi again, Josh and Tripp!

    Just to remind you that The Enterprise Mission has finally released the unaltered, supposedly 'real' IR image of Cydonia, which they downloaded on July 25th.

    Isn't this what you were waiting for in order to prove Hoagland and Laney are liars and crooks?

    ...... Hold the phone!

    I've just realised the TEM website seems to be uncontactable. I guess that's why you guys haven't been analysing the IR image data for the tell-tale signs of tampering.
                                          :0

Thanks for the compliment, Cindy!   

    And thanks for the very interesting history lesson about the origins of the Yuletide celebration. Fascinating stuff!

    This tends to support my contention that there was, in fact, quite a degree of 'fudging' in the establishment of sacred dates.
    If these holy dates were established by humans and not actually by God Herself, then surely we don't need to be quite so particular about how we translate them into a new Martian calendar.

    I think most of the comments I've read are supportive of 'my' Martian calendar, unless I'm misinterpreting them. The weeks would still be 7 days long, Monday to Sunday, northern spring would still be in March, April, May, and would correspond to a lengthening of the days just like on Earth, and Christmas would be towards the end of December, during the northern winter.
    Former Australians, who would naturally tend to settle in the southern hemisphere(! ), would still celebrate their Christmases during high summer, just like home!!   
    The only real difference would be the strangeness of having so many days in each month, but we'd soon get used to that.

    In the event that changing the length of a second would be problematic for computers (though I don't see why we couldn't overcome such difficulties), would it be unrealistic to go back to KSR's 39 minute 'dead-spot' in the middle of the night?
   Yeh, you guessed it .... I'm still trying to get that little bit of extra shut-eye!!
                                     

About the only thing more dangerous to argue over than politics, is religion. And, in the end, whatever you say will probably have no effect anyway because people form their own opinions in accordance with their own needs.

    I subscribe to no organised religion myself. But, for reasons I cannot logically justify, I believe in 'God' - for want of a better word. Perhaps it helps me make sense of an otherwise big, lonely, and impersonal universe. So I guess its a contrivance of my own mind to 'help me through the night' and to explain how it is that people I've loved, who have died, can just disappear. I find it very difficult to comprehend that a vibrant personality, full of hopes and joys, fears and aspirations, someone intelligent, reflective, and affectionate, can just cease to exist.
    So I factor in the notion that somehow, after death, we go on. How, or in what form, I don't really have a clue. But it helps me to think this way. I suppose it's a bit like Einstein's cosmological constant, which he conjured out of nothing and incorporated into his equations to explain the 'static universe', thought to exist at the time. 'God' is my cosmological constant - enabling me to balance my equations!!

    But organised religions frustrate me very much. They're nearly all based on the here and now, though they purport to be 'forever'. Everything happened just lately: Yahweh appeared about 3000 years ago, Christ about 2000, and Muhammad about 1500 years ago.
    My picture of the universe is big .... VERY big! And my conception of time is mind-numbing. I'm very aware that everything in human history has taken place on a speck of dust, on the outskirts of a run-of-the-mill galaxy, in a universe so vast we can't even find its boundaries. I'm very aware that everything in recorded human history has taken place in the last 0.00015% of Earth's modest span of existence (4.5 billion years.)

    To me, it seems incomprehensible that God would specify a special day to be kept holy. What length of day? A day from Earth's past when our planet rotated once every 8 hours instead of every 24? Or one from the future, perhaps, when a day will be 28 hours long? Of what significance is a 'day' to an omnipotent eternal being, presiding as She does over days of different lengths on Earth and on different planets in different galaxies all over the cosmos?
    Why should the Son of God ignore the Sumerian, Minoan, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations for nearly 5000 years, allowing them to live as 'heathen idol-worshippers', before finally making an appearance during the Roman period? Out of at least 35,000 years of anatomically-modern human existence, what was so special about that moment, 2000 years ago? As soon as Cro-Magnon man appeared, why didn't Jesus?
    And if dates and days are so important that AJ wants to lynch Byron over them, why is Christmas day on December 25th and why is this the year 2002? There is apparently very strong evidence that Jesus was born in March of 4 BC!!

    I'm told that Muslims set their spiritual calendars by the phases of the Moon. Are their clerics aware that the orbit of the Moon is enlarging and that the lunar month is lengthening? Is there any allowance or instruction for this eventuality in the Koran? I'd be very surprised if there were.
    There is a meteorite in a building in Mecca which is venerated by Muslims. Why this particular meteorite out of the trillions of tons of meteorites which have fallen on our planet over the eons? Do the clerics understand that there is a finite chance the next 'stone from heaven' might demolish Mecca altogether, or maybe take out half the Arabian Peninsula? And what mention is there of this in the Koran?

    And looking briefly at Judaism in the context of calendars, just so our Jewish colleagues won't feel left out of my reckless diatribe(! ), how do they know what day to celebrate the Passover? I'd be amazed if anyone really has a clue what date the Angel of Death chose to slaughter the first-born sons of Egypt.
    And if Christianity depends on the predictions of the prophets of the Old Testament that a Messiah would come, how is it Jews have their Sabbath on Saturday and Christians on Sunday? The very word, Sabbath, is hebrew, isn't it? If Christians have inherited it directly from Judaism, why doesn't it bother them that somehow their holy day has 'slipped' back by a whole 24 hours?!

    I have said all this, not to belittle the beliefs of so many of the world's people (though I admit it's hard to look at what I've said and NOT think that was my intention), but to explain my deep-seated inability to understand the conventions of three of the world's largest religions.
    In the light of our enormously expanded knowledge of the universe we inhabit, the rules and regulations of these competing faiths start to look extremely parochial, at least to me.

    The fact that there are various religions, with various calendars of sacred days, might actually be a good reason to deliberately ensure that any new Martian calendar is as blandly secular as possible. If it looks entirely secular, there can at least be no insinuation by one group or another of any bias against them.
    And planets and their orbits are messy things. If God had wanted us to keep time so precisely, why couldn't He have made Earth's year exactly equal to, say, 360 days? Why couldn't the Moon have been persuaded to revolve about Earth exactly once every 30 days? And why not have them constant in their paths over all eternity, never slowing or changing their orbits?

    Mars is a different world for which we have been left no software by God. And I think She would be disappointed in us if we didn't use our initiative and start from scratch with a secular calendar.
    Let the Mullahs and the Priests and the Rabbis sit down and create a new religious observance timetable based on the orbital characteristics of our new world.
    Surely, if it's that important, God will send us all another prophet with updated instructions for use on Mars.
                                               

P.S. This may be the biggest can of worms I've ever opened
       on New Mars! I just hope it's received as it was
       intended, as an attempt at a reasoned argument, rather
       than any kind of attack.
                                                :0