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[Iduno]

Ultracrepidarian

How do I change my username?

the fact remains that the article is not reporting conclusive evidence of life on Mars.

Ten. It took until the 10th post for this.

[Teneb]

Ultracrepidarian

How do I change my username?

PM Toady and ask nicely.

[Trekkin]

the fact remains that the article is not reporting conclusive evidence of life on Mars.

Ten. It took until the 10th post for this.

Hey, I tried to point it out gently in the 4th post. It just...wasn't clear enough, apparently.

[ChairmanPoo]

Thread title: Life on Planet Mars has been found and confirmed

Thread source

Nevertheless, much of the evidence remains circumstantial and unverified, and the possibility of life on Mars remains an open question.

Confirmed. Yeah. Right

[smjjames]

Thread title: Life on Planet Mars has been found and confirmed

Thread source

Nevertheless, much of the evidence remains circumstantial and unverified, and the possibility of life on Mars remains an open question.

Confirmed. Yeah. Right

Yeah seriously, at least make the title accurate. My first thought was, ‘rather late for an April fools....’

[Dorsidwarf]

I assumed this was a spambot thread with an inevitablea virus link when I saw the title but apparently it’s just  reading incomprehension.

[wierd]

Having worked in aerospace, and seen how some of the more "specialty" metal alloys corrode, I concur with the NASA interpretation that these images of the inside of the rover are consistent with salt contamination and corrosion.

Martian soil samples have pretty consistently been loaded with perchlorates-- Oxygenated chlorine salts-- that react pretty intensely with many industrial metals. Martian dust is very very fine particulate matter as well.  Combine that with prior observational evidence of water condensation on the phoenix lander and you have the potential to form salt crusts in enclosed spaces that get leaks in their hermetic seals.

To me this is the more favorable interpretation, sans pointing an instrument at the crust and vaporizing it for science.  (high chlorine and oxygen content == salt crust. High carbon content == fungus)  Sadly, the images are of the inside of the instrument that could make those readings itself... so not able to identify.

[Trekkin]

Having worked in aerospace, and seen how some of the more "specialty" metal alloys corrode, I concur with the NASA interpretation that these images of the inside of the rover are consistent with salt contamination and corrosion.

It's not NASA's interpretation, though. The references to NASA's abiotic hypotheses are all about the (probably) hematite nodules.

The primary author on this -- who is, I note, retired from a research institute that, so far as I can tell, has never actually existed -- is just miffed that nobody cared that he made Martian maybe-fungus Pinterest out of the NASA/JPL rover photos and invited a bunch of random geologists/biologists to rate how likely it is that a bunch of random photos show things that might be fungus, so he's decided to play to the lay crowd with an open-access jumble of literature references, pseudoscience, and insinuations that NASA is wrong. (le gasp!) It's written to look and sound like a paper if you don't look too closely, and it references actual papers so we can talk about the actual science it mentions, but there's a reason that it's in a "journal" with no listed impact factor currently soliciting articles on such worthy topics as:

-SpaceX and Tourists on Mars: Good or Bad for Science?
-Ancient Greece/Rome, Culture, the Trojan War, Mars
-Is Life on Mars Contrary to Torah, the Bible, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism...

And don't forget their future edition on "-The Expanding, Collapsing, Anti-Matter, Parallel Universes"

The more you look into their site the better it gets. They're not focused on primary research, they've got reprints of slightly less farcical journal articles, Amazon ads in the margins and literally every paper I check references the same guy. This is a pseudoscience gold mine.

[wierd]

I got that vibe as well.  The tone is very accusational, and makes the obvious "I am not a scientist!" give away of suggesting that science is about consensus of opinions, rather than agreement on data.

I took the Occam's Razor approach to the conjectured substance:  We have chemcam evidence of perchlorate. We have photographs of condensation. The rover in question had been in service for more than 4 TIMES its planned service life because it was the rover that could-- Failure of hermetic seals is a reasonable expectation given the repeated freeze/thaw cycles the thing endured.

Is it more likely to be the thing we have evidence for, or the thing we only have opinion for? Hmmm.. I wonder. /s


This guy just screams "I am angry that nobody listens to my opinion!!".

[Astrid]

//:Edit.
Finally got my hands onto a computer again and edit this. lol what a epic fail.
Learn from my mistakes kids. Never trust a youtuber even if he's been a creditable source for Years. in the end its only the money that counts for them and they WILL 'bend the story' for more views.

[Iduno]

//:Edit.
Finally got my hands onto a computer again and edit this. lol what a epic fail.
Learn from my mistakes kids. Never trust a youtuber even if he's been a creditable source for Years. in the end its only the money that counts for them and they WILL 'bend the story' for more views.

Also, Youtube has gone way downhill since they got bought out by Google. Who knew an ad giant with questionable politics and ethics would be trouble?

[Trekkin]

Is it more likely to be the thing we have evidence for, or the thing we only have opinion for? Hmmm.. I wonder. /s

The author used a similarly adversarial process in coming to the conclusion that the rovers must be covered in fungus, you know. Occam's Razor is not a scientifically valid way to evaluate mechanisms. Everything is true to the extent that it enables us to make accurate predictions about future data sets; the invalidity of one hypothesis is not, in and of itself, proof of another.

It's one of the more common misconceptions laypeople have about the scientific process, in my experience: that we're in the business of providing tidy explanations of the universe instead of the data. I think it's because those explanations help them win (well, "win") arguments and feel like they know things, but in any event, "which explanation is more likely" is not a valid question to ask, and it tricks you into jumping to conclusions.

We don't know what's in that gunk; we have no direct measurements of its composition and everything we do know about it is consistent with multiple mechanisms. Beyond that, everything's speculation.

[wierd]

I did lamplight that- To wit (with emphasis):

To me this is the more favorable interpretation, sans pointing an instrument at the crust and vaporizing it for science.  (high chlorine and oxygen content == salt crust. High carbon content == fungus)  Sadly, the images are of the inside of the instrument that could make those readings itself... so not able to identify.

The images were of the inside of the chemcam. This is the instrument that could have determined composition with spectroscopy. Since you can't aim an instrument at itself, this is a lost opportunity.  I would have much preferred zapping a sample for science.

[Trekkin]

Well, yes, you did say that. (I'm afraid "lamplight" does not mean what you apparently want it to mean.) The problem, and my point, is that you went on to draw conclusions anyway, falling back on  heuristics about the explanations themselves in the absence of anything else. The author did the same thing to reach an entirely different conclusion from the same data, which is a nice example of why real scientists don't.

If we don't have the data to differentiate between two hypotheses, great. Now we know what we need to learn. That conclusion, though, precludes all others.

[wierd]

"Most likely to be" != "Totally this"

Just to be sure we are on the same page here. I am not ruling out fungus as an option, just saying it is less likely to be the case. (what is the fungus eating in there? I needs a source of metabolic energy. Unless this is some very strange chemotrophic fungus or something, how do you explain having a fungal growth of that density, in the absence of organic substrate? Etc.)

Zapping it for science is the most direct way to find out. Sadly we may never know.

vis-a-vis "Lamplight"

It is also a theatrical term for purposefully drawing attention to something in a narrative. This is the use I invoked.

An example in television, is a close pan-in to a McGuffin in the scene, even when the actor's characters are unaware of it.
It's etymology derives from the practice of increasing illumination on a set piece to draw attention to it.  Theater is a very old practice, and lamps were the mainstay light sources for centuries. Hence the term.