Curiosity scoops up SHINY BITS from the RED SANDS of MARS! Curiosity's latest dig into Martian soil has uncovered yet more shiny objects, but this time boffins don't think they're from the rover. Bright bit in hole dug by Curiosity When the science truck swallowed its first solid sample of soil for analysis by its CheMin instrument to look at the minerals inside, it saw that bright …
Kinda looks like a tooth! I hope it's a tooth! That would be the most exciting discovery ever1
Consider if we had actual people on Mars this "is it isn't it?" issue with man made debris would have been resolved almost instantly.
Keep rolling curiosity. Hope you're still rolling when human feet finally touch down.
Jesus X Christ, politicians do not WANT gold. They have fiat money (i.e. bits of paper with pretty pictures on it - sadly no lolcats or ponies). This allows them to pay for wars, armies of civil servants and otherwise untenable "social security" promises at the turn of a printing press with nary a peep from the masses (actually, with cheers from the masses, especially from the Marxistically enclined ones who never even understood how to wipe their own proletarian arses, but I digress).
tl;dr: Hard Money is as yesterday as Political Responsibility
"Money" is not "paper money" in the same way as a hamburger is not the picture of a hamburger.
Check it out: The Origin of Money And Its Value
And getting rid of money? Sure, if you want to sit in a cave trying to decide whether stones are edible. Definitely an alienation-free Marxian Paradise, but it has its drawbacks.
"Come in red leader, the Earth robot has started moving again."
"Excellent. How long was it stopped for?"
"Three days."
"Any idea why it stopped?"
"We believe the human operators became confused upon encountering a shiny piece of the robot in the dirt"
"For three days?! Well what is it doing now?"
"It keeps scooping up dirt and dropping it again. I don't think the humans like the shiny pieces they see in the sand"
"What is this some kind of joke? Why the fuck have they sent a robot all the way here just to piss about playing in the sand and shooting shitty little lasers at pebbles? Why aren't they exploring the Pyramid and the Face we built for them? Did they not see them? We built them big enough and at the right angle didn't we? If they don't buck their ideas up soon I'm gonna send one of our robots to Earth to destroy one of their cities and then maybe they'll understand the whole concept of Sending A Robot To Another Planet To Do Shit"
The "bright" piece looks like a bit of white quartz. What I find very interesting is the soil itself. The fine gravel or coarse sand appears rounded - well rounded in fact. Here on the Blue Planet that means water transport. Also, notice that the very fine sand adheres together in small clusters of grains and that a lot of the rounded pea gravel has coatings of fine sand that are more than one grain thick. That looks remarkably like slightly damp, very fine sand. The problem is NASA didn't include a scale.
... or at least a simpleton :-). But...
There's, like, robots. On, like _Mars_. Wot we put there. And some of them have been there for _years_, trundling round. And one of them, it's, like, seeing things, and we can see them too. And it's picking things up, and, like, looking at them chemically and physically and...
And there'sbloodyrobotsonbloodyMarsandwebloodyputthemthereand... :-) :-) :-)
OK. I know. The red pill. It's OK. I took one :-P. But this, to me at least, is still cooler than mixed vanilla and belgian chocolate ice-cream. It's so cool it makes liquid nitrogen look like a nice cup of tea. And pretty close to just as cool is that, like, there's places like this with folks like you guys (yes, and guy-ettes) who just love to speculate, to ponder and to give a damn.
There may, just may, be hope for the rotten race yet :-).
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