NEW ERA for HUMANITY? NASA says something 'major' FOUND ON MARS Perhaps to give the President time to act in advance, NASA says it will unveil a "major" discovery it has made on our planetary neighbour Mars later today. Nobody knows what the discovery could be, but there has to be at least some chance that at last, alien life has been discovered on another planet than our own. The US …
Of course they tell it's always a rock. They will never tell the truth although it is full of alien life and spaceship and buildings everywhere in their own released pictures on which sometimes someone from the inside is allowing the censoring software to fail .. so that something can be seen.
Reminds me of this...
LISTER: OK, OK. What's Holly spotted?
RIMMER: An unidentified object.
LISTER: You mean a rock.
RIMMER: It might not be.
LISTER: They're always rocks.
RIMMER: Mostly they're rocks, I agree, but maybe this one's different.
LISTER: Rimmer, there's nothing out there, you know. There's nobody out
there. No alien monsters, no Zargon warships, no beautiful blondes
with beehive hairdos who say, "Show me some more of this Earth thing
called kissing." There's just you, me, the Cat, and a lot of floating
smegging rocks. That's it. Finito.
Sorry, can't get the formatting right.
"Not a coincidence, the title of the Red Dwarf episode the quotes from is 'waiting for god' Series 1 episode 4."
Thanks for the info!
Before I posted, I actually googled "Lister Rimmer rock" to see where the lines were from but the search didn't seem to bring up any results that struck me as relevant.
My money's on it being a rock as well.
With a fossil of some kind in it. Or at least some markings that could be interpreted as a fossil.
It's unlikely they'll find life now, but since Mars was supposed to be warmer and wetter in the past it's entirely feasible that they could discover fossils of life that existed back then.
Either way, it would still answer the age-old question of life evolving elsewhere once and for all, and it would profoundly change our perception of ourselves in relation to the universe.
If it is a fossil, there will be a lot screaming, hair-pulling, and chest-beating from various religious groups and US CongressCritters. My bet is that it's not a fossil or will be reported as "looks like but isn't a fossil". To much turmoil will be raised in tumultuous times for that kind of new. Besides, certain "believers" in Congress would kill NASA's entire budget for reasons of blasphemy.
@Mark85: If it is a fossil, there will be a lot screaming, hair-pulling, and chest-beating from various religious groups and US CongressCritters.
No there won't. They will just find new ways to deny it, misinterpret the data and discredit the authors. That's what zealots do.
"and it would profoundly change our perception of ourselves in relation to the universe."
Sadly, it wont. We will carry on as we are doing. Fighting amongst ourselves like we have always done. Slowly polluting our planet, just as we have always done. Ad nauseam...
UNTIL some ET bugger actually lands here, at which point it will be taken off for "tests" at area51, ad nauseam.
Unless it is a newly discovered gas gradient.
Or my lost pen.
Or an odd mineral never seen before on Mars, which would be a stretch.
Hopefully, not a sign of my family Mars wilderness excursion. We always have practiced "leave no trace behind".
But then, I was a Cube Scout. Octagons were obscene to us.
Or an odd mineral never seen before on Mars
Given the amount of Mars that has been explored and analyised in detail this isn't so far fetched. Personally I think they'll annouce 'Water!' for what, the third or fourth time now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/25/wellies_mars_water_everywhere_500_000_years_ago/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/14/rover_worth_its_salt_mars_sometimes_has_liquid_water/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/06/boffins_say_mars_had_ocean_covering_20_per_cent_of_planet/
etc etc.
Let’s hope this “announcement” is vetted better than NASA’s 1996 ALH84001 meteorite claim of microscopic evidence of Mars bacteria, that is believed by the Scientific Community to be bogus. Or vetted better than NASA’s 2010 claim to have discovered a bacterium in Mono Lake that used arsenic in place of phosphorus in it’s biochemistry, only the authors of the paper (Wolfe-Simon, et al, Science 332, 1163-1166 (2010), DOI: 10.1126/science.1197258) misanalysed their own data. A careful analysis of the data presented in said paper didn’t support the authors conclusions.
(Don't take this the wrong way, I like space rocks, just not them being overhyped and the inevitable OMG-LIFE!!!1111EleventyOne!!! response from the press and others)
I disagree...
If I were to find a space rock and it tested positive for alien life my name would be written in textbooks, spoken in schools, lectures and universities until the end of time. That "space rock" would be one of the greatest discoveries of mankind.
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Come on guys, do you really think that if NASA found life on mars or aliens they would tell us?
If NASA told everyone there is a recently crashed alien spaceship on mars that has more advanced weapons that we could only dream of making, you know what would happen? Worldwide mass panic in one hit!
But none the less, aliens are not real as god created us in his image and we are the only life in the universe, all alone, just us, no one else. All alone in this big place, with no one else to see, all alone :-(. Or at least, that's what the pope told me.
(Note: I'm not religious, and my last paragraph was a joke.)
Tell you what though, if aliens do find us, they'll be saying "Oh, don't go near Earth! It's got human beings on it, they're contagious!".
I recall somebody once saying that if NASA was going to falsify anything, they'd have more reason to falsify discovering life in space rather than suppressing it, because such a discovery would guarantee a raft of funding to investigate it further. What motives exist for suppressing the discovery of life - bearing in mind the primary motivator of all large-scale human decisions is making more money?
I recall somebody once saying that if NASA was going to falsify anything, they'd have more reason to falsify discovering life in space rather than suppressing it, because such a discovery would guarantee a raft of funding
There is a difference between disclosing the information to your boss (in this case the government) or to the general population. Why assume that everything will also go public?
"Why assume that everything will also go public?"
First, that doesn't answer the question of what motive NASA (or the government) would have for suppressing the discovery of life in the first place.
As to it going public, even if NASA wanted to suppress discovery of life for whatever reason, asking Congress for more money to investigate said discovery would very quickly result in a whole lot of beancounters asking "But what do you want the extra money for?" There would certainly be a lot of leakage from that!
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http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-487586.html
Its worth mentioning that some reactors designed for space use are based on liquid metal (specifically a Pb/Bi alloy) and the Russians used the NaK variant of this technology on several satellites (Kosmos 954, 1818 and others)
A hypothetical >200MW variant of this technology with plutonium in the core might have been feasible with the weight allowance and the earlier two launches test runs with a dummy satellite of the same weight to fine tune the critical payload escape system for N1 launch *4.
On orbit docking with a crew capsule then relaying previously recorded biometric data and voice comms from a dummy satellite might have accounted for some inconsistencies reported by amateur radio enthusiasts, it is actually trivial to add a fake delay and echoes etc.
How about a movie tie in? With The Martian opening this week, what better time to talk about the science of growing stuff in your own shit.
Perhaps that would be too cynical, even for a cash-strapped NASA and an eager marketing team. It would, however, be hilarious if they wheel out Matt Damon.
I know it's old but here goes.
In a bid to find more funding to ensure future space missions, NASA are to announce the discovery of oil on Mars...
On a similar notes, finding water gives an energy source and Oxygen for future missions, so that's dandy. There may even be other items we can make use of.
Iron Sky's Helium 3 sub plot jig wasn't really that far off the mark.
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