41–50 of 152 posts
The human brain is a remarkable pattern recognition machine with a keen penchant for extracting meaning from noise. This, of course, will turn out to be nothing more than an unremarkable optical illusion; an urban legend is born.
> Pareidolia ... is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.
I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I'd say the most important number to think about when looking at rover images is the scale . "the little protuberance is probably about 0.5 cm tall, or even smaller." Five mm is obviously tiny. Keep this in mind before making up hypotheses as to what the thing is. =) We have to wait until better data is available. What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however…
> What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology. You can never completely rule out that possibility, regardless of how much evidence you collect, but it's a matter of semantics at that point. Immediately and without collecting anymore data, we can dismiss the hypothes…
by my account superstition is not the correct word because the possibility of ET's existence is not supernatural. maybe naivete could express more eloquently the state of affairs here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my dearest wishes is that humanity will find solid evidence for other lifeforms in the universe (whether it is through remains or actual contact). This moment, if/when it happens, will be so mindblowing on so many levels and affect us deeply as a society/species/etc. that I just WANT to see it.
I suspect finding evidence of other lifeforms in the universe, even highly intelligent lifeforms, would briefly be novel, but would have very little long-term effect on most people's daily lives.
Also, the information we exchange with them would have a huge impact on everything. What if they have the secret to efficient solar power? Or AI?
I find these things fun, of course some folks want to find alien technology, but I remind people that we've lost roughly 2/3rds of all the probes and ships that we've sent to Mars [1]. Since there isn't a lot of stuff covering them up, eventually we may find a bit of antenna from the Mars Observer sticking up where the spacecraft attempted to fly through the planet. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mar…
I find these things fun, of course some folks want to find alien technology, but I remind people that we've lost roughly 2/3rds of all the probes and ships that we've sent to Mars [1]. Since there isn't a lot of stuff covering them up, eventually we may find a bit of antenna from the Mars Observer sticking up where the spacecraft attempted to fly through the planet. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mar…
More likely this may be human created with Photoshop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect finding evidence of other lifeforms in the universe, even highly intelligent lifeforms, would briefly be novel, but would have very little long-term effect on most people's daily lives.
Many people's religion has a huge effect on their daily lives, and news like this would have a huge impact on their faith. Also, the information we exchange with them would have a huge impact on everything. What if they have the secret to efficient solar power? Or AI?
Science changes and religion adapts.
I find these things fun, of course some folks want to find alien technology, but I remind people that we've lost roughly 2/3rds of all the probes and ships that we've sent to Mars [1]. Since there isn't a lot of stuff covering them up, eventually we may find a bit of antenna from the Mars Observer sticking up where the spacecraft attempted to fly through the planet. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mar…
That seems extremely unlikely. If a few dozen planes crashed on Earth (on land), how likely do you reckon you'd be to ever run across significant debris from any of them just by randomly driving around?