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.
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?
Devil's advocate: those are of the successful landings, it doesn't include the other Mars "landings" that were unsuccessful or unintentional. Such as Beagle 2, MPL, MCO, Deep Space 2, Mars 2, and Mars 6. Here's a full list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_M...
Most of the impact sites of those objects are known except for a few. MCO's impact point is unknown and whether or not Beagle 2 hit the surface is unknown (it may have skipped out of the atmosphere into a heliocentric orbit, or into an elliptical orbit and reentered elsewhere, or burned up entirely).
Even so, the chances are astronomically low that Curiosity has managed to stumble upon the wreck of another spacecraft.
The problem is the shape, not just the material. As a layman, I'm not used to rocks having that shape, except in very rare circumstances but in those cases "abnormal" shapes are usually found in clusters (Grand Canyon etc). This is a seemingly-solitaire rock of abnormal material AND abnormal shape, which is possible, but almost as unlikely as random probe debris.
Just to put a bit of context here, you should visit Death Valley. It is the strangest and most wonderful place you can walk around and find amazing mineral deposits, geologic formations, and generally odd sorts of things.
Mars has had during its life a very active volcanic system, these systems imply magma, and magma implies melting and cooling of basalt. 'Shiny' objects in volcanic fields are typically obsidian or some other form of basaltic glass. Erosion by wind of a piece of obsidian can carve it into a pretty bizarre shape.
So all said and done, the geology is fascinating. And one of the differences between having a rover up there and having humans up there was that this would have been a 15 minute news story with humans, "Oh look, shiny!", "What is it?", photo, photo, chip, chip, "Some sort of <analysis result>, what is over where you are?"
Now its 'next day' at best, and 'in a month' if there is a long list of things to do before you get a break at worst. Sigh.
If Earth were devoid of vegetation and instead uniformly rocky, running into a sliver of a downed plane might've been far more probable. Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that doesn't look like a rock.
> Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that doesn't look like a rock.
I don't think anybody is confusing the likelihood of finding a piece of a plane due to not looking at the picture well enough. It's a question of if there would be anything in that picture to begin with.
Agreed. Curiosity is exploring an area known (or at least apparently) to have had quite a bit of water activity in the past. It seems quite likely that a river or glacier would have peeled off all the softer stone around the metal and left something like this behind.
No, it's just the more reasonable. Most likely it's not any kind of artifact, but we have a lot more evidence for the existence of man-made spacecraft than we do for alien spacecraft, and Mars is a lot closer to Earth than it is to anywhere aliens might come from.
Hmmm... I'm not sure we have reasonable evidence either way on this thing. At face value it is a seemingly artificial object where (reasonably) such a thing should not be, and (reasonably) you cannot honestly claim to know where in the universe aliens might come from.
> Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities?
The more plausible of the two (Occam's razor). Even though it's highly unlikely to stumble on a spacecraft wreckage on Mars. It is even more unlikely for this to be an alien tech. Though, I do admit, I want it to be :)
I think Occams razor would dictate that it is just a weird looking piece of metal formed in the early days of mars, when there was more volcanic activity.
I love (sarcasm) how a supposedly technologically superior and enlightened species of non-earth intelligent beings would only be out to destroy or punish us, according to science fiction and a lot of people.
Enlightenment and technological superiority don't necessarily go hand in hand. In fact, looking at human history, a lot of technological advancement came directly out of actual or potential warfare. (Remember that the U.S. went to the moon to beat the Russians.)
As Douglas Adams said:
"Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason."
You're trying to use humans as an example for the possible disposition and psychology of aliens? Really?
Does it not strike you inappropriate to do so considering the billions of years of evolution and absolutely random events like mass extinctions that led to the rise of mammals and eventually humans?
Humans are the only real evidence we have of how a technological society develops. Evolution produced us, and evolution arises from the physical laws of the universe. Why should we believe it would operate differently elsewhere in the universe?
No planet will have infinite resources, so it's logical that life will develop through continuous competition for territory and materials--just like it did here.
Looking back at Earth's history, it's not like we are the only violent forms of life we know of. Quite the opposite.
Do you remember what happened when the europeans travelled around the world? 90% of populations died from new illnesses. They basically saw nothing ill in settling and displacing the remaining population.
Well, alien illness probably won't kill us. Without a common ancestry, it's highly unlikely that anything that uses an alien as a host can live in our bodies.
We don't know that. There are plenty of examples on Earth of cross-species infections. No telling how microbial/fungal agents could directly attack or indirectly impact the delicate balance here on Earth.
Further, any microbe hitching a ride aboard an alien may well find Earth's general environment to be easy to thrive in. Think Kudzu, but at the microbial level. Eventually, the alien microbe and/or the natural Earth microbes will mutate in order to out-survive the other.
You assume that all life would be carbon based. And even assuming a "super fit" carbon-base alien microbe, the worst you could get would be some kind of eco-disaster that will end up being controlled anyway - like some sort of alien-algae overpopulating our oceans doing some eco-havoc. Even that would involve a kind of "super-fitness" created by an accelerated evolution running for much longer than here on Earth, as this microbe will have to compete with many others that are much more adapted to our environment.
Anything really dangerous, like something that can infect multiple species, would have to be "engineered". "Mother nature" (aka evolution) doesn't engineer bio-weapons made to take over alien ecosystems - you would need huge time spans plus ubiquitous means of interstellar transportation for natural selection to favor such features (think "star gates" but zillions of them with tons of creatures and cargo running through them for at least tens of millions of years).
So I'd take contact with a "non-engineered super infection" like you describe as a sign that someone has been operating a huge network of interstellar transportation systems for quite some time, as this would provide the only "peacefull" evolutionary history (again, excluding civilizations expert in bio-war things...) for such thing to evolve, so it would be quite a good omen for hopes "intergalactic fraternity" :)
The possibility of non-carbon based life is so remote as to be irrelevant. We'd have to go through many star birth and supernovae cycles to get to the point where silicon is even anywhere near as abundant as carbon is now.
As for microbes from other worlds, who knows. The properties of water are pretty much required for life (as far as we know) and so they'd have 0 trouble interfacing with most organisms. Combine that with the fact that the basic amino acids can form in a wide range of conditions and you've got the recipe for interference. Also, infections happen when organisms invade and multiple, some times the damage is a secondary side effect (i.e. waste or toxic byproducts)
Name the occurrence in the history of our planet where the much-more advanced/capable species did not displace and diminish the indiginent one. In many cases, the more advanced or aggressive species completely wiped out the existing one.
There's a lot more that's extremely unlikely in the Star Trek universe besides just transporter beams and faster-than-light travel.
A sufficiently advanced species might not feel any more compunction about eradicating the human race than I would feel about eradicating mosquitoes.
Humans and buffalo. Humans and passenger pigeons. Humans and mastodons. Humans and elephants. Humans and tigers. Humans and smallpox. Humans and dodos. Etc.
No, I just wanted to make sure you weren't conflating what happens to species with what happened with Columbus and Hispaniola. I'm not so sure we know in enough detail exactly what happened to Neanderthals for that to be a good example, especially since the conversation is about the meeting of different civilizations, not just different species.
They might not be out to destroy or punish us. They might take no more interest in us than we took in thousands of species that have been destroyed to make way for farms and shopping malls. Maybe our planet would make a good Vogon parking lot.
I think that's the point. When you don't know anything about the motivations of an alien race that can easily wipe out our species, why would you take any chances?
Pretend for a moment that I have a Button. The owner of that Button can push it and eliminate every person on the planet besides the people that owner didn't want to kill (friends, family, city, state, country, whatever)
Would you be an advocate of giving that Button to any random person on Earth?
Any race of aliens capable of interstellar travel probably has that Button. So while (I assume) that you wouldn't be okay with giving that Button to any person on Earth -- you'd be okay with having an alien race that we don't understand even a little bit in possession of such a thing.
Well I don't think I said I'd purposefully give such a killer switch to an alien race, I just said we don't know.
We are all aware of the reasons to be pessimist, because of all the books and movies, but there are reasons to be optimist too: advanced technology may come with advanced ethics, for instance.
Oh yeah it's a totally safe assumption that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and made it all the way to Mars that they won't find us... you know... one planet over, with a century of RF radiating away from our home.
Unless of course you believe they're hiding inside Europa...
Which message are you even responding to? Maybe you should read the thread in order to understand what was being discussed. It had nothing to do with your response.
Hawking has said that we need only look at the history of inter-species relationships on our planet (let alone race relationships) to get a hint of what exopolitics might look like. He goes on to mention that in terms of the search for alien life, we'd do best to keep our heads low.
The strong assumption here is that the is no divide between intelligent and non intelligent life forms. I don't think it is the only view.
I'd rather compare alien encounter with something like Marco Polo going to China: he didn't wish to kill them all, was impressed by some achievement and inventions but was also disgusted by the Chinese diet. Came back and wrote a book, and it was so foreign most readers didn't believe him.
History up until... when? The last 60 years has seen considerable advances in inter-race politics, and it's improving all the time. Why wouldn't exopolitics be an advanced form of this?
I would not deny the possible that, for reasons I don't understand, any species advanced enough to be capable of interstellar travel behaves like a cross between Bono and Peter Singer. But I would not stake the survival of my species on it.
And there is a reason to believe that they probably won't be - they will be the product of Darwinian evolution, just like us, which is really not a very nice thing.
I completely agree on not staking the survival of the species on it, I just think that it's an overly cynical view. Same as I think most people are good people, but I still lock my car because a very few of them are thieves.
except of course, when the "advanced" species wants something that the "lower" species has. What if liquid water is a rarity, and the earth happens to have a lot of it?
It's too late for keeping our heads low. There's a sphere of EM radiation travelling at 3x10^8 m/s that started expanding out from Earth about the time that we turned on the first radio set. It announces our presence to anything capable listening.
After a few light years non focused radio/tv transmissions will drop off into background noise.
Active SETI is what's needed to send a signal to other planets
Any alien lifeform that can reproduce would be subject to Darwinian natural selection. It would tend to grow exponentially, if the resources were available, and if you do the math, the universe ain't big enough for more than one exponentially reproducing species.
If aliens decided to use our resources, they would probably do something like build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, which would mean there would be nothing left for us. It wouldn't matter how big they were, because they would use the resources we need. Look at it this way - we don't notice or mind the presence of insects or flowers, but that doesn't help them when we pave or plow their habitats. A lot of wild things escape us because we aren't that good at harvesting every possible resource, so there's a lot left over, but presumably aliens would be more efficient.
Because of the properties of exponential growth, there would be nothing left over for us. If two organisms double their numbers 250 times, their numbers would roughly equal the number of atoms in the observable universe, which means there would be none left for anyone else.
The only hope would be that they either don't reproduce, which seems unlikely since they would be the survivors of a process of Darwinian evolution just like any other critter, or that they're Space Vegans with a moral code against exterminating other species. We really don't know how they would think.
If the evidence becomes associated with conspiracy theory though, many people prefer to shy away because of the commonly held feelings about "those people." For example the recent claims of ET corpses being genetically studied, mysteriously absent from headlines it seems: http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1109-disclosu...
Regardless of your interpretation of Drake's equation, we have no evidence for life existing anywhere else but on Earth. We never sent Curiosity to look for intelligent life, we sent her to look for evidence of past life or life buried in the rock. To assume that one of the first shiny object we see could even remotely indicate alien life is laughable.
Discovery of alien would be nothing but revolutionary for the human race but don't let scifi and fantasy get in the way of reality. A rock formation like this is not unheard of just because you've never heard about it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Past_missio...