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 sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology. Of course, such hypotheses have to work extremely hard before they should be accepted. Our standards of evidence for stuff like this must always remain as high as possible, given the emotions and mass misunderstandings involved. But the very fact that we've come this far and still cannot rule out the existence of life on Mars is quite remarkable.
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.
religions have an uncanny ability to either ignore scientific facts or bend their religion to fit with the facts. Remember that originally it was thought that the Earth was in the center of the universe because God had put it there. When the facts changed religion was eventually bent to acomodate the facts.
Religious tradition and dogma changes yes, but their "holy" books can't rewrite themselves.
Interestingly the bible doesn't make any comment to suggest there is no other life in the universe. In fact it does refer to extra terrestrial life; God sent "angels", literally translated "messengers", to the earth.
To be fair, a country's constitution must also be interpreted. That's why things like Supreme Court rulings are so important. The SC gets to decide, "What this amendment means is..."
True, but it's to a much lesser extent. The constituion of a country is pretty clear on who is in charge, how to select the people who are, how many representatives, how they're set up, where the power lies. The bulk of the information is pretty straight-forward. There's certainly plenty of edge cases, but it's not really presented in terms of parables.
"The senior Vatican scientist, Brother Guy Consolmagno, said that he would be delighted if we encountered intelligent aliens and would be happy to baptise them.
His pronouncement opens up the possibility of space missionaries heading out to the stars to convert aliens to Christianity.
Speaking on the eve of addressing the British Science Festival, Dr Consolmangno said he had no problem with science and religion co-existing together.
But he dismissed Creationism and claimed that the revival of “intelligent design" – the controversial theory that only God can explain gaps in the theory of evolution – was “bad theology".
Dr Consolmango is one of a team of 12 astronomers working for the Vatican, said the Catholic Church had been supporting and funding science for centuries."
Granted, not enough centuries, but still a nice statement.
"but their "holy" books can't rewrite themselves."
Hah, want to bet? Both the Bible and Buddhist scriptures have been rewritten and retranslated and had additions made countless times in the last few thousands years. The teachings of Christ and Buddha are now not able to be found in those texts. They're just the words of ordinary people.
I'm shocked. Just shocked. You mean there's no hope that translation errors are going to be fixed? For example in hebrew the same word is used for either "young woman" and "virgin". And some believe that the christian made a translation mistake by transforming the young woman mary into the virgin mary.
I think that if that one is a mistake, it should be fixed ; )
Just a note, the "virgin" that applies directly to Mary (Luke 1:34, "And Mary said to the angel, 'How will this be, since I am a virgin?'", among other passages) is written in Greek, not Hebrew. Granted, there are some prophetic passages in the OT that use virgin (e.g. Isaiah 7:14, "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."), but just make sure everyone's on the same page when challenging dogma. Is the Greek word thought to be mistranslated as well?
> news like this would have a huge impact on their faith.
Not necessarily. Non-believers often underestimate the intellectual sophistication that one can find in religious traditions.
For instance, Augustine in the 4th century was already saying things like this:
"With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures."
And C.S. Lewis (best known as a Christian apologist) wrote some interesting religious science fiction novels with extraterrestrial angels. (The Space Trilogy.)
Religion will survive. It survived learning the sun didn't revolve around the Earth. It survived learning disease wasn't caused by demons and that Zeus wasn't hurling lightning from Olympus. It survived evolution and the Big Bang. People will say the mysteries of God* were just greater than they realized, and their mythologies will start to seem a bit more like Star Wars.
You're correct. Religious belief is an evolved memetic/genetic survival mechanism.
Those parts of the human brain were never about logic and accurate observation of the material world - so they are safe from new facts and logic for now.
Probably at some point (assuming we survie), our own genetic/cybernetic modifications will so increase our intelligence, that religion will fall away completely... but that's beyond the Singularity.
Not all religious people have gods that they have so narrowly restricted you know. Only those who have assigned an unjustifiable importance to themselves or really love cramming their gods into artificial boxes would find such a discovery disturbing.
The realization that those dots moving across the sky are not gods did little to eradicate religion. Nor did the realization that gods did not carve the canyons or raise mountains, or even create the species or the stars. Why should finding some living junk on Mars be the game changer that everything else failed to be?
Yes, but this (nor anything else) would not do it. Note: religion != belief. Religion is a societal construct used to control, limit, and oppress people.
Well, at 5mm it's clearly an antenna in the 112GHz band, from which we can conclude that 1) there'll be other alien antennas in line-of-site of this one, and 2) Martians clearly run very high bandwidth wifi networks.
> 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 hypothesis that this is non-human technology as unworthy of our attention. It's not merely that the hypothesis has an immense burden of evidence to heft, but that it's a waste of time to even consider it.
Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition.
"Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition."
I agree, and I hope I didn't give the impression that this is what we should be doing. This thing is still just an observation - it's not evidence of anything yet. My point was this: we know of things that would effectively rule out the 'life as we know it on Mars' hypothesis (e.g. absolutely no evidence of any water, liquid or otherwise), but we're not seeing them.
It's true that we keep trying to dream up new ways of allowing the possibility of life on Mars to counter existing hurdles (e.g. hypothetical microbial life buried underground to shield from radiation), but if there were some solid evidence that would allow us to say 'yeah, there was almost certainly never any life on Mars, and neither is there any life on it today,' we would accept that filter.
We could then put Mars in the same category as the Moon when it comes to the life hypothesis. This is not the case - so I'd say a search for evidence of life on Mars (past or even present) is justified.
If you want to understand the "huh?" reactions you're getting, you might want to wrap your mind around the idea that it's effectively impossible to prove a negative.
I'm sort of annoyed by the notion that "you can't prove a negative". It's true when we're talking about empirical evidence, but it's only a specific case of "you can't prove anything". There's nothing at all special about negatives. It's just that at no point can we ever say "Well, that's it, our confidence in this belief is now 100%" (even though we can get damned close). Of course, sometimes people say "proved" to mean "supported by evidence to the point that all reasonable people should believe it". In that case, you can prove negatives just fine.
I think that the "can't prove a negative" thing must originate from the subtler "it's hard to confirm the null hypothesis", but even that one isn't a hard rule, so long as you have lots of statistical power.
You're totally correct. I should also consider the fact that you can prove that negative voltages exist. The opportunities for pedantically ignoring the context of the discussion at hand are endless.
You didn't stop at the "discussion at hand". You invoked the general principle of "proving a negative" and Russel's teapot (which is rather naive reasoning in itself).
Well, proving a negative is certainly feasible:
>In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence as positive proof of its non-occurrence.
>We could then put Mars in the same category as the Moon when it comes to the life hypothesis. This is not the case - so I'd say a search for evidence of life on Mars (past or even present) is justified.
Of course searching for evidence of current or past life on Mars is justified. But there is a huge difference between searching for evidence, and declaring every anomalous discovery to be potential evidence. In addition, the hypothesis "a technological civilization has lived on/visited/probed Mars" is a minuscule subset of the hypothesis "there is, or has been, some form of life on Mars".
There's a [dead] reply taking me to task on my use of the word "superstition" because apparently Wikipedia thinks that superstitions have to be beliefs in the supernatural. Like all semantic arguments, this is boring and dumb, but in point of fact, the first definition in every dictionary I can find supports my usage.
Here's Random House:
a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.
Not to nitpick, but the fact that we can't rule out that possibility is nothing special.
You cannot rule out the possibility that when you drop a ball it won't fall to the ground. Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes. Only inductive reasoning operates that way.
"Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes."
Precisely, and so 'rule out' shouldn't be taken to imply an absolute ruling out of things. =)
Perhaps I should've said effectively ruled out. Life on the Moon has been 'effectively' ruled out (lack of liquid water, no atmosphere, full exposure to radiation and impactors, etc.) - but many years ago it wasn't extremely unreasonable to suppose that life might exist there. Now we know better - we'd have to reach for very convoluted scenarios to argue for the existence of life on the Moon. The same is not true for Mars (although it's not a picnic, obviously), which I would say is remarkable - there aren't many celestial bodies that have passed that test.
How is it any way remarkable that we haven't yet ruled out the possibility of life on Mars, given what you correctly said about the high standard of proof?
"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 sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology. Of course, such hypotheses have to work extremely hard before they should be accepted. Our standards of evidence for stuff like this must always remain as high as possible, given the emotions and mass misunderstandings involved. But the very fact that we've come this far and still cannot rule out the existence of life on Mars is quite remarkable.