Sunday, August 14, 2005

Is the ESA's Mars Express team trying to tell us something? Take a look at the unmistakable vivid blue and green in the top-center of this (very large) image.

I know that sometimes lack of color correction can produce spurious oases on the Martian surface, but this . . . ?
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8 comments:

Ken said...

Martian oasis...Wish we could send National Geographic up there to take pictures from the ground...

A couple of additional thoughts:

First, I thought liquid water was not possible on the Martian surface because of low temperatures and reduced atmospheric pressure.

Second, if the green tints really do constitute some sort of vegetative life, it suggests that chlorophyl (however the hell you spell it) and photosynthesis are at work. In other words, plant life on Mars has somehow evolved in a very similar fashion -- if not in the exact same fashion -- as it has on Earth.

I think the odds of that happening are extremely small...unless there's more to evolution than the strictly arbitrary hit-and-miss scenario of natural selection.

4:47 AM
Carol Maltby said...

Site seems to be down in some peculiar fashion. I just clicked on your link, got an empty photo space with one of the "no picture" x'ed boxes (what is the formal name for them?). I went up the URL and got forbidden notices, and when I got to the home page wasn't getting a 404 of any kind, it was empty.

Do you suppose someone was unhappy about that picture?

11:57 AM
JohnFen said...

I think the odds of that happening are extremely small...

Maybe not. Mars and Earth exchange a surprising amount of mass in the form of meteorites. Life could have started on one and been transplanted to the other, and you'd have the same coincidence. I admit a bias, though -- I'm rather partial to the "we are the martians" theory.

1:16 PM
JohnFen said...

...err, I mean "hypothesis", not "theory". Have to be careful about those words these days.

1:17 PM
Ken said...

"Maybe not. Mars and Earth exchange a surprising amount of mass in the form of meteorites. Life could have started on one and been transplanted to the other, and you'd have the same coincidence. I admit a bias, though -- I'm rather partial to the "we are the martians" theory."

I've got my own hypothesis; I call it the "Duplication Hypothesis". My proposal is that there is actually a space-time nexus of some sort between Earth and Mars, which in turn caused life to evolve in remarkably similar ways on the two separate worlds.

My guess is that on planet X in some part of the universe far from Earth life has evolved in very different ways than it has here. Perhaps there is even intelligent life there, but the way that this particular intelligence has developed is so different from our own evolutionary history that communication between them and us would be impossible. In other words, their intelligence would not be wired in the same way as ours, and communication is possible only where reasoning works in roughly similar ways.

If men and women have such a difficult time understanding one another, just think of the implications if the difference in psychic "wiring" were increased exponentially. Lol.

3:01 PM
Mac said...

Ken Younos--

Sounds very "Sheldrakian"!

3:27 PM
Carol Maltby said...

There's some interesting features on this beyond possible algae. I got the image for a few minutes, now it's disappeared on my so I'll have to go on my fleeting memory if the section I saw.

Go down the left side of the image. A little above halfway down the left side
(the image takes up about 2 screens worth from left to right for me) there's a sort of mesa. If up is north, at the southwest of it is an L-shaped line of hills that seemes to have fairly rhythmic sort of crenellations. If these were caused by wind or water, I wouldn't think they'd be able to maintain that right angle in relation to the mesa to the northeast of it.

Further down, closer to the left edge than that feature, look for a long-short-long "seep" somewhat like a chicken foot radiating from the northwest to the southeast.


Above that with an axis going from 11 o'clock to 5 o'clock (the seep would be coming off its foot) there is a feature which looks like a humanoid biped stick figure with arms and legs outstretched. I put a piece of clear plastic over it and traced it, and then folded it along the center "torso" line.

The arms and legs appear to be perfectly symmetrical in their angle from the body, and pretty much in their length!

Since I can't access this properly and can't get any further details, does anyone know if this was a nadir shot?

Has anyone else commented on it? If not, I call naming dibs! What date was it shot?

11:59 PM
Kyle said...

Mac -

A cool photo...in a sea of cool photos from Mars. On my monitor the center of the dark area you cite is indeed a very deep dark blue, and the area surrounding is also indeed green with a reddish fringe in areas.

Also, in the rather deep "canyon" in the image, there seems to be a very dark reddish "murkiness" that reminds me of the iron-rich water of Toledo Bend Reservoir here in Texas. Very interesting colors going on here.

One thing that gives me pause on the oasis theory is the scale of the image.
As one inch on the image equals 10 kilometers, these would have to be gargantuan moss beds or algaeal mats.

If such life-forms exist on Mars, and I think the evidence will be revealed very soon that they do, I think it will be found in very small pockets virtually all over the planet, rather than concentrated in kilometers-long patches.

I could be wrong, but Mars just isn't that hospitable to life...at least life as it is here.

I think also that if life has a hard time making it on Mars, it's pretty likely that if it ever did flourish there, it probably came here from there. In fact it may have splattered all over the solar system, and only took hold in a few little "pockets"...Earth, Europa, Iaepetus, etc...and on those others perhaps for only a short time before extinction through various intolerable conditions.

With MRO en route to the red planet, we will soon know for sure what this image depicts...among MANY other things.

It's about time we went there to look for what we should have been looking for all along...and with a set of very impressive eyes, even by rover standards.

Let's hope MRO doesn't meet the fate of Beagle II.

Best,

Kyle
UFOreflections.blogspot.com

4:49 AM

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