Trees on Mars
Posted by daydreamer at 22:18, 30 Mar 2009Now don't beat me up if i've got my geology wrong here. Its pretty tricky from a photo in the distance.
I saw those photo's of tree's on Mars, which were linked to in a blog post.
(if someone can remember or find the address i will add it here)
We all see different things in pics like that, depending on our education etc
I could see geology in them (no surprise there).
If you take a look at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...
and look at the picture of the guy with the rucksack stood in front of the cave reflecting in the water that somebody thought was a ghost.
Above him him is what looks like an igneous dyke and sill structure. These occur when magma is forced up through the above rocks under pressure. A dyke occurs when the magma cuts through the layers of rock above and the sill occurs when the 'arms' of the dyke spread out through weaknesses between rock layers or within them.
You can see in the picture the dyke sticking up into the air and the sill sticking out of the side with its 'face' towards us. Both have survived as the sea weathered away the softer surrounding rock.
From the look of it the sill couldnt support its weight once the underlying softer rock was weathered out and it collapsed, exposing the face to us.
You can clearly see the crystalline structure that developed as the magma cooled below ground, and it looks alot like those tree structures on Mars.
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Comments
12 April 2007
3 hours 8 min
The late Arthur C. Clarke thought those weird Martian features were proof of vegetation.
I wish we could get a closer look. And not only one from
above.
PS: Granted, the photo of dyke is very easy to dismiss. But man! that photo of the old lady looking from up the castle... that's spooky, no matter the explanation! :D
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
21 February 2009
21 hours 4 min
Hay Dude,
The features in the image above are too numerous to be dykes i would say.
Perhaps some sort of sprectrographic analysis would help to confirm or disprove the idea of CO2 ejection.
They do look like vegetation in a that pic though. Who know's. It all depends on what your willing to accept. I think to improve the odd's of vegetation on Mars the argument would need some sort of Alien interference.
You couldnt just uproot Earth vegetation and put it there without messing with its gene's quite a bit. It would die. I dont think the argument that life evolved to that sort of level on Mars holds very well. Mainly because of the lack of evidence of biodiversity on Mars.
Really there is only one way to tell fully. We need to send geologists to Mars to see if there is any evidence of a fossil record. If there isnt then any idea of life being present on Mars in anything more developed that the equivalent of the Pre-Cambrian on Earth is just flat out wrong. We cant be as sure until we do that though.
So far we have photo's of Martian stratigraphy in high enough resolution to look for a fossil record. I cannot find much reference to this, although there is some, but it is concerned with microbial activity.
Perhaps a good analysis of any cliff face shots would help. If you took close'ish up photos of Earth cliff faces in high enough resolution and showed them to geologists, palaeontologists, or amateurs they would be able to tell you that Earth had a biosphere.
We also have the Martian rocks and can look at those. If you havn't been on the internet and looked up 'microfossils' and 'nanofossils' then i recommend you do so immediately. There is much more to the fossil record than is visible to the naked eye. So we dont have to just look for chemical signs of life. I personally remain unconvinced about life on Mars for the moment, but it wouldnt do much more than admonish a 'cool' from me if they declared that it was certain.
I know that alot of people on the net think that there definitely is life there, some even declare intelligent life and civilisations. I'm not sure why really. Whether belief is driving the mind or not. Some of the claims are just bonkers, given even a cursory look at the planet.
P.S Some of those pics are spooky! I like the one in the mirror. It reminds me of the girl in the Exorcist. I'm a bit saddened about these being put forward as the best examples. I've seen better. Some are obviously natural, which makes me wonder how they got in.
I will make an exciting prediction. The increase in pixel resolution will reduce the number of these ghost images and make it easier to explain them. This will be a great thing as the ones left over afterwards will be even better.
12 April 2007
3 hours 8 min
We have to be mindful that those ghost pics are not 'evidence' of anything. This was a pop contest with no clear standards on what merits a picture should have to be considered a bona-fide picture of a ghost. What is a ghost, to begin with??
It reminds me of that contest to find the new wonders of the world. Obviously it wasn't an objective contest, just a publicity scheme—even though Chichen Itzá was one of the winners, if I remember correctly ;-)
Now, getting back to Mars: the problem is that we are—like always—projecting our pre-conceptions of what life, vegetation, etc, as we observe it here in our planet, should be for another world. The feature might be geological, or it might display some features that we thougt could exclusive of life, meaning that what happens on Mars might be the result of something that is neither mineral nor biological... but something in between.
It's funny how we use to think on binary terms regarding some issues but later we see them not as black/white but as shades of gray. Take intelligence for example: we used to think that only Man was intelligent and the rest of the creatures were not; now we know this is highly inaccurate. But we still think in binary terms regarding life (either something is alive or not), but with what we know of viruses and such, we should start to change our perspectives here too.
What if we find in some other world some life-form that doesn't use DNA to replicate itself? doe we still call it a life form? What if there are such creatures right here on this planet, as Paul Davies has recently proposed?
I'll say it again: we need to go there and have a closer look.
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
30 April 2004
6 hours 4 min
We have to be mindful that those ghost pics are not 'evidence' of anything. This was a pop contest with no clear standards on what merits a picture should have to be considered a bona-fide picture of a ghost.
Not to mention a pop contest run by a media-savvy, self-promoting skeptic.
;)
Kind regards,
Greg
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You monkeys only think you're running things
21 February 2009
21 hours 4 min
Agree completely. The what is a ghost quote is interesting as well.
We definitely are applying our preconceptions, but there is no way around that. Thats just what happens when we think and talk. The same is true in reverse of course. Preconceptions are applied that we might be applying preconceptions.
If life was bonkersly different on Mars then we wouldnt recognise it. Personally i think the only way that we wouldnt is if it was so obviously not life that we got it completely wrong. If for example the mantles of planets are the gonads of giant space creatures that intangibly permeate space. Something so unexpected that we just wouldnt see it. Like if something had a reproduction, inhalation, excretion etc cycle of over a billion years, but then it wouldnt evolve quickly; so i can argue with myself over that one!
Life could be amazingly different in its chemistry and structure to Earth life and we would still be able to tell.
However i have an evolutionary brain. I.e i am programmed to look for evolution.
If something anywhere consists of self replicating molecules of any chemistry and if there is a mechanism for hereditry storage of structure as well as a mechanism for imperfect replication then we have evolution. If we have that then we either have life, or a possible precursor for it.
DNA is what is used here. As you comment there may be more, but they would have had to be able to compete with DNA for resources.
I like the idea that when you look out of your window and see all the various types of life, really you are only seeing one; DNA. It has simply shaped itself into all the forms we see through evolution.
Obviously there is RNA as well, but we dont see that with the naked eye typically.
DNA is not the definition of life, self replication of the type above is. If we found another molecule then of course we could call it life. I guess it would have had to have increased in complexity enough though, probably.
I agree that this will only be answered conclusively once we've been there.
I disagree about not recognising life though, but thats just from my perspective of being taught about it. So long as it broke the rules enough then i guess we wouldnt see it though, but then im not sure we would class it as life anyway. I guess if we got down to something that wasnt clear then we would find the definition less helpful.
My gut rebels a little at your definition of something between mineral and biological as well. We are both obviously, mineral and biological. To be mineral you have to be biologically inert i.e just mineral as defined by your chemical composition and structure. I find it impossible to imagine life being so simple that we could mistake it for mineral under a microscope, but this comes from having spent years staring at mineral cross sections under a microscope - i know what they look like and their structure, i just cant picture it.
12 April 2007
3 hours 8 min
If for example the mantles of planets are the gonads of giant space creatures that intangibly permeate space.
That would give volcanic eruptions quite an interesting new spin :-P
Good comment, as always.
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie