I, like many of my fellow humans on planet Earth, am simply bursting with joy, excitement, pride, anticipation, and (pardon the pun) curiosity after the successful landing of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory on the Red Planet. This was a big deal, for a number of reasons outlined at this link, but for me this remarkable acheivement can be summed up in one quick phrase:
Science – It Works!!! 🙂
Image source and caption: In this image from NASA TV, shot off a video screen, one of the first images from a second batch of images sent from the Curiosity rover is pictured of its wheel after it successfully landed on Mars. The video screen was inside the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team inside the Spaceflight Operations Facility for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California August 5, 2012.The rover landed on the Martian surface shortly after 10:30 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday (1:30 a.m. EDT Monday/0530 GMT) to begin a two-year mission seeking evidence the Red Planet once hosted ingredients for life, NASA said. REUTERS/Courtesy NASA TV/Handout
Image source and caption: Aeolis Mons (unofficially Mount Sharp), as seen from Curiosity.
And if that isn’t cool enough, check out this Youtube video of the descent of the MSL towards the surface of Mars taken from the lander itself!
**Note: I want to give a shout out to my FB friend Rob for inspiring the title of this blog entry 🙂
My favorite time of the year is almost upon us: Halloween! 😀
I love Halloween not just because of the candy, the costumes, and the decorations (when else can you be a complete freak and it be socially acceptable?) but also because of the wonderful potential for promoting skepticism and critical thinking about various paranormal claims. Let’s face it: at this time of the year, ghosts, witchcraft, psychics, and various other kinds of woo are on everyone’s minds, so why not take advantage of that fact and use it to inject the skeptical viewpoint on things? I have found this to be a very effective teaching technique over the years, so that’s why I pass it along to you.
So in the spirit of the season (pardon the pun), allow me to share with you some links to various Halloween-ish skeptical resources that you can use, including a few of my earlier blog posts on the subject…
According to this story over at Space.com, there is an amateur astronomer claiming that he has discovered what he calls a “Base on Mars” in the following image that he downloaded from Google Mars…
All I can say is… are you kidding me?! A grainy, fuzzy, and heavily pixelated image from Google Mars shows… what exactly? Why couldn’t this be some kind of geological feature on Mars, or couldn’t some of the features be artifacts of the imaging process? Why the rush to jump to “alien base on Mars” without any supporting evidence? This sort of thing is on par with people using similar crappy-quality images to claim they’re looking at Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or seeing Jesus in the clouds. Folks, it all boils down to that well documented phenomenon called pareidolia, because if there were decent high-resolution images available then it would be harder for people to see what they (consciously or not) want to see in the pictures.
Some more reasonable possibilities are suggested by some experts in the Space.com article:
“It looks like a linear streak artifact produced by a cosmic ray,” said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona and the director of the Planetary Imaging Research Laboratory. McEwen is the principal investigator of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a powerful telescope currently orbiting Mars.
Cosmic rays are extremely energetic particles emitted by the sun and other stars. For the most part, the Earth’s protective magnetosphere blocks them from hitting the planet’s surface, McEwen explained. “But with space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it’s very common to see these cosmic ray hits. You see them on optical images and a lot of the infrared images too,” he told Life’s Little Mysteries. …
… The digital compression software that converts the image into a JPEG file then “sort of smears out the image, giving it that pixelated look,” McEwen said. What started as a clear streak in high-resolution turns into a streak that, in the armchair astronaut’s words, looks like it is “made up of cylinders.”
That, or this guy actually did discover an alien base on Mars. I think you’d have to have a particularly dull Occam’s Razor to accept that conclusion, however.
Every Halloween, when I’m not having fun at a party or handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, I like to take some time to listen to the 1938 radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles. I do this for two reasons: 1) it’s a great story – full of suspense & the appropriate amount of spookiness for the season, and 2) it’s a wonderful lesson in skepticism. In fact, it is perhaps the first, best example of a widespread media hoax (however intentional or unintentional it may have been) with ensuing mass hysteria that we have in the United States, because so many people tuned in and took the story of the Martian invasion of Earth literally. Invaders from Mars? It was no wonder there was a panic!
In an earlier blog post, I gave a detailed rebuttal to a lecture by the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin titled “Intelligent Design: Dead Science or the Future of Biology?” – however, it wasn’t until recently that I came up with what I consider to be the real killer criticism of a basic intelligent design argument: their so-called “design inference” model. During his talk, Casey Luskin showed a picture of Mount Rushmore, which he stated the design inference model shows is clearly a product of ID, not the result of natural processes. The implication is, of course, that much of evolutionary science is false because ID’s design inference model can prove that ID is a better explanation; but there’s a fatal flaw here.
The basic argument is simply a variation of the classic watchmaker argument, which is essentially an argument from ignorance. Not to mention, Luskin has stacked the deck in favor of the ID design inference model because every time an ID-advocate trots out their model it is in the context of a post-hoc analysis: they already know ahead of time that the object/situation they’re analyzing is the product of intelligent (human) processes. Hell, of course Mount Rushmore is the result of (human) ID, because we have records & photos of humans chipping away at the damn rock! So they can’t lose – in this sense, the ID folks are proposing a non-falsifiable model, which makes it NON-science.
My last entry focused on a supposed “alien” skull found on the surface of Mars, which is really nothing more than a classic case of pareidolia. Well, just today I received a bogus email from a colleague which recycles the old “Mars is going to be closer than EVER!” myth which has propagated over the last few years.
The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter’s gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.
The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.
By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. That’s pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month. Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN
Recently, while I was hanging around on the JREF Forum – an awesome place to go chat about science, skepticism, and critical thinking – someone posted the following image, taken by the NASA Spirit rover, from the surface of Mars…
What, if anything, do you see? If you’re like me, you see a rocky surface with a particularly big rock (relatively speaking) right in the middle of the photograph.
I just found out about some very exciting news! It seems that the hypothesis that Mars currently harbors some kind of microbial life just got a boost. Check out this article from NASA…
The basic premise of the article is that there are unexpectedly high levels of methane gas in the atmosphere of Mars. Because natural processes on Mars destroy methane quite quickly, for this much methane to be in the atmosphere means that something is producing it. Based upon what we know about chemistry, there are only two possible sources for so much methane – esoteric geologic processes and microbes, as in lifeforms.
Couple this with what we’ve learned over the last decade about Mars having had a much wetter (as in water!) past than we once thought, and the evidence seems to point in the direction of life. However, we do not yet know anything definitive (this is merely circumstantial evidence), and a good skeptic attempts to avoid excessive speculation in favor of critically analyzing the evidence at hand.
We do know that life is much tougher than we once thought, even as recently as 10-20 years ago, and that it pops up in many places that would surprise us. In addition, we’ve learned much about extremophiles (those surprisingly tough little critters), and recent scientific research regarding the origins of life has brought us closer to understanding how life may have arisen from non-life (what scientists call abiogenesis).
But is all of this definitive evidence of life having evolved on our neighboring planet, Mars?
In my opinion, no… not yet.
Remember that we know of two possible processes that can account for the extra methane in the Martian atmosphere: geologic processes and microbial life. That means that in order for us to be sure that there are little Martian microbes living under the surface of the Red Planet, we have to be able to rule out the potential geologic origin of that methane.
This is a good lesson in applying skepticism & critical thinking, because though I may wish for there to be life on Mars (boy do I wish it), whether or not there really is life on Mars is not up to me to decide.
The universe operates according to its own rules, which don’t take into account the wishes & feelings of sentient beings such as you and me. As I tell my students, we have to change our preconceptions & beliefs to fit the universe on its own terms, not the other way around. Only then can we really learn something about the world around us, and the best method for learning – in an honest, objective, and useful manner – about our universe is to use science.
It is unfortunate that so many people allow their preconceived notions about how they think the natural world should behave that they fail to understand that it is they who have to conform their beliefs to fit nature, not insist that (magically) nature conform itself to fit their beliefs. This kind of magical thinking is the source of much pseudoscience and woo.
So, in conclusion, is there life on Mars or out there in the vast gulfs of space? The most honest answer is, “We don’t know.”
But someday, if we work at the problem really hard and perhaps get a bit lucky, I think we’ll find out the answer.
The Skeptical Teacher 