Secret Mars Base Discovered? Hmmm, No…

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.

 

More Martian Madness

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 email reads, in part…

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

Martian Madness

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.

Well, it seems that some in the UFO-alien woo crowd has decided that this image constitutes “evidence” of past or present alien intelligence on Mars, because – here it comes – the “rock” in the middle of the picture is actually an alien skull.

Life on Mars? Not so fast…

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…

Martian Methane Reveals the Red Planet is not a Dead Planet

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.