Hi, Dave, and List,
Obviously, we are entering the Tucson Lull when The List goes
unnaturally quiet! Time for the supremely silly Post! Mine, I
mean.
So, let's talk about the Xenotech website. I don't know how
much of it you've looked at, but I'd already spent quite a few
hours on its hundreds of pages. First, it's not these jokers;
it's one individual who seems to done a truly massive amount of
work completely on his own and seems to have examined every image
from every camera -- hazard cam, pan cam, microscopic imager, you
name it -- through every filter from every sol.
I can draw some conclusions about him: 1. he's hard-working
and thorough; 2. there are some large gaps in his knowledge which
suggests to me that he's probably entirely self-taught; 3. he's
honest enough that when he went way overboard with one object
which later photos showed to be just a rock, he left the page up
on his site to show how easy it was to be deceived; 4. he's right
about some (but maybe not most) things.
Actually, Marcin at meteoryt.net posted to the List this guy's
page on assembling true color images of the martian surface:
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/truecol1.htm
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/opsol15a.htm
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsq.htm and
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsbcb1.htm.
This is one of the things he's right about. And the images he
assembles using the calibration data are really nice, vivid, and
probably accurate.
Now, the fossils. I think he's wrong. But a few of his
images are almost convincing, like the stereo view at the top of
the page you referenced in your email. If it's not a fossil, then
it's a geologically produced feature. What kind of geology
produces that? Of course, we know jack nothing about Mars'
geological processes except for sweeping generalizations, so we
can't answer that question.
Quite reasonably, he sees only very primitive soft-bodied
and simple shelled forms (no shark's teeth!), what you would have
seen on Earth 500,000,000 years ago. Remember, we went to these
locations because we thought they would be old sea beds. There are
probably lots of people on this List with fossil expertise. Maybe
they should look at his site:
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsindx.htm
I think he suffers from Pattern Recognition Syndrome. Human
beings are so attuned to finding patterns that they find them when
they are not there! I spent a long time staring at one his really
big processed images from the microscopic imager that suddenly I
saw an Hallucinogena fossil, like in the Burgess Shale. I went and
banged my head against the wall for a while and it went away.
Appropriate name, though.
He really applies very heavy processing to the images to bring
out the features he decribes. He may be overdoing it, but I see
few signs of processing artifacts. Frankly, the images do not go
far enough to establish anything incontrovertibly. Are those sand
dunes in the bottom of Endurance crater, or eroded ice? The photos
are eerie and inconclusive, but beautiful.
The other thing he has a problem with is the accepted time
scale. He sees certain features in the photos and says These
can't be more than a few weeks old! because he assumes more
Earth-like rates of erosion and modification, when an always
cautious professional would say These features have remained
essentially unmodified for many millions of years. The truth? We
don't really know.
Mars obviously modifies its surface much more slowly than
Earth (hence the craters). The Tharsis volcanoes were first said
to be inactive for 1.3 billion years, then 800 million years, then
150 million years, and a just released NASA study says some of the
flows are only 2 million years old, maybe younger, and there may
be water ice glaciers on the upper slopes. The professional starts
with the most cautious judgment and inches slowly forward over the
decades...
This guy sees very active water features, what would fit with
the high aquifer model, with wet soil just under the surface and
assembles a certain amount of evidence for a wet (and very salty)
Mars. Did you know that the humidity on Mars is almost always
100%? Hmmm.
The essential question is: how Earth-like is Mars? We don't
know the answer; that's why we want to go there! And occasionally
he has a real point:
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/wetclay1.htm
Whatever the RAT got into, it was gooey goop, not rock!
Another possibly valid point is his reaction to the photos
that show countless trillions of blueberries spread out over the
