Remember this before and after picture in the news recently from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity?
Well, it appears there’s a conspiracy theory under every rock, more fodder for Lewandowsky and Cook I suppose.
Science doesn’t advance by lawsuits, though some people think it does.
I’ll point out the obvious: that “biological organism” hasn’t moved since.
The explanation from NASA’s mission leader Steve Squires (al la Occams’ Razor):
“We think the most likely hypothesis is that it was dislodged by the rover wheels from a location that may currently be obscured by the solar arrays,” he said via email.
Squyres described the rock as “white around the outside, in the middle there’s low spot that is dark red. It looks like a jelly donut,” and said it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen before on Mars.
And Squires has a photo to back up the claim:
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-ideas-jelly-donut-mars.html#jCp
Anyone who’s ever driven a vehicle down a gravel road knows that rocks get dislodged by the tires and may move a foot or two.
The lawsuit seemed almost too ridiculous to be real, so I checked to see if the plaintiff was real. Yep, he has his own Wiki page.
Rhawn Joseph is a neuropsychologist who worked at the Veterans’ Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California.
He is involved with the Journal of Cosmology, and he advances eccentric views on the origin of life on Earth.[1]
Joseph is the author of Astrobiology: The Origins of Life and the Death of Darwinism, published in 2001. In the book he writes that “Contrary to Darwinism … the evidence now clearly indicates, that the evolution of life had been genetically predetermined and precoded…”
…
Joseph has been described by some evolutionary biologists as a crank for embracing unorthodox mechanisms of evolution. In one instance, the blogger P.Z. Myers ridiculed a claim by Joseph that a rock found on Mars is a living organism similar to a type of fungus existing on Earth.
In the lawsuit there is this language:
“Petitioner immediately recognized that bowl-shaped structure, hereafter referred to as Sol 3540, resembling a mushroom-like fungus, a composite organism consisting of colonies of lichen and cyanobacteria, and which on Earth is known as Apothecium.”
“When examined by Petitioner the same structure in miniature was clearly visible upon magnification and appears to have just germinated from spores.”
Strangely, and for the first time ever, I find myself in agreement with P.Z. Meyers.
h/t to reader Ed Zuiderwijk
Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/202863315/NASA-Lawsuit
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Any chance it’s a very small impact crater formed between the two pictures? It would take a lot of
things happeneing “just right”, e.g. trajectory of the impacting object, timing, size, etc., but it’s no
less likely than some of the wilder theories out there.
Kinda funny, considering some of the high-profile cases over which Whyte has presided, that he
gets one like this….all evens out, I guess…
Great comment about the Berliner – could tie a whole mess of conspiracy theories together there…
Berliner doesn’t have a hole in the middle but maybe the Raspberry jelly got squashed out by
Martians, the rover, or whoever dropped their cigarette pack out there 🙂
Dah,
The Squyres hypothesis (““We think the most likely hypothesis is that it was dislodged by the rover wheels from a location that may currently be obscured by the solar arrays,”) is probably right – but wouldn’t it be much more exciting if the thing were a mushroom – like life form?
And, you know, it’s quite improbable, but not actually impossible – especially because it’s unlikely a rock spun up by a wheel slip would have landed so nearly on the depression shown the before photo.
I want to believe…
Could always stick him in a rocket and send him up there to find out.
How many differences can you spot in the photos. Hint – there are several.
In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Coke bottle tossed over the side of a biplane flying above the clouds lands at the feet of a Bushman in S. Africa. He figures that the gods have tossed it there and ponders the meaning of it.
Maybe those gods, aka the Pranksters on Olympus, or “gremlins,” have done the same thing here.
One puzzling aspect of the rock photo, from the tiny bit I’ve read, is that the rover hadn’t moved between those two photos. But still, it could have been stuck atop a wheel and fallen after a wait.
“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. It lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call, The Twilight Zone.”
A glitch in the matrix?
It is not biological. it is the repository of Trenberth’s missing heat! They had a transporter malfunction.
Martian Poltergeists? Who knew???
wws says:
January 31, 2014 at 8:01 am
This is actually a pretty brilliant move by Rhawn Joseph, and so far is going exactly to plan.
How else do you think some no-name pencil pusher at the Veteran’s Affairs Bureau in Palo Alto is going to get people all across the web talking about HIM???
A couple more shout-outs like this, and he’ll be hosting his own exobiology show on Animal Planet – either that or the Weather Channel. (Why not???)
More likely this is part of his plan to have his own Reality show to air immediately after the Kardashians.
For Pete’s sake don’t let that man near ANYTHING resembling a mushroom!
Oh please, photographic manipulation is so far advanced that you can’t trust anything but live video feeds as with local news, usually. With those mega-ultra-supercomputers of the NSA for “matters of homeland security”, a seven second “bleep as needed” delay gets questionable.
What happened is blatantly obvious. When the rover came through the first time, some young Martian kid jumped out of hiding, picked up a rock, and chucked it at the rear of the rover when it wasn’t looking.
Clearly you can see how easily this can be true, as it is an established universal scientific fact that, generally speaking, all young kids act the same on every planet known to have intelligent life. They rarely put back things from where they got them.
They killed it!
The real problem is NASA’s serial use of words and phrases like “unprecedented” and “something we’ve never seen before”. Wouldn’t it have been enough to simply say “This is an unusual feature that warrants another look”?
On the other hand, I think that the second part of the NASA quote should be immediately adopted as their motto: NASA: We are totally confused.
The moon conspiracists say that you can see telegraph wires, or maybe shadows of telegraph wires, in the footage of moonwalks. So c’mon fellas, has no-one got access to Photoshop? Where are the telegraph wires in this Mars footage?
This suit is meritless in so many ways — another indication we are in desperate need of sensible tort reform. Dismissing the suit with prejudice and assessing the plaintiff for court costs would help. So would holding that the attorney by filing a known to be meritless action did not act in the best interests of the client, and so is not entitled to any fees (except in this case Rhawn Joseph is attorney pro se, which means his client has a fool for a lawyer).
Pro se, eh. You know what they say about client and counsel…
Punishment of the continuity person on the Mars set is to continue until morale improves.
(Adjusts fit of tinfoil hat.)
Wait a minute. If you digitize the object in the photograph the dimensions have the exact ratio of 1:4:9 — the squares of the first three integers. This cannot be a coincidence.
As the aphorism goes, the longer I live, the more real life resembles Monty Python:
From “Holy Grail”:
Sir Bedevere: No, no. What else floats in water?
Peasant 1: Bread.
Peasant 2: Apples.
Peasant 3: Very small rocks.
Peasant 1: Cider.
Peasant 2: Gravy.
Peasant 3: Cherries.
Peasant 1: Mud.
Peasant 2: Churches.
Peasant 3: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck.
Sir Bedevere: …Exactly. So, logically…
Peasant 1: If she weighed the same as a duck… she’s made of wood.
Sir Bedevere: And therefore…
Peasant 2: …A witch!
It’s not dead! It’s just resting…
Dear Mr Watts
For once I have to absolutely disagree with you Thawn Joseph’s case is absolutely rock solid it is clear to me sitting here in my orbiting space ship that the creature is a jelly fish Pac Person, sorry for being PC but it is difficult to determine its sex from an aerial view. It has clearly moved due to being disturbed by the Rover 🙂
Have a good weekend and for goodness sake don’t Google jelly fish sex 🙂
Absence of evidence of movement is not evidence of absence of movement.
Russ in Houston makes a good point and as a photographer it was the first thing I noticed. I would suggest that the ‘object’ is actually in both photographs. There is clearly a difference, however slight in both the elevation and angle of the two images. Evident in the number of differences pointed out by Russ. That and given the likelihood of the time of observation change means that the shadows fall differently.
I think it’s nothing more than a matter of illumination rather than illuminati. As it always is with faces in rocks and such things.
If there was anything at all going on here of any significance NASA would have been all over it in the press. Nothing better than a sensation to bolster your case to get your funding back. They may well be towing the party line on climate and losing face but they would jump, literally jump at the chance to shout ‘micro-organisms!’ to the world’s eager press.
I’m not fond of the ad-hom but this gentleman, Dr Joseph ( I’ll be kind ) is clearly a Kook and deserves to spend every cent that this ludicrous suit will cost him before it’s dismissed to sounds of muffled laughter.