Photos show evidence of life on Mars, Ohio entomologist claims | Hacker News Reader

Photos show evidence of life on Mars, Ohio entomologist claims

phys.org

34 pointslelf29 comments

This is a really weak article, right from the opening paragraph

> Romoser's research shows that we already have the evidence [of life on Mars]

A single blurry picture of what might look like a bug is not evidence of life on Mars, any more than the "Mars Man Face" is. This seems like Pareidolia but for someone who looks at insects all day. Wikipedia article itself shows another Mars example...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Noooooo... This is an old man with pareidolia.

However, see "I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/im-convinc... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229390

The atmosphere of Mars is not in chemical equilibrium. (Cf. Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis.)

I want to give the benefit of the doubt because this person seems like a legitimate scientist, but this is an extraordinary claim and the evidence seems a lot like cloudgazing to me. Is there a source with more detail on this?

Edit: Found this (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cd3gmtja551h6l1/AAABGYzMsjlN7Uemk...)...still looks like cloudgazing to me, though.

That is stunningly bad, as far as "evidence" goes.

I find it amazing that the rocks are so clear, and the snakes and bugs look exactly like the rocks. It's interesting that the snakes and bugs don't actually look like snakes and bugs, and in order to see what he sees, you have to forget how clear the rest of the picture is and except his analysis at (blurry?) face value. Just like backward masking in music, or the word SEX toasted into your Ritz crackers and wrinkled into some girl's socks, it requires text arrows, shape outlines, and highly specific descriptions before you can just almost see/hear it.

Imagine if National Geographic had to go through such extremes before we could see bugs and snakes in their pictures of them.

On Mars, sometimes a rock is just a rock.

This is beyond a reach and doesn't even make sense. What would tiny wings do on a planet with a thin atmosphere roughly equivalent to being over 100,000 ft high on earth?

That last article about life on mars was much more compelling: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/im-convinc...

Mars's atmosphere may have been thicker in the past, and wings could be vestigial appendages from the creature's ancestors.

Surely they would have been strongly selected against given many thousands of generations in a harsh environment?

And worse for my idea, looks like Mars probably lost its atmosphere billions, not millions of years ago.

Then they'd have the problem of not being able to fly very easily in still weather, and being blown to the other side of the globe during the dust devil / wind storm events.

I'm skeptical, but a genuine question:

If we had an "Earth rover" that took similar photographs as the Mars rover did, would it find examples of insect fossils?

If not, it seems like this is just seeing Jesus in a piece of toast.

For what it's worth, I've lived on earth my whole life and I've never seen an insect fossil outside of a museum.

Same, but I also don't know what to look for. I probably wouldn't know an insect fossil if I saw it. So even though the Mars structures look like noise to me, they probably would even if they were fossils.

Same here... lived my whole life on Earth an never seen Jesus on toast... seems like a shame, really.

You can find surface fossils, but it's super-duper rare. However, you don't have to do much- basically anywhere there is a lot of sedimentary rock that has been recently uncovered you can expect to find fossils.

So I would say if the rover just covered the surface, it would not see fossils unless you placed it in a likely area, and there were conditions that exposed fossils.

I see we're doing this again. Previously:

Face on Mars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars)#%22Face_on_Mars...

Bigfoot on Mars: https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2008/1305.h...

The actual explanation, of course, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia.

A "Life on Mars" paper was actually published in Science in 1996 too: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/273/5277/864

I find it entirely believable that there may have been life on Mars, and even that some of it survives today in extremophile microbial form.

That doesn't make this guy's conference poster any less silly, though.

Arthur C. Clarke's banyan trees on Mars: https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2001-...

sure looks like a yeti to me

"There's a large, out-of-focus monster running around the countryside. That's extra scary to me. Run, he's fuzzy!" (mitch hedberg)

"When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere."

I'd be willing to believe that there is fossilized life on Mars, maybe even complex arthopod-type life, but saying that there is still life flying around on Mars is a pretty extraordinary claim. Is there a paper or any more information around here? Outside of the two pictures in the articles I can't find anything.

Today I learned entomologists have pareidolia for bugs.

If you could find any alien living with head and legs, that would be very stranger than finding alien life itself,

or life on earth come from the same origin.

Not entirely. Legs have independently evolved multiple times on Earth, as have heads (or things that are similar to heads). It pays to have a lot of sensory organs on an appendage that can articulate – said sensory organs being close to the brain is also an advantage, assuming you have one single central brain. And 'legs' are good way to achieve locomotion over uneven terrain. Even on Earth that was done using different mechanisms: we use muscles attached to tendons, spiders use hydraulics.

Even though an alien lifeform could conceivably have a 'head' and have 'legs', they would probably look nothing like what we have here.

For a good story about how some alien lifeform would look like, I would recomend reading Blindsight: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

The author uses some of his marine biology background to design the lifeforms. I think he does a pretty good job at trying to identify mechanisms which would hold true anywhere, but also making the result completely alien.

Well it complements this article: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/mysteriou...

What an amazing find! In case you aren't aware, there are also giant human-like life forms living in the clouds on Earth. This has already been widely reported though.

This is also pretty good evidence that Ohio exists.

I can clearly see a honey badger on this photo.

Isn't this roughly comparable to estimating an entire dinosaur from a leg bone?

It's roughly comparable to squinting at a pile of rocks, seeing what looks kinda like a leg bone, and declaring "dinosaurs walk among us!"

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