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Space

Mars Channels Discovered; Possible Aquatic Origin 176

Posted by timothy from the but-no-one-can-#kick-you-out- dept.
Carey Frey writes " CNN reported today that 'NASA scientists have uncovered evidence of wide, ancient channels that could have formed from the flow of enormous volumes of water.' The movie Mission to Mars opens tonight. I suppose this is all just a coincidence?"

Yeah, right. The production crew spent literally weeks planning the trip, getting to Mars and digging all those channels. "Coincidence," indeed!
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Mars Channels Discovered; Possible Aquatic Origin More

Mars Channels Discovered; Possible Aquatic Origin

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  • Didn't the surveyor, which was running after the lander crashed, find these already?

    I remember get Space News online and going to the NASA site when they thought they may have had a chance at communicating with the crashed lander. And there was some info on this back then.

  • There has been good evidence of water on Mars for years; and no I'm not just talking about the old "canals" on Mars (which were just optical illusions).

  • Alternative. (Score:4)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:04PM (#1210910) Homepage
    Ok everyone calm down.

    There still remains the chance that these "water canals" could be nothing more than an underground subway system for a race of super-intelligent beings.

    Let's not fly off the handle and start talking water before we're sure it's not just something simple.

    Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny

  • The channels are *underground* (Score:5)

    by Signail11 ( 123143 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:07PM (#1210911)
    The NASA scientists use a laser-based system to detect fluctuations in the surface conditions that enable them to infer the existence of very large underground channels that could have been created by vast flows of water when Mars was much younger. As importantly, the information confirms that Mars used to be in a state of great geologic upheval, as demonstrated by the enormous latent volcanoes on the surface.

    Very interesting article; this much water on a planet creates the prospect that life may have one day existed on Mars. Also, I think I might be pretty close to a first post. Oh well.
  • I thought it was a pretty much foregone conclusion that Mars once had a very different environment than it has now, maybe not exactly like Earth, but with a much more substantial atmosphere and water. &nbsp Witness the ice on the poles... &nbsp but also note the proximity to the asteroid belt...

    I guess that will always be a hypothesis until proven though...

  • Didn't the surveyor, which was running after the lander crashed, find these already?

    In a word, no. They've already known a lot about visible outbreak channels just based on photographic evidence, but these are actually buried. The were found by doing tricks with gravitometers and the like. The Mars stuff at JPL is definitely worth looking at. The high resolution topographic maps from MOLA are particularly interesting- especially while reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

  • How about setting up the code to kill anything with the phrase "first post" in it?
  • This is another good example of waiting for the right time to release information.

    It is very obvious that this is no coincidence, but I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Trying to manipulate people to get attention is a bad thing. Trying to advertise science is a good thing. I guess this is a little bit of both. All I hope is that this information is not "modified" to sound more interesting.

    This fits into the same category as sending old Senators to space and finding rocks form Mars which supposedly contain microbes.

  • HA! stupid hollywood (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    did anyone else see the commercial for 'mission to mars' where the guy says 'that DNA looks human!' after looking at a tiny snip of a DNA helix rotating in full 3-d glory(thats how real geneticists do it! .....right?)? heh, yea i can frequenty determine the species of origin of some random DNA by simply simply looking at a few base pairs on a monitor! puhlease.
  • How about ignoring first posts instead of bitching about them? I tend to find anti-first-post messages more distracting. And yes, I do realize the hypocritical nature of my post.

    --

  • Regarding the movie (Score:4)

    by Esperandi ( 87863 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:19PM (#1210919)
    I guess the people who made the movie (Touchstone I think, Disney owns them I know) are kinda in hot water because one of the trailers says "Twenty five years of conspiracy are about to be unveiled" and NASA consulted HEAVILY on the movie (as they have done for MANY Disney movies in the past)... NASA didn't know that trailer was going to run and from their reaction, it seems they're quite miffed about it. Apparently its all about the treatment of the face on mars in the movie..

    From pre-reviews I've heard, there are points in the movie where the audiences actually shouted "GOOD! I'm glad you're dead!" and the reviews haven't been all that good but I think I'll see it anyways...

    On the fact of life on Mars now or in the past, its way possible. Just yesterday I read on the AP Wire that in this metal mine in California they've found these microbes that thrive in 115F environments and eat iron and secrete sulphuric acid... never before seen and they have no idea how they got there and anyone previously would have guessed life would never have existed there. Similar to the things that live down at the vents at the ocean floor miles down (well, 2) every guess beforehand would have been that life could not exist in such a toxic environment. After hearin about all that, I don't see how anyone would be really stupefied if they found microbes and maybe bigger things on Mars, though Europa looks amazingly promising in comparison...

    Esperandi

  • Breaking News: (Score:4)

    by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:21PM (#1210920)
    "They're definately from water all right," said Dr. Willie Makeit, Scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "Well, either that or massive quantities of hot grits, but come on, that wouldn't be possible..."

    30 years after finding the canals scientists concluded today that they could have been created from flowing water, to what do they attribute the lag time?

    "Pong," says Makeit, "when the initial data came back in the 70's Pong had just came out and we were all playing it on the big screens here at the Center, we must have missed it and shelved the data."

    Still, there is much controvercy, not all the scientists here at Goddard belive they were created by flowing water.

    Jimmy de Loche, a newcommer at NASA thinks there was a more interesting explaination to the canals formation.

    "If you look at the ridges, they're not smooth, kindof jagged, this suggests fragmantations, a blast of some sort, what I think happened is that a civilization not unlike our own nuked itself into extinction on Mars, poor bastards. No doubt a war over hot grits and Natilie Portman open sourced and Petrified statues."

    When pressed on the issue of where he came to this conclusion, Mr. Makeit goes into convulsions, rants almost incoherently about slashdot, troll tuesday, and "Will Rob fucking impliment submit box moderation already!". This reporter was very taken aback with these words.

    What do they mean? Who is Rob? Trolls in this day and age?

    Tune in tomorrow for answers to these and other important questions, same Linux-Time, same Linux-Channel.

    -- iCEBaLM

  • More headlines from previous centuries.... (Score:5)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:21PM (#1210921)
    In addition to the discovery of channels on Mars, previously called 'canals,' the following headlines began to appear....

    -- Scientists detect existance of 'eathre,' previously called 'aether;' now known to be the medium in which the Planck-sized subspace foam floats.

    -- Observatory locates giant space dragon living in the Moon's trojan points that sporadically emerges to swallow the moon in an event called an 'eklypps.'

    -- Biologists observe quantum-tunneling effect of organic particles that allows manure to generate flies spontaneously.

    ...and, of course:

    -- Giant flaming objects expected to fall from sky soon because of the wrath of the great god Iridium.


    --

  • 2nd Theory (Score:3)

    by NatePWIII ( 126267 ) <nathan@wilkersonart.com> on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:33PM (#1210924) Homepage
    Well... that is one theory.
    The second more plausible theory put forth by a certain group of NASA engineers is suggesting that these canals are simply remnants of "lava" flows that occurred when the red planet was still "hot".

    I think I'll go with the second theory myself. We see much the same phenomena on volcanic islands such as Hawaii. Underground lava flows creating rivers of molten rock.

    Of course everyone likes to toss around the water theory, who wouldn't? But realistically, these channels are due more to the lithography and not a fictious hydrosphere.


    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
    www.npsis.com [npsis.com]

  • Good Mars Books And Links and Stuff (Score:5)

    by Jikes ( 123986 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @04:48PM (#1210926)

    If you enjoy pulp science fiction, try Ben Bova's _MARS_. It's an easy breezy read.

    If you want a 3-book-long lovemaking session to the planet Mars, I highly suggest Kim Stanley Robinson's _RED MARS_, _GREEN MARS_, and _BLUE MARS_. They get progressively more boring and uninspired as the series progresses through more and more abstract characters, but they are still extremely decent reads that make a slight effort to represent Mars in all it's beauty. The franchise milker _THE MARTIANS_ is also out as of a few months ago. Haven't checked it out, but I expect it to be just as fatally flawed as the others. Oh well.

    Yeah... And there's also Ray Bradbury's _THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES_.. Or was it CS Lewis? I forget and don't care, because I didn't like it.

    Oh yeah, and there is now an official Mars Flag or something. It's three vertical stripes going [RED] [GREEN] [BLUE}. Quite cool.

    Mars is vastly more interesting than you might expect. Read up on it if you like.

    http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/t np/mars.html [arizona.edu] is an EXCELLENT start if you want to learn more about the planet at a glance.

    http://www.marssociety.org [marssociety.org] links you to the Mars Society, a delusional group of Mars Freaks who want to settle the planet or something. But they're still cool.

    http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] has a very supercool solar system simulator that can show you what the planets look like from almost anywhere at almost any time. It's quite accurate and cool. Not open source yet, but i'm sure with some coaxing and good project management, they might be willing to release it. It's written in C and shit, so it'd port pretty easy i'd imagine. The data sets might not be public domain though. Oh well. Go see it anyway.

    Enjoy.

  • Yes, lithography with a hundred billion micron feature size. Suck that, intel!

    Ryan
  • The Matian Chronicles was by Ray Bradbury, and was a collection of somewhat related short stories taking place on Mars. C.S. Lewis did a trilogy starting on Mars that was a biblical allegory, seems kinda corny by today's SF standards, though still a good read.

    Another good one is The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke, although it's probably one of his least accurate novels.. He says the sand is actually blue on mars. Well, can't be right all the time I guess.
    (or was it Bradbury that had the blue sand idea?... time to read those again probably)


  • It's funny that you should say that, because something similar actually happened in the past.

    In 1877, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli observed channels on the surface of Mars. The Italian word for channels, however, is canali, which was translated to English as "canals." Consequently, many people were under the impression that they were constructed by intelligent beings, rather than that they were just naturally occuring channels. This is probably where the notion of life on Mars came from in the first place.
  • Even though I think you should get your a$$ wipped for your choice of words, I try to explain my point a little better to you. Comments like this make me wish that anonymous posts will be banned.

    I am not talking about some kind of "conspiracy / cover-up". If you want that, go to blockbuster and rent a movie.

    NASA's funding is declining more and more and the days were billions were spent on Moon missions are over. Of course, NASA needs good PR in order to keep interest alive. It does not need a secret cover-up to make the decision to release a news story at the right time. That is, at the same time as Mars gets lots of media attention - may that be due to a movie release.

    This is not the first time this has happened and it is for sure not a crime - its just obvious and understandable.

    I agree that this is not a tremendously important news release and that it might as well be a pure conicidence this time.
  • I hope NASA is getting a kickback from the free publicity. I saw news stories about life on Mars on at least three news channels today.

    Coincidence. Maybe.

    Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?

  • Have a look at this link Think Mars [thinkmars.net]. Its a site advocating human exploration of Mars. There's a petition that you can sign to urge world leaders to commit themselves to the exploration of mars.
  • Even in Mars's (1/3 g?, I forget) gravity, I really doubt that a 200 km wide cavity could hold up. On Earth with good hard rock, 50 m is about all you get. What am I missing here?

  • If you want a 3-book-long lovemaking session to the planet Mars, I highly suggest Kim Stanley Robinson's _RED MARS_, _GREEN MARS_, and _BLUE MARS_. They get progressively more boring and uninspired...

    Uh, gee, thanks. Do you recommend any other boring, uninspired books for me to read? I'm sensing some hostility here.

    What exactly do you mean by a "lovemaking session" anyway? Oh right, that's where somebody can't keep track of how many books are in the series, so they should take all the books to Mars and screw a sand dune while reading each one, then just count the holes, conclusively proving that they're dumber than fucking dirt on Mars. (sorry, this is as bad as my posts get, I hope)

  • If anyone gave them a bad review, I agree with them. I'm sure many of you will disagree with me on this but (1) 2001: space odysee sucked... movie and book (2) Mission to Mars was just a reinterpretation of 2001. All events that happen in 2001 are symbolically in m2mars only they tried to make sense which just made the movie plain stupid, not to mention the inaccurate crap that was going on on mars. I went to the mars/moon breifing a year ago and they said that the temperature varies greatly between groundlevel and where your head would be, yet it did not bother them when they were in a tent on the martian surface. My recommendation is to not see the movie, if you have seen/read 2001 imagine it on mars.
  • On the fact of life on Mars now or in the past, its way possible. Just yesterday I read on the AP Wire that in this metal mine in California they've found these microbes that thrive in 115F environments and eat iron and secrete sulphuric acid...

    I'm sure life could exist on Mars now. But I don't think it very probable that it could have started there in the first place. It probably takes an ocean world for life to appear spontaneously.

  • Disney must be paying out the ass for the PR on the new movie Mission to Mars!
  • Umm, I think the point is, if you find life (still alive or the remains of, it matters not) on another planet, it'd be incredibly significant to discover it has DNA at all, rather than some completely different molecule on which genetic information is encoded. So yah, any DNA you find at all on another planet "looks human" (as opposed to what you'd expect -- not being the same molecule at all).

    --

  • Dude,

    While there may have been intelligent life down below, think of the possibilities that the tubes present...

    I heartily look forward to the day when the Underground Channels of Mars are opened as the solar system's largest skate park ever! It would, like, bring life back to the word "tubular", at least!

  • I'm going to get flamed for this, but I am sick and tired about hearing about news stories and movies that glorify the concept of "extraterrestrial life." Oooh, look! Some canals on Mars! That obviously means that there was intelligent life there once, right? And there probably still is! Hello? No! These days it seems you can't look anywhere without hearing about some sort of search for life. They say there's life on Jupiter's moons. My tax money is being criminally spent on a "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence."

    How long have they been looking for life? A long time, that's how long. What do they have to show for it? Absolutely nothing. Yet they continue to perform this "search" with the same zeal that they started it with. Why not? They've got people giving them money hand over fist, apparently oblivious to the fact that it would be less wasteful to simply light the money on fire.

    This country's liberal establishment is big on things like Europa, SETI, and Mission to Mars. This is the same establishment whose members personally slaughtered four million children in the womb last year. If they can show, or at least advance the idea that life on Earth is not unique, then they further their agenda. Their agenda is to reduce the value of human life. That is what they stand for. If they are allowed to portray life as some sort of cosmic accident, people will be more receptive to their crimes against humanity and against morality.

    When you've got programs like SETI, moons like Europa, and movies like Mission to Mars, it's no wonder our kids are filling each other full of bullet holes. They need to be told that they are not some sort of cosmic accident .. that they are created beings and that they are loved by their Creator unless they are homosexual. We've already got great states in the country, like Kansas, who are taking the proper step of banning the theory of evolution from the classroom. We need to go one step further and ban movies and stories like this, because they advance the "idea" of life beyond Earth as being possible, and that destroys the value that human life has. James Cameron and his film crew may be a bunch of chemicals that rose out of a pit of primordial goo, but I am special, and God loves me.

  • Dan Quayle was Right! (Score:3)

    by Stan Chesnutt ( 2253 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @05:56PM (#1210946) Homepage
    Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

    -- Vice President Dan Quayle
  • ...not to mention the inaccurate crap that was going on on mars. I went to the mars/moon breifing a year ago and they said that the temperature varies greatly between groundlevel and where your head would be, yet it did not bother them when they were in a tent on the martian surface.

    Did they all die from the incredibly thin, oxygen poor Martian atmosphere? If not, then I suspect they pumped their own atmosphere into the tent, in which case the fact that the Martian atmosphere has greatly different temperature between foot and head level is irrelevant -- the atmosphere in the tent will be more or less uniformly the temperature they heated it to.

    --

  • you seam to be missing the whole point of 2001, for it is not about space at all. no, 2001 is about options and questions, not answers, and not physical exploration. If you fail to understand than think harder

  • I can't tell you how good it is to see a decent Christian witnessing on Slashdot.

    You're absolutely right about how this is behind all those kids shooting each other. Obviously, if there's "life" on other planets, that means life on Earth is pretty worthless, doesn't it? Plentiful throughout the galaxy, cheap as dirt: The two concepts are inseparable. It's also a sly move by the media to condition people to accept the evolution hypothesis -- and with government funding, too! What else is the space program but a big supposed "demonstration" of the supposed fact that the Earth is nothing special! Well, if God went that far out of his way to create it, I guess he must have had some reason. But try telling them that. Some super expensive technology is all it is, just government money wasted on fake science for the fat cats in Boston to "prove" their little theories.

    I'm telling you, I've had about enough of it.

    ------------------
    By the way, I have to tell you about this, this is just not right: Just now, as I was telling you about all this, my computer just sat here for four minutes, literally, and my browser wouldn't do a thing, everything but the title on the window went white and the computer, you know, the CPU part, it went on with this grinding noise and a light went on and stayed on while it made the noise for four whole minutes! I don't think that's right, and I made sure to buy Windows 95 because I know it works and I can trust a big company like that. It's just not right! My boy said it was "swapping" but he don't know nothing, who's it swapping with? That's nonsense! What does he know, he just plays with some silly Slacker Slackwearer program every day after school! And something called Apache, I know what that's about -- the Indians were pagans, I wasn't born yesterday! Then he tells me he's learning a language to talk to the computer -- he calls it "See", well I told him "I can't 'See' it from here!" and I laughed. Well you know how boys can be, he got all hurt and all that, but he'll have to learn to take a joke if he's going to give people crazy talk about talking to a computer in a special language for it! I'll have to put a stop to that nonsense right now. He's getting old enough to be looking for a job, not playing silly games. Computers are a good hobby but he should be learning an honest trade.

  • If they are allowed to portray life as some sort of cosmic accident, people will be more receptive to their crimes against humanity and against morality.

    What they want to do is prove that Life is the result of an incredibly unlikely, yet unintentional, accident. Because if Life had been created by God, then we could wipe it out entirely with no bigger consequence: He could simply create Life again.

    The fact that we are the result of an extremely improbable accident is what makes us, living beings, truly precious, because when we are gone there is no chance of Life ever happening again.

  • yeah, that 2001 really sucked. I guess that's why it's on so many critics' top 20 lists and stuff :)
    ---
  • Because then people would post something like this :

    f1rst p0st !
    or
    First P*st !
    or
    F i r s t P o s t !
    or
    Second Post ( minus one )!
    or
    El Firsto Posto!

    Best to ignore them till they get moderated into oblivion.

    ebw
  • I thought he was related to that supplemental insurance the duck keeps quacking about in that TV spot.
    Or is that a goose?
  • Didn't Garabaldi (sp?) ride in one of those tunnels with Walter Koenig's character?
    BTW, anybody else ever stumble across Koenig's sci-fi book some several years ago?
  • It probably takes an ocean world for life to appear spontaneously.

    Why would it take an ocean? I would think at all you would need is a large enough body of water to support the required chemical reactions. Along with the right chemicals of course. A smaller body of water might be preferable as it would keep the chemicals in closer proximity.

    ...they've found these microbes that thrive in 115F environments and eat iron and secrete sulphuric acid...

    An interesting popular book on this subject is Dark Life by Michael Ray Taylor. Taylor is a caver that worked with scientists to discover a number of previously unknown lifeforms. The book also discusses the so-called Martian fossils.

    Get it at your local library or at Fatbrain [fatbrain.com].

    Steve M

  • Yucky doo, what a lousy movie. I just came back from its opening at Silver City in Kitchener-Waterloo (Ontario, Canada :P) and it was not a good movie.

    The movie starts off well, but slowly and steadily deteriorates until the final blow - the alien. Anyone who sees it will immediately understand what I mean.

    Save yourself 122 minutes and watch something better.
  • I had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing this movie tonight. Although the special effects are Ok the story is conived and drags on and on (2 hours+)

    If you want to see it I recommend waiting for the video

    Kastor
  • After this one I have to wonder: why the sudden focus in "every space discovery has to have some tie in with extraterrestrial life".

    Let's see:

    • Finding a rock with possible"Life on Mars"
    • Every Mars mission exploring the possiblity of "Life on Mars"
    • Crashing Galileo to avoid contaminating "Life on Europa"
    • Extrasolar planets hosting "Life Around Other Stars"

    Cripes. I think we all need to lay off the "X-Files".

  • Have you SEEN this movie? No? Good, don't.

    It's about the cheesiest thing since starship troopers. Tim robbins and gary sinise (sp?) can't save this movie from being a cheese-fest. It has almost every cliche from "no, i won't let you die" to "the mission should have been yours." Awful direction, a botched script. Not to mention obvious product placement! Dr. Pepper, SGI, etc..

    The one good thing about the movie is that it is a realistic portrayal of what an actual mars mission could look like in thirty years. That was cool.
  • Actually, an ocean habitat is not neccessarily needed for the rise of life. Lynn Margulies, Carl Sagan's ex-wife and a microbiologist /darwinist /author states in her book Microcosmos one very real possible solution to the puzzle of how the biological components of the first prokaryotes "congealed" (i use the term loosely.) She said that they concentrated to a certain critical mass needed for life through protein-rich water splashing against rocks and evaporating, or possibly tidal pools evaporating. the high concentration of proto-organic molecules acheived thus could rise to life much easier in such a high-density solution than in the relatively low density of the ocean.
  • I don't agree about 2001, I think it was a movie with a useful message, unlike Mission to Mars, which I have to agree with you, was total crap. Not only is the story awful, but there constantly is publicity in almost every scene. For the scenes that didn't have any publicity, they compensated on the next scene.

    As for the story, they take the risk to elaborate on a different theory about our origin (as Humans), ok, that was a /little/ interesting. (i.e. when they solve the DNA problem)

    [warning, spoiler]

    Of course, the movie finishes on a complete cliché, with a typical happy ending.

    Sorry if I wasn't very objective, I just got home and I'm not yet over it :)

    On a positive note, I'm in the mood to go and see 2001 : Space Odysee, a movie that definitly had an interesting impact on me.
  • I'm supposed to see this movie tomorrow with my girlfriend and some friends, and from what I've seen of the previews, I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way you do. It just seems to be the best new movie to come out in a while so what good new movies are there or are coming out soon?

    I've got $60 worth of movie gift certificates that I want to use. I don't want to resort to renting Akira again. If anyone can recommend a better scifi or just a damn half-way interesting movie, please, say something or email me directly. Remove the spamless.

    Dave
  • What if it's the other way around ???
    what if the government ordered hollywood to make a movie about a mission to mars to prepare the public for a real mission to mars ???

    just a thought ...
    ---
  • Has everyone forgot about Edgar Rice Burroughs and the 'Warlord of Mars' series?? John Carter kicked some serious ass on the red planet back in the day.. Him and Tars Tarkas, wiping up Greater Barsoom with a long sword and a R-Ray pistol, one dead city at a time..
  • That the channels gouged into the desert in the northern hemisphere were caused by
    NASA spacecraft attempting to land on the southern ice cap.

  • just wanted to throw in my 2 cents on the movie. Basically it was dull. It brought out no new ideas, interesting dialog, or special effects IMHO. Though I got several laughs from their use of computers. At one point the guy from sliders decides he has to reboot the computer because the fixed a whole in the ship. (must have been using windows 98)
  • Well than this raises the questions/theories that perhaps that there was once life on Mars, but perhaps there was some sort a cataclysm taht wiped most of it out, or perhaps that there are a few underground species that could easily live in underground rivers, or were if they dired out as these canals would evidence. Its an interesting prospect either way.
  • You had to have seen 2001:A Space Odyssey back in '69 when it first came out (before ABC stole the look of the ending for their TV network promo graphics, and Elvis and everybody's brother used the intro music)to properly appreciate it (and being a sci-fi reading teen helped too).
  • yeah, the movie sucked, but no less than the u of guelph cis program does :-)

  • It is unsurprising to hear that NASA is at it again, spinning questionable material in an effort to entice and entertain the masses. The masses, dazed and stupid (before and) after seeing that new mars movie, link these two events together, and clamor for congress to spend more money on the failing and irrelevant NASA program.

    What a bunch of crap. I wouldn't be surprised if NASA underwrote the movie, and had their PR people specificly in sync with the movie folks at a very early phase.

    NASA exists for one reason - and that is to do what's necessary to generate more funding for NASA. If hyping questionable data, leveraging off of pop culture, and sending elderly celebrities into space brings in the dough, they'll do it.

    I'm a scientist in mind and heart, and space travel does fascinate me. But NASA is little more than a very expensive entertainment troupe, paid for with your and my tax dollars.

    If Disney went to Congress to ask for money to build a new theme park, would you support it?

  • I just got back from watching the movie with my oldest son. Its not 2001 but to tell you the truth I'd rather see a movie with a real ending than the ending that 2001 had. If I had to rate it i'd say its worth seeing. If you are a sci-fi nut like me you'll see it whether it's reviewed well or not. But in this case I wasn't dissappointed.

    While I'm at it I'll mention that Pitch Black was worth seeing also. I know it got dogged by the press, but Vince Diesel (sp?) really takes charge of the screen. In The Bioleroom he steals the show. The premise of Pitch Black is really quite novel.

    If you had to choose one movie currently playing I'd pick The Insider. Watched it last week with my wife. We both enjoyed the movie and now I finally know why 60 Minutes has thoroughly sucked for the last two years. Pachino is a must see anyhow.

  • Stick with the classics, Godfather, Goodfellas, UHF, Dune, Stargate, Monty Python stuff, etc. I don't see anyone making a movie featuring Wheel Of Fish again. I know, it's sad.
  • I'm going to get flamed for this
    I hope you don't take this as a flame. It's not ment to be one.

    that they are created beings and that they are loved by their Creator unless they are homosexual.
    I couldn't argue with any thing you said up tot this point but this is just flat out wrong.
    You should read up a bit in your Bible, try some of the words of Jesus. It's not your place to judge them, and God loves them no matter what. Homosexuality may be wrong, but Gods love is uncontitional. It can't be earned, bought, or bargened for. Like all many other good things it free and open.

    We've already got great states in the country, like Kansas, who are taking the proper step of banning the theory of evolution from the classroom.
    I'm actualy proud to live in Kansas, but we have NOT banned evolution, the state legislature just said that the teachers should chouse if any theory is worth teaching, Creation or Evolution.

    We need to go one step further and ban movies and stories like this, because they advance the "idea" of life beyond Earth as being possible
    Hmmm... that would be censorship, The Bible is against censorship you know...

    God loves me.
    He loves us all, even if we don't love Him back.
  • Remeber fondly, along with ERB's Venus books. (Not to mention the actual Tarzan novels, before Hollywood dumbed them down)
  • I thought "remember" looked a little odd, but had to click "Submit" for that breakthrough moment of revelation. :)
  • hey! he is a highly trained astronaut, who we all know have to spend years learning to identify foreign DNA on sight! or something...
  • This will be a slightly different post. You see, I went to grad school with the two scientists (Jim Garvin and Maria Zuber) mentioned in this article. They are really great people.

    Jim was a CS major as an undergraduate (Brown) and got a MS in CS (Stanford). But he love space stuff so he decided to become a planetary geologist. Jim was (still is?) an ice hockey goalie. This should really tell you something about him. He once crashed the IBM mainframe (JCL, yuck) by screwing around with variables in APL program. He actually liked APL. He is the only person I know that was told by his thesis adviser to stop writing more chapters (papers) for his thesis. No Jim, you're done, stop writing!

    Maria Zuber used to play women's basketball as an undergrad (Penn). She also played with us on our intramural basketball team. We sucked, but Maria did okay. The other teams would let her shoot as she was the only female in the entire league. And should could hit the outside shot.

    In our small building, the floor that I had my office on only had one woman on it (our secretary). When Maria moved to our floor we had an office warming party to celebrate her introduction into what we called the last bastillion of male supremacy. This meant beer then more beer, then off to the bar.

    When Maria got married, a bunch of us gave her a basketball, ears of corn (don't ask), and a car baby seat as her wedding present. She wasn't pregnant, but what the hell, she was Catholic and came from a large family. BTW, the priest thought it was a great gift.:-)

    BTW, I got this nick (craw) when I was in grad school.

  • The word you were looking for was 'recall'...

    They did kind of rock, in that cheezy pre-science science-fiction sort of way.. The Venus series was better than 'The Martian Chronicles', but 'Back to the Stone Age' was the best of the bunch.. Not nearly as unbelievable as the rest, well, except for the basic premise that the earth is a hollow shell. I never could do anything but laugh about the 150 year-old Civil War officer on Mars who communicated by sheer force of will.. I guess that's why they had him discover the 'Gridley wave' independantly in the later books..

    Why the hell did he have this 'Jason Gridley' character linking most/all of his series? Except as a weak expositive device, he served as nothing more than a running joke!
  • IIRC this morning on the news, a recent study into NASA revealed that they were highly complacent regarding maintenance and were equally understaffed. The findings seemed to point, interestingly enough, to NASA being 'under funded' and the #1 announcement was the immediate hiring of more personnel and a push for additional funding. Frankly, it is about time.
    Give these guys something to work with again...
  • What kind of life do you think we're hoping to find? Given a rather strong penchant for egotism among the species I figure this "life" we keep looking for has to fit in to one of two categories:

    1.Not quite as smart as us, so we can keep all those books that call us (or at least some of us, in some cases) the "superior race". Like a whole planet of folks who really dig "Wings".

    2.Dead. So we don't have to worry about them killing us for being inferior.

    I think we'd prefer to find the latter. Less hassle, even if the former could give us the excuse to ship the military off-planet

  • Nice troll, but for your information SETI is mostly funded privately, so it's not your tax dollars that are wasted.
  • That's Aflac [aflac.com]. Not Affleck. And it's a duck. The guys are talking about their insurance and wondering what to do. The duck is trying to get them to get Aflac. They ignore him (It's a DUCK! What does it know about insurance?!). IMO it's a damn funny commercial(most are dull and unimaginative. Sort of like an average school reseearch paper...blah). Okay, okay, (Offtopic, -1)...but it IS on topic for this particular thread.

    Welcome to Slashdot. Please do not feed the trolls.
  • A note: even though my pseudo-review may seem negative, I genuinely enjoyed the movie and I think it's interesting and important to see.

    Just came back from it about 3 hours ago. I found it to be exceptionally short and anticlimatic. I also saw a Discovery channel show about the production of the movie, and I was surprised to learn the extent NASA's influence. The movie excapes pesky concepts like "physics" and "reality."

    I was going to describe in depth the flaws in the movie's logic in referring to human (and Martian) DNA, as long as several errors relating to the physics in question. Realizing it was quite boring and I couldn't fit all the errors, I ditched it. Simply put, the movie creates a tremendous over-simplification of DNA and the human genome, and generally ignores the laws of high school physics. The thing they did the best was to copy 2001: A Space Oddessy and include rotating circular space stations to reduce cheesy zero-g filming. Dizzing camera movement, done by someone obviously vying for a photography nod, sort of kills that though.

    One high point: Story Musgrave (a real astronaut) was in the film for a few minutes, albeit without lines. A couple low points: product placement is all over this movie. An Isuzu concept car sits on the screen for the first ten minutes of the film. Some Dr. Pepper saves the space shuttle. M&M's are used twice as to create (over-simplified) DNA models. An SGI display screen is used to relay video transmissions from earth to the space shuttle. Kawasaki and Pennzoil cover the Mars Rover as if it was featured on Nascar.

  • Offtopic: But it must be made public (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mission to Mars: The feature film

    1) absolutely the most utterly stupid sci-fi movies I've ever seen in my entire movie-going career.

    2) had special effects done by Disney animation artists - example: in the final scene a holodeck with one of the Aliens who "seeded" earth points to Mars while a tear drop forms on his cute little eye as his planet is hit by an asteroid... so sad... I could barely control my emotions too.

    3) is based around total non-science, even the basic principal that the "Face on Mars" was artificially created was shown to be totally nothing on a second photo.

    4) acting - I'm going to leave the flaming of the acting to other ac's

    5) do not go see this film - it's a total over-hyped Apollo13 knockoff with so many obvious spot advertisements it makes you sick to your stomach
  • Even more offtopic...here's [aflac.com] a shot from the commercial.

    Welcome to Slashdot. Please do not feed the trolls.
  • You must be from Engineering :P

    down with thornborough!! :)
  • Not only do scientists know that theres water on mars they also believe there are microbes living beneath the ice. One of the reasons they want to crash the Gal satellite into one of the moons of mars is because it wasnt placed through any cleansing process and MAY still have some bacteria on it that could effect the microbes on Mars if it crashes into it. Theres something to be said when they want to crash a billion dollar hunk of metal to protect a planet, I feel theres info about Mars they are holding out on us.

    ----------------------------------
  • Ummmm... the story actually covers that (although with some pretty poor grammar).

    The channels have been filled in with sediment, they theorize. They're not just empty caverns in the rock.

    ---

  • Re:The channels are *underground* (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    perhaps there was some sort a cataclysm that wiped most of it out

    It's called being a small planet. The current hyphothesis ( ie, educated guess ) is that because of it's smaller size, it's interiour cooled faster. When the core solidified, the magnetic field protecting it from the solar wind cut out.

    That coused it to loose it's ozone layer at an accelerated rate so that UV radiation disociated the water into H2 and O2. The H2 escaped into space and the O2 oxidized the surface to what it is today ( lots of nasty peroxides ).

    As for the suggestion of looking for evidence of previously existing life in these underground cannals, that makes sense. Any fossils down there would have a much better chance of remaining undamaged than they would up on the surface.

    Who knows, maybe there are even a few surviving micro-organisms down there still today?

    Personally though - I hope not. I'm really into the idea of terra-forming mars and if it's a totally dead planet, that will make the job a lot easier, since it's hard to tell how any surviving life forms might iteract with terrestrial life once we had built up the atmosphere enough. DNA exchange is pretty common ammongst micro-organisms and mixing and matching earthly and martian microbe DNA might make for some nasty possibilities.

  • "I'm actualy proud to live in Kansas, but we have NOT banned evolution, the state legislature just said that the teachers should chouse if any theory is worth teaching, Creation or Evolution."

    This is a common misconception held by too many people on both sides of the so-called "issue."

    The simple fact is that the beliefs of the Bible and the theory of evolution are not mutually exclusive.

    The true purpose of the Bible is not to serve as a historical document or as a textbook; it exists as a moral and ethical guide, which was meant to be interpreted and discussed. The "Basic" in Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth is important; we have a free will and the intelligence to use it for a reason. If you are to accept the Creationist doctrine word for word as described in the Bible, you are missing the great message of the creation of man. We are from God, we are God's servants, and we are thinking beings with a concious will of our own.

    Your interpretation of the Bible and its story of creation are up to you, but it is very, very, important that you do interpret it, and you interpret it for yourself.
  • Ok guys, this is just getting plain wierd.
  • Huh. Interesting idea, but if the channels are old lava tubes, how did they get filled with sediment? Especially if there's no running water? (And before you propose that the lava is still in them, I suspect the difference in density between and sediment is detectable gravometrically; this should be easy to check out, and I'd be surprised if the planetologists haven't already done it.)

    The size is also a bit large for lava tubes, I think -- all the ones I've seen are tens of feet across, not a couple of hundred kilometers. It's hard to imagine what would increase the size that much; the difference in surface gravity won't do it, for sure.

    ---

  • I'm sure life could exist on Mars now. But I don't think it very probable that it could have started there in the first place. It probably takes an ocean world for life to appear spontaneously.

    I know of two alternative theories for life's origins, neither of which require an ocean. The first is that clay minerals provided the scaffolding for early self-replicating structures, which eventually evolved into nucleic acids and then broadened their living area. The second is that life began beneath the surface of the earth, where it was much more shielded from the nasty surface environment in the early days of Earth's history (asteroid and comet impacts, mostly). We keep discovering terrestrial life in deeper rock, and it's becoming difficult to explain how it got there -- especially since some of the rock is pretty old.

    Aside from that, there are some consistent indications that Mars did have an ocean for a while, early in its history. The northern hemisphere has a very thin crust, similar to terrestrial ocean bottom, and is remarkably smooth, also like terrestrial ocean bottom (in fact, the only planetary surfaces that smooth are those two). There have been some pretty good papers on it in the last year; the ones I remember were in Science, but I'm afraid I don't have the links handy. I particularly remember one which identified the drainage basins from which the water would have flowed; the channels which led it to the northern ocean are the ones which were first seen in the old Mariner photos, and which for 30 years have been considered likely to have formed by large flows of water.

    ---

  • Re:terrible books, and a joke in bad taste (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Uh, gee, thanks. Do you recommend any other boring, uninspired books for me to read? I'm sensing some hostility here.

    Well, I can't speak for the poster that your replying to, but I do understand where they are comming from.

    Like a lot of authors these days, K.S.Robinson seems to be stuck with a publisher who want's to squeeze the maximum number of books ( and thus revenue ) out of a concept.

    In the case of RGB Mars, I thought that a lot of the ideas were excellent, but that all of the details of the main characters totally dis-functional relationships with each other were tedious and boring in the extreme.

    After a while, whenever these tedious scenes popped up, I'd just skip a few pages untill the latest dis-functional soap-operatic scene was over and keep reading.

    By doing this, nothing of importance to the plot was apparently lost and reading the books became enjoyable ( instead of a tedious chore ).

    So essentially, just over a third of the series could have been cut without any real loss.

    If you have plenty of time to waste, you might also try Steven Baxters "Titan". My advice with this one is read about the first 170 pages, skip all the stuff in the middle and read the last 30 pages. If you read this way, you will think "Wow! What a brilliant concept!". If you read all 500+ pages, you will probably hate it.

    If you still have time to waste, try A.C Clarke and Gentry Lee's "Rama II" trilogy. Once again, when you hit the scenes involving everyone's dis-functional relationships, just skip a few pages until something interesting starts happening again. This is another series that would be enhanced by the removal of over a third of the verbiage

    So what's my point here? It's simply that perhaps the hostility that you are sensing is more a matter of the fact that Sci-Fi has become a high-tech version of "Mills and Boon", and that some of us are more interested in the idea of Sci-Fi as "future history" than we are in all of the sordid details of the characters sex-lives.

    take all the books to Mars and screw a sand dune while reading each one, then just count the holes, conclusively proving that they're dumber than fucking dirt on Mars.

    If I was you, I'd patent that idea as quickly as possible. It has a lot of troll potential, so if you don't grab it quick, it's all too likely that "grits boy" and his pals will soon be doing "screwing Natelie Portman naked and petrified in a hole on Mars" ;)

  • I agree that the anonymous poster went a little overboard in his/her language, and that being anonymous probably emboldened him (yes, i'm sure it's a male), but he has a certain point.

    My wife's last job was producing stories for a cable news program focussed on science stories, and I am 100% certain that CNN released this story because of the movie. There are stories like this all the time that come out of the scientific world, but they only get wider play because of "general interest." A cynical, but accurate dissection of this term is "sensational, weird, or tied to current events." And expensive movies are current events valued the same as, say, how global warming creates changing weather patterns, considered in the wake of a hurricane killing 40,000 in Central America.

    OK, so it may be a cynical viewpoint, but just because we're geeks doesn't entitle us to be ignorant about the way that things that interest us become news items. The story and the movie are not coincidental. The story would not have been run but for the movie.

    That being said, you are correct that NASA has public relations concerns which can affect the timing of their announcements... if they want funding, publicity helps, and piggy-backing a release on a big Hollywood movie can't hurt.

  • I thought it was a very subtle satire - look at the caliber of actors & the director. It was making fun of itself all the way through, and managed to be respectful yet funny. Either that, or it was just the stupidest movie in history.
  • Hey... that is how we do it!
    For instance, I can tell from residual DNA on your mouse that you are a middle-class white male from suburban New Jersey named Ralph. You will name your son Bob, and he will get in a fight in his 9th grade. You like chili dogs... I could go on and on.
    The movie was a satire, get it?

  • All the flaws in Mission 2 Mars... (Score:3)

    by Silicon_Knight ( 66140 ) on Friday March 10, 2000 @10:59PM (#1211021)
    My date and I just sat there and picked apart all the screwy crap in the movie (at least I got to see it as a complimentary screening).

    * Computer generated voices do not asphixicate (sp) from the lack of oxygen (in the scene with the "micrometeorite" )

    * Repeat after me: KE = 1/2 mv^2. You know how fast the micrometerite have to travel to punch thru the spaceship's hull *and* armor? (Even the older apollo modules have a "bumper" for micrometeriorites".

    * Even at 50% atmosphere, your eyeballs will be popping. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi, 50% atm will mean a difference of 7 lbs per sq inch.

    * Why would you want to transmit "DNA" as 3D coordinates? Woudn't transmitting it as "AGTC" be a LOT more efficient? And even if you *did* transmit it in 3D coords, you would still need a forth character to denote the DNA nucleoside bases. And, man, do you have any idea how big the Human DNA Genome is?

    * Death by decompression is a lot worse than what they showed...

    * Signal Latency from Mars is NOT 20 minutes, it's a lot lower than that.

    Well, aside from that, I thought that the Kawasaki rover and the SGI panels were a cute touch 8-)

    -=- SiKnight
  • I saw the movie a few hours ago, and I gotta say it was rather disappointing.

    I was hoping for a movie that would show a realistic Mars mission or play with some of the actual likely problems with a long-term mission to another planet (one scene came close, where the characters tried to locate and plug small hull breaches, but even that scene featured some really boneheaded moves by the supposedly highly-trained astronauts).

    Instead, the movie ambled along, going from boring inane chatter to sci-fi blatently lifted from 2001/2010 to half-hearted action sequences. I normally try not to blame films for taking artistic license with science (I can live with instant visual genome identification, for example), but in this film the characters were routinely threatened and sometimes killed by events which any high school student could see as impossible. At that point, the scientific slips are irritating; they're not just eye candy or oversimplifications, but actual driving forces in the plot.

    The film did enjoy a high point or two -- a scene where a character and his wife "dance" in zero G was especially engaging. Still, I never really cared about the characters and was distracted by the constant scientific slips -- would it be so hard to just get things right on occassion? This is sci fi, after all.

    ----

  • They already did that. What's more, they decided to backdate it so that you wouldn't have to read the first post rubbish when reading old articles. But this deleted the message that called for the first-post ban, so in fact the ban was never called for and never existed.

    Hmm, I don't seem to be replying to anything..
  • 50m? There are plenty of cavities in Earth that are bigger than that. My local underground carpark, for example.



  • Why is this post marked interesting? Someone moderate the above down as a flame. This parody of religious intolerance is so poorly done it shouldn't qualify for the low standards of "funny".
  • Yeah, they found channels with their nifty billion dollar systems paid for by your tax dollars.

    They may even be formed by water millions of years ago, look at your wonderful tax dollars at work!

    While I don't discount the possibility of water ever existing on mars, I see this as all highly circumstantial evidence. The article was written only to show the successful projects nasa has created to collect information about mars. The article lacked any convincing evidence that the channels were formed by water. If no good scientific data was sighted, why should we beleive nasa may have proven the previous existince of water on mars?

    What a timely press release of this data collected in 1997. A little late? Public begining to doubt the need for a space program?

    Anyhow, tirade aside, I believe the space program is a great investment, mars is a great investment and we should continue to appropriate large amounts of funds for larger furture projects (terraforming 2099 baby!). But this article just seems to be a lot of sensationalism and numbers, abbreviations and dazzling technology specs to dupe joe public from brooklyn. Like my arch nemesis signal11 seemd to point out, those channels could have been created by magma.

    It is pretty neat that we can look at caves under mars' surface though. I sure am proud.
  • Now all they need to do is work out weather is may have been a difffereent type of water than our stuff, that would be interesting
  • She said that they concentrated to a certain critical mass needed for life through protein-rich water splashing against rocks and evaporating, or possibly tidal pools evaporating. the high concentration of proto-organic molecules acheived thus could rise to life much easier in such a high-density solution than in the relatively low density of the ocean.

    Sure, but it takes an ocean to collect all those molecules and splash them against a rock, or concentrate them in a tidal pool.

    -- Abigail

  • You forgot a few other things that need to be banned.

    1) Astronomy - Lets go back to the geocentric model of the universe. That way we won't have any place to look for those pesky ETs. Don't forget the Bible says God stopped the Sun in the sky so the Hebrews could murder some people God didn't like. It says nothing about stopping the rotation of the Earth.
    2) Biology - It has a horrible record of finding facts to support that evil theory of evoulation.
    3) Palentology - We need to destroy all those fossils and make sure nobody finds any more. They mislead people into beleaving in evoulation.
    4) Geology - These people don't beleave in Noah's flood!
    5) Other fields of scince need to be carefully censored to remove non-christian contamination.
    6) The First Admenment - That nonsense about no establishment of religion has to go. Then we can have a good Christian Theoarchy to protect us from thinking.

    All this trouble started when Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once we ban knowledge, we can return to Paradise. Lets bring back the dark ages, led by our High Priest, Anonymous Coward.
  • You're talking like a liberal arts major....be careful. When the mods on slashdot smell that you don't have a B.S. you'll get modded down.

    I don't know what scares me more...the original post or the fact that people thought i was serious.


    -FluX
    -------------------------
    Your Ad Here!
    -------------------------
  • if space exploration and improved safety/economy for commercial aviation don't excite you, then maybe the direct transfer of technology to more dirtside pursuits will -

    http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/spinoff1999/index.ht m

  • Don't forget Greg Bear's Moving Mars, and a few other books he's written that go with it. (Heads is the only one that comes to mind, but that's on the moon.) Those books are more socio-political than anything else, though.

    Then there's Bruce Sterling's short story Sunken Gardens about a terraforming contest on Mars. (SimPlanet?) It can be found in the Crystal Express collection.

    And finally, if you can dig it up, Edmond Hamilton wrote a story in 1952 titled What's It Like Out There?
  • Ok people hold on your horses. If NASA is claiming that it has discovered any channels and is giving an "aquatic origin" to them then they are just playing pure BS. Because for the last 20 years a lot of people has been talking about this and getting pissed off for talking too much. Do you think this is fantasy? Absolutely not. People were even kicked out of Yahoo.com's lists in 1996 for these ideas. In fact it was the first time I noted a clear use of censorship on the net.

    Note that this has nothing to do with Hoagland and his cohortes. Yes, a lot of people around this trend has a pro-Hoagland view but also there are a lot who can't see this bastard 10 kilometers in shoot range. And also a lot of them talked about these channels in views completely far from any aliens, ET's or Shadow Govs.

    What ruled people inside and around NASA to hunt for the dissidence is still not fully clear. But the fact his that there is a big lobby around NASA that tries to establish the idea that Mars is "old, dry and quiet". Not at all. Mars was highly wet for quite a long time. Somewhere in time. maybe 1-2 billions , maybe a few millions years ago (people don't agree quite on this) something happened on Mars. It could be one impact. I and other people consider they were several big impacts. Mars turned into a cauldron. Due to impact, Mars waterways ran wild. In some places water managed to dig channels with a few kilometers deep (I, personally, analysed such photos in 1996). It even flew and fell back in some places. And probably Mars went so hot that it started to evaporate. Due to the low gravitation, most of it was lost into Space.

    Btw. Cydonia is mostly the result of such event. Specially if one analyses the South-Eastern/North eastern region of the plateau, then one can see a large evidence of a powerful washout among landscape formations. But it is not the most spectacular. The most spectacular I have seen was a weird erosion that suggested that water acted there as a fountain falling on rock. And made a hole 1 kilometer wide.

  • /connect aricibo.earth.solnet.com (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    #mars :You'd be fat and lazy too if you lived with six times gravity
    #mars Jove 999784631526
    = #mars :AstroNut Bugger @JoveZzzz quasar Elvis @DrkMatter M0rpheus_ @Y LadyRed gryhppl ElScorcho @[Phobos] Backson God @[Deimos]
    #mars :End of /NAMES list.
    #mars 998602183744
    *** AstroNut (~boomhauer@rtt.d0olx.nasa.gov) has joined channel #mars
    <LilGrnMan> like hell I will!!
    *** Signoff: Elvis (theking@graceland.xyzzy.orb) has left IRC [Thank you. Thank you very much.]
    <quasar> Hi Astro!
    <DrkMatter> yeah, right Grn... we all know you guys have been hoarding it for eons
    <M0rpheus_> i saw a pic of it... hold on, lemme find that site again
    <AstroNut> Lost: One polar lander. Last seen plummeting to the surface of Mars
    * LilGrnMan slaps DrkMatter with a pickle
    <AstroNut> heh-heh
    <LilGrnMan> do you ever quit, dark?
    <LadyRed> hey Astro
    <LadyRed> sorry, still no sign of your probes... You'll be the first to know if we find anything, though
    <LilGrnMan> hey Earth boy.. how's life on the sponge?
    <AstroNut> Red, Green... Harold.
    *** juelll (~user@24517.17.19866.472) has joined #mars
    <AstroNut> Boss's are on my ass again. Budget time is getting closer and they're looking for something sensational to feed the media
    <DrkMatter> astro: you got me Gillian Anderson's autograph yet?
    <quasar> sponge?
    * gryhppl is away: messages are logged
    <AstroNut> DrkMatter: you freak
    <LadyRed> That 'special' time of the year again :)
    <LadyRed> so any ideas for the big science breakthrough
    <DrkMatter> quas: the Earth, you know... that big, soggy, putrid sponge of a planet?
    <M0rpheus_> still looking for that page...
    <AstroNut> idunno.... We just had another asteroid thing and that didn't get any press
    <AstroNut> What have you guys been up to?
    <DrkMatter> (as if we care, morph)
    <quasar> me waves hi to the earthman
    <quasar> oops
    <LadyRed> Well, I got back from a weekend at the beach this morning
    *quasar waves hi tothe earthman
    <DrkMatter> Red: That was this weekend?
    <AstroNut> Oh, yeah. I've been meaning to ask you about how you deal with water there.
    *** Signoff: gryhppl (gryhppl@dj53-r.blkt9.vq.eitszu.vrn) has left IRC [Connection reset by peer.]
    <LadyRed> Well this was one of our constructed beaches, of course
    <LadyRed> There's hardly any naturally flowing water on Mars anymore
    <DrkMatter> yeah, we build our beaches underground
    <AstroNut> So where do you get the water from?
    *** gryhppl (gryhppl@dj53-r.blkt9.vq.eitszu.vrn) has joined channel #mars
    <DrkMatter> we drill for it, and create artificial "rivers" to distribute the water throughout the planet
    <DrkMatter> that way we can also maintain a certain amount of cycling, too
    <AstroNut> And this is all underground?
    <LadyRed> oh, of course. Otherwise it would all just be mud
    <DrkMatter> the dust storms pretty much demand it
    <AstroNut> duh... stupid me
    <DrkMatter> (we don't expect much less from an earther)
    <AstroNut> hah-hah... so you've built an underground network of aquaducts then
    <DrkMatter> yup, a few of them have caved in and formed the canyons you can see from your telescopes
    <DrkMatter> but our engineering is advanced enough there's virtually no chance of that anymore
    <AstroNut> Great! I think I can make a story out of this
    <LadyRed> cool. And I got a killer tan from the fission radiators
    <LadyRed> When are you gonna get off that rock of yours and come see us?
    <AstroNut> Someday, red... someday
    <AstroNut> I'm gonna go type up this "research" (heh)
    <DrkMatter> by Jim, glad to help
    <AstroNut> later guys
    <LadyRed> *smooch* see-ya, luv
    *** Signoff: AstroNut (~boomhauer@rtt.d0olx.nasa.gov) has left IRC [Is there anybody out there?]
  • It was Baaaadd - sooo Baaaadd....

    When the lights came up the 1/2 the audience just stared at the screen with glazed eyes and the other half snickered - out loud - for a minute (7:25 showing at the Paramount - I swear.) Plainly put the movie screams for a midnight showing and an irreverent audience:

    "Luke..." I am your Father
    Danger! Danger! Danger Will Robinson "Oxygen is at 60 percent"
    "Meatloaf! Don't pick your friends! Pick your nose!"
    "We are Them - They are Us" I am the Walrus - kukkakoobajoo...
    Do it for The Gipper!

    This turkey will be out on video inside of a month - even then just fast-forward to the really great inside-the-spaceship scene (a complete rip from 2001 but at least it was a rip from a classic and not from a B movie like "The Mummy" like so many other parts of the film) and turn off the audio. Afterwards return the film unwound - you'll be doing someone a kindness.

    -- Michael
    Salon had a great synopsis of the reviews:
    http://www.salon.com/ent/log/2000/03/10/mars_rev iews
  • Hmmmm... an anonymous post that wants anonymous posting turned off? That's beside the point. I personally keep my comments set to -1 Flat so i can read all the trolling... some of them are very funny. If you are offended by it or you don't want to read it, set up an account, set your comment threshhold to 1 and *poof* all trolls and 90% of the Anonymous Cowards are gone... no reason to ban IP addresses when people like myself enjoy the troll posts....
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  • Hehehe....i didn't finish, but i was a Journalism major myself. The only one in my CompSci class who wasn't getting a B.S in CS or some form of Engineering.

    The kids on slashdot that moderate my sarcastic comments down are just pissed that they have to provide tech support because their parents made them buy the GeForce with no financial help. I guess i'll just resign myself to moding them down on the Kurt Vonnegut discussion websites or something. :P

    My favorite techie quote: "Yah I read literature. I like Asimov, Tolken, and I've read all of the DeathGate cycle."


    -FluX
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  • Even at 50% atmosphere, your eyeballs will be popping. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi, 50% atm will mean a difference of 7 lbs per sq inch.

    Er, no. Judging from the Soyuz 11 [straightdope.com] case, vacuum exposure doesn't do that sort of damage (lack of air will kill in a few minutes, of course, but without gory SFX).
    /.

  • What they want to do is prove that Life is the result of an incredibly unlikely, yet unintentional, accident. Because if Life had been created by God, then we could wipe it out entirely with no bigger consequence: He could simply create Life again.

    Not clear. What is clear is that humanity (at least US society) is largely willing to overlook the sanctity of life, vis-a-vis abortion (visited upon the only form of human life that is defined as 100% innocent of any crime of thought or deed).

    But while theoretically God could create Life again, the Judeo-Christian God is widely represented as having made Himself quite clear that we're a "one-shot deal".

    Though, other religions view creation as ever-occurring, or at least repeating, and some of those "other religions" include Christ-based (and perhaps Judaism-based) ones.

    Personally, what I believe is that it is our valuing of human life that strengthens both our willingness and our ability to preserve all life, throughout the universe, regardless of size or "intelligence", in the long run, if that is indeed an aspect of our "destiny". If we don't value each human life as unique and special, the slope from there to not valuing any form of life at all is steep, short, and slippery.

    The fact that we are the result of an extremely improbable accident is what makes us, living beings, truly precious, because when we are gone there is no chance of Life ever happening again.

    Indeed, if that ever becomes widely accepted as "fact", we should then become a better species.

    But that isn't quite what is being promoted by much of today's scientific/educational system, which generally depicts life as nearly inevitable given a (comparatively) small amount of the right elements, input energy (solar or geothermal), and a modest amount of time (a billion or so years).

    Note that I agree strongly with the sentiments you express, just not so much with your belief that "they" wish to prove them as true! So thanks for your beautiful post!

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