Richard Hoagland On Martian Revelation 2-5-05 - Page 5

Reply 63 - I think Hoagland means "clueless," as in people are "clueless" to what he believes is on Mars, and he's so obsessed with this that everything is an extension of that philosophy. It's a sign of identity theft, the lights are on, but nobody's home.

way cool observation, gump.

pixels beget pixels....

but were they ever "true color pixels" to begin with?

Raptor Witness
That is not what he (hoagland)thinks.
are you reading his statements? It doesn't appear that you are. Actually I think that most people are clueless as to the fact that war of any kind produces casualties. I don't see any Americans or Brits who are genuinely concerned over the loss of Human life. Mainly it's just they attacked us when we least expected it! No fair.
Reality is when you are at war people are going to die. Sometimes those people are innocent. If you dis agree with war you don't call for the burning in hell or otherwise of a fellow human. If you do agree with war you are prepared to accept casualties. In WWII when the carpet bombing of Japan was going on there was no public outcry for the innocent civilians burned to death in their beds as they slept. Face facts people WWIII is at hand! millions more will die to feed the warmongers appetite and nothing hoagland has done is creating this situation. If anything it is the attitude of hatred being hurled at his "research" that creates division within our world community.

sincerely, #68

Hoagland has never, in his life, conducted research.

Research suggested a scientific process - and nothing he does is based on that.

He just does whatever crap he thinks will get a response.

Doug

You know what the worst thing is? Hoagland is obsessed with finding life Out There on comets, moons, in caves, underwater... and he waved away the loss of what we now know to be 55 human lives in London with a regal swish of his hand.

And in reply to whoever posted the following anonymously:

I don't see any Americans or Brits who are genuinely concerned over the loss of Human life

... I can assure you I was more than "concerned" last Thursday morning when I was frantically waiting for replies to my "are you okay?" emails and calls to my publishers and friends in London. "Concern" doesn't even come close when you're wondering if people you know have been spattered over a tube tunnel wall or a London street like pizza by some fanatic with an explosive-packed rucksack.

I agree - "I don't see any Americans or Brits who are genuinely concerned over the loss of Human life" is complete and utter bollocks.

I was emailing and phoning people I know who live and work in and around London.

I mean - excuse my language - but ***king hell, my other half and I were on a Picadilly line train going into Kings Cross less than 40 hrs before the bombs went off.

Concernded over the loss of human life - hugely.

Prepared to change my way of life due to some terrorists. Never.

Doug

That is the general impression I get from people around me ; "It's a sad thing, but hey, it wasn't us, it wasn't here, life goes on, don't blame it on the..., it won't happen to us."
Hello? Have a little compassion, spend some minutes of your otherwise empty thougthts on it; what if you were asked to have some patience because the bomb basically blasted your 4-year old daughter in a million pieces? While an extreme example some may say, something like this is the real thing in a similar situation.
I personally regret this happening very much and that's what these people are after.
It is a time of 'war' and everybody has the responsibility now to pay a little more attention in the future, that is, also to that strange, nervous man standing next to you on the train; sad, but true. This kind of war can't be fought with legions. People should stand up and work along, instead of being so damn naïve.

Nico

Reply 72 "Clarke's theory of artificiality [of Iapetuswas not a theory at all, but part of a novel. It was a fictional device."

Reply 73 "jules verne also wrote some fiction about 20,000 leagues under the sea, and rockets to the moon.", implication, that SciFi came true so Iapetus being artificial could/should (I don't know) be true.

Well, for one thing, there are plenty of things in SciFi that haven't come to pass, eg, manned voyages to Jupiter utilizing stasis in 2001. For another, we just don't know enough about Iapetus, it's odd, but one side (the dark IIRC) faces into its orbit, so the idea that it collects dust is a good one. As for the ridge, it's odd, unique, and in conjunction with the light/dark nature of the moon, it's very interesting. Still, we don't know enough yet. Io has much greater surface alteration due to the tidal force of Jupiter, so maybe it's a neater example of that sort of effect.

The mining colony theory in reply 71 definitely falls to Occums razor, for instance, why would these aliens with advanced technology worry about the exhaust from their spaceships going onto the raw materials they're mining? How do you know which side they're mining?

Is that really Richard Hoagland posting under the name "MARS REVEALER:CYDO_NAUT_KNIGHT"?

If the aliens are coming, I want to know!

Hynee writes (reply 8 :
"The mining colony theory in reply 71 definitely falls to Occums razor,"

That must be Occam's other razor, the one he didn't tell anyone about because he didn't want to be thought of as multiplying razors without necessity.

A single simple explanation which covers several disparate phenomena falls to Occam's razor? A set of vague special "explanations", one for each phenomenon to be accounted for, stands where the simple single explanation falls?

The dark side of Iapetus does face in the direction of orbit. It does not follow that "the idea that it collects dust is a good one". Seven other Saturnian satellites apart from Iapetus are gravitationally locked so that one side always faces Saturn, but Iapetus is the only one with two very different figures for albedo. And where is this dust supposed to have come from? Iapetus is well beyond the outermost ring, and isn't in the plane of the rings. Satellites which do actually move within the ring system, and which are apparently responsible for keeping the rings in place, *don't* get anomalous albedos due to dust accumulation on their leading surfaces. Nor should you expect them to.

If the dust is following the same roughly circular orbit that Iapetus is, then it will orbit Saturn *at the same speed* as Iapetus. Galileo showed that different objects will fall through space at the same rate regardless of differences in size or mass. It's easy to imagine Iapetus overtaking the dust so that it slams into the leading face of the moon like flies hitting a windscreen, but that isn't how gravity works.

On the other hand, if the dust was following a highly elliptical orbit then it could slam into Iapetus at speed, but then we wouldn't expect it to cover the leading face of the moon but some other face, depending on the details of the elliptical orbit. And where *did* this convenient dust come from, and how? Why does the equatorial ridge so neatly bisect the dust-covered matt ellipse, if the dust came from some random direction in space and is unrelated to the ridge? And why is there nothing like Iapetus, not just in the Saturnian system (44 moons and counting of which 31 have measured albedos) or in the Jovian system, or *anywhere*?

It is by having one-off ad-hoc explanations for each observed phenomenon, each of which "explains" just that one phenomenon and nothing else, that you multiply entities practically without limit. Because the explanations in turn need to be explained. And if the explanations for the explanations are similarly ad-hoc and one-off then you need explanations for the explanations of the explanations, and so on.

"for instance, why would these aliens with advanced technology worry about the exhaust from their spaceships going onto the raw materials they're mining?"

For the same reason that you (hopefully) don't sprinkle powdered garbage on your food before you eat it, and you don't pack the interior of your PC with mud to keep it cool, and you don't site soot-belching factories at the place where they will cause as much annoyance and damage as possible.

Try to imagine how much harder it would be to keep the Martian rovers operating if there was a daily rain of soot falling on them. It would coat the camera lenses, coat the solar panels, get inside and clog all the sensitive instruments. Now imagine an even higher-tech operation which is far vaster in scale than anything humans have ever attempted. It might involve solar panels and cameras. It would certainly involve a lot of complex and sensitive equipment. And if the stuff that's being mined is also being refined in-situ, it makes no sense to contaminate it at the same time as it is being refined. Even if it was just a matter of cutting down the window cleaning bills for the site manager's portakabin, it would make sense to minimise the sooty fallout over the site of the mining operations.

"How do you know which side they're mining?"

First of all, I'm not suggesting that the mining is ongoing. If it was, we would see evidence of the current activity. The miners have taken as much as they wanted and moved on.

Now, look at a picture which shows the equatorial ridge, e.g. at

At the left we see the highest part of the ridge/ramp, so high that it makes a clearly visible bump at the visible edge of the moon. At the other end of the ridge we see a huge pit or depression. That, I would sugest, is one of the mined areas.

My I.Q. is 195. How about the rest of you geniuses? Most of you are clearly illiterate donkey faces! And that is why I love you! I never said that Americans and Brits weren't concerned with their own people, I said they were insensitive to the attrocities of war unless it affects them personally, so thanks for proving my point. Oh and by the way I believe that All groups of people are basically this way. That is why it is so important to identify ourselves as humans first, Americans, Brits, Africans, Christians, Scientists, Morons, etc...second!

I go for Occums Razor just on the basis of needing some explanations as soon as some weird details of the moon, the ridge, come to light. It's crossed by some large craters, so it's ancient (100's of millions of years), so there's plenty of opportunity for weird solar system type of stuff to form it. My guess is that the core cooled and shrunk after the crust had cooled, and this left a small size difference, and the hemisphere's cracked into two halves. Still pretty weird though, and there isn't evidence of mass cracking near the ridge.

As for the difference in albedo of the hemispheres:
The dark side of Iapetus does face in the direction of orbit.
Different from what I've read, but I don't know for sure.

I've read on the internet that the main theory is that it is coated by stuff coming off Phoebe, and the leading hemisphere's spectrum almost matches Phoebe's.

Iapetus' orbital inclination would be a good way to get a difference in velocity with the circular orbits of particles, enabling it to collect dust. Phoebe also orbits retrograde to the other satellites of Saturn, meaning particles that come off it would be orbiting opposite to Iapetus. So maybe Iapetus mops up all that material spiraling inwards (I don't have a good reason for the particles to spiral in from Phoebe).

Just looking at what I wrote about the hemisphere differences, it does look overly complicated and lacking in details, but it's still better than an alien explanation, because that begs all sorts of questions, like "why no evidence elsewhere", and "why do alien explanations evaporate as soon as we get concrete details", the latter illustrated by the canals on Mars theory of Lowell. You can always go for catch alls, like they want to hide themselves from us, but that gets into circular arguments, like the fact that they've left a bloody big ridge on a moon!

My ridge theory is also lacking as I noted, but I don't believe any alien explanations, or the need for them (they're not simpler).

muy retardo senor

re:92
Someone with an Iq of 195 might be expected to be able to spell Faeces

Doug

Hynee: "the hemisphere's cracked into two halves"

- that might explain the presence of a ridge, but not any of the actual features of the ridge. Why only on one side? Why the straightness? Why along the equator? (ridges on other moons seem to be aligned fairly randomly, and there are several per moon). Why does it bisect the dark region so neatly? Why so high compared to ridges on other moons? Why is it (apparently) higher at one end than at the other? Why is the variation in height so smooth and gradual? In other words, why is it so much like a long shallow ramp, if that isn't what it actually is?

"I've read on the internet that the main theory is that it is coated by stuff coming off Phoebe"

That's the theory. But Iapetus orbits 3,561,300 km away from Saturn (info from nineplanets.org). Phoebe orbits 12,952,000 km away from Saturn. That's nearly four times further. To get from Phoebe to Iapetus, dust would have to either follow a very elliptical orbit or do a lot of spiraling inwards (and I don't have a good reason for the particles to spiral in from Phoebe either). Phoebe is only 220Km across, and Iapetus is 1460Km across, and yet we are supposed to imagine that enough spots have been knocked of phoebe, by meteors or whatever, to thoroughly coat one side of Iapetus? A surface area many times the surface area of Phoebe? Meteors hitting Phoebe would send sizeable secondary fragments shooting off up, down, left, right, inwards, outwards, every which way. They would not (as far as I can see) send a planet-sized stream of dust spiraling neatly inwards. And even when Phoebe and Iapetus are as close together as they can get, they're still 9 million Km apart or so. That's something like twenty-five times the distance from Earth's moon to Earth. Most of the time they're a lot further apart than that. And Phoebe is *much* smaller than our moon.

How likely would you consider the chance of dust from our moon being able to thickly coat just one side of a satellite in low Earth orbit, while leaving the other side (and other satellites) pristine? Now, replace our moon with something a fraction of the size and many times further away. Replace the sattelite being coated with something which is much larger than the satellite providing the coating. What does that do to the chances?

"why no evidence elsewhere"

If ultra-low albedo is due to sooty residue from chemical rockets, then the ultra-low albedo of Phoebe *is* "evidence elsewhere". Phoebe could have started off as big as Iapetus. When it became small and irregularly shaped as a result of extensive mining, there was no longer any need for a ramp, and no suitable location for one either, so rockets just blasted directly off into space. This eventually resulted in the whole of the remnant of phoebe being covered in so much sooty residue that normal mining was no longer viable. A few last dregs were obtained from Phoebe by directing asteroids towards it so that they would knock chunks off the surface, and then operations were switched to Iapetus.

There's only one ramp per solar system because that's all that's needed at any given time. And the builders of the ramp don't make their presence known because they aren't here. They have long since moved on. Occasionally, maybe once in every hundred million years, a new set of visitors come. They repair the ramp, take what they need, and then move on. Soon it will be our turn to repair the ramp. Maybe.

Doug,
The word is faces: Plural of face. Meaning the front of the human head, where the eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks, and forehead are.
The word you are refering to might be Feces meaning the body’s solid waste matter, composed of undigested food, bacteria, water, and bile pigments and discharged from the bowel through the anus.

Yes, I know how to spell that one too.

You were clearly attempting to use the latter word...

To call someone 'donkey face' is odd. To call someone 'donkey shit' is childish, but not out of the question.

And the word I am refering to - using the correct british spelling is

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=faeces

British Spelling or American Spelling - you still spelt it wrong...

And one has to question the credentials of someone claiming to have an IQ of 195 and yet who is perfectly happy with calling someone 'donkey shit'

Talking of which - I cant believe someone actually bought Hoaglands theory on Iap. How sad.

Doug

Doug (reply 99):
From Wikipedia: "Feces (American English) or faeces/fæces (Commonwealth English) are semi-solid waste products from an animal digestive tract...". Google, and you will find that feces is actually the most common spelling on the net, as is usual with American vs. British spellings. Fæces, with the ligatured a and e, is probably the most correct British spelling, but few can be bothered to work out how to type it on a keyboard that doesn't have an æ key. Even if they could, it isn't guaranteed to be displayed correctly on a web page.

"To call someone 'donkey face' is odd. To call someone 'donkey shit' is childish, but not out of the question."

- for you, perhaps, but please don't project your scatological tendencies onto others.

"Talking of which - I cant believe someone actually bought Hoaglands theory on Iap. How sad."

You mean somebody actually bought Hoagland's theory? I wonder who that could be.

You say of Hoagland that nothing he does is based on a scientific process - but your response whenever there is a mere mention of Hoagland seems to reveal a deep, burning, searing, all-consuming hatred. How scientific is that?

About Hoagland's reference to the victims of terrorism, I have said elsewhere that it was uncalled for, and really that is all that need so be said about it. To go further, e.g. to say that Hoagland deserves to rot in hell, is similarly uncalled for. We are supposed to be rational entities. Hoagland has explained his position. And he was not incorporating the bombing victims into his theories, any more than he was incorporating the jailing of Judith Miller, or the choice of London by the Olympic committee, to which he made similar passing references. He was trying to explain why he *doesn't* generally write about such things, unlike other bloggers. In his opinion, Deep impact "is the only lasting story, among all that's gone on this week, which will ultimately affect all our lives". You can agree with that or you can disagree with it, but I don't see how you can characterise it as an exploitation of the victims.

The only possibly reprehensible thing in Hoagland's blog article is the use of the word "clueless". But Hoagland explained that in his opinion we are all (including himself) clueless. And it is true that in general we simply are not informed about the things that matter most, or we are misinformed. There is a thread in this forum, "The rest of the world is oblivious", which makes that very point. Nobody, to my knowledge, has objected to that thread, or to the use of the word "oblivious" (essentially synonymous with clueless) to describe the great bulk of mankind.