[meteorite-list] Hot flash more goof balls?

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Feb 2 01:16:40 2005
Message-ID: <42007021.A7714EBD_at_bhil.com>

     Hi, Dave, and List,

         Obviously, we are entering the Tucson Lull when The List goes
     unnaturally quiet! Time for the supremely silly Post! Mine, I
     mean.

         So, let's talk about the Xenotech website. I don't know how
     much of it you've looked at, but I'd already spent quite a few
     hours on its hundreds of pages. First, it's not "these jokers;"
     it's one individual who seems to done a truly massive amount of
     work completely on his own and seems to have examined every image
     from every camera -- hazard cam, pan cam, microscopic imager, you
     name it -- through every filter from every sol.

         I can draw some conclusions about him: 1. he's hard-working
     and thorough; 2. there are some large gaps in his knowledge which
     suggests to me that he's probably entirely self-taught; 3. he's
     honest enough that when he went way overboard with one object
     which later photos showed to be just a rock, he left the page up
     on his site to show how easy it was to be deceived; 4. he's right
     about some (but maybe not most) things.

         Actually, Marcin at meteoryt.net posted to the List this guy's
     page on assembling true color images of the martian surface:
     <http://www.xenotechresearch.com/truecol1.htm>
     <http://www.xenotechresearch.com/opsol15a.htm>
     <http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsq.htm> and
     <http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsbcb1.htm>.
     This is one of the things he's right about. And the images he
     assembles using the calibration data are really nice, vivid, and
     probably accurate.

         Now, the fossils. I think he's wrong. But a few of his
     images are almost convincing, like the stereo view at the top of
     the page you referenced in your email. If it's not a fossil, then
     it's a geologically produced feature. What kind of geology
     produces that? Of course, we know jack nothing about Mars'
     geological processes except for sweeping generalizations, so we
     can't answer that question.

         Quite "reasonably," he sees only very primitive soft-bodied
     and simple shelled forms (no shark's teeth!), what you would have
     seen on Earth 500,000,000 years ago. Remember, we went to these
     locations because we thought they would be old sea beds. There are
     probably lots of people on this List with fossil expertise. Maybe
     they should look at his site:
     <http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsindx.htm>

         I think he suffers from Pattern Recognition Syndrome. Human
     beings are so attuned to finding patterns that they find them when
     they are not there! I spent a long time staring at one his really
     big processed images from the microscopic imager that suddenly I
     saw an Hallucinogena fossil, like in the Burgess Shale. I went and
     banged my head against the wall for a while and it went away.
     Appropriate name, though.

         He really applies very heavy processing to the images to bring
     out the features he decribes. He may be overdoing it, but I see
     few signs of processing artifacts. Frankly, the images do not go
     far enough to establish anything incontrovertibly. Are those sand
     dunes in the bottom of Endurance crater, or eroded ice? The photos
     are eerie and inconclusive, but beautiful.

         The other thing he has a problem with is the accepted time
     scale. He sees certain features in the photos and says "These
     can't be more than a few weeks old!" because he assumes more
     Earth-like rates of erosion and modification, when an always
     cautious professional would say "These features have remained
     essentially unmodified for many millions of years." The truth? We
     don't really know.

         Mars obviously modifies its surface much more slowly than
     Earth (hence the craters). The Tharsis volcanoes were first said
     to be inactive for 1.3 billion years, then 800 million years, then
     150 million years, and a just released NASA study says some of the
     flows are only 2 million years old, maybe younger, and there may
     be water ice glaciers on the upper slopes. The professional starts
     with the most cautious judgment and inches slowly forward over the
     decades...

         This guy sees very active water features, what would fit with
     the "high" aquifer model, with wet soil just under the surface and
     assembles a certain amount of evidence for a wet (and very salty)
     Mars. Did you know that the humidity on Mars is almost always
     100%? Hmmm.

         The essential question is: how Earth-like is Mars? We don't
     know the answer; that's why we want to go there! And occasionally
     he has a real point:
     <http://www.xenotechresearch.com/wetclay1.htm>
     Whatever the RAT got into, it was gooey goop, not rock!

         Another possibly valid point is his reaction to the photos
     that show countless trillions of "blueberries" spread out over the
     Martian plain as far as the eye can see (a long way) at a density
     of 10,000 blueberries per square foot. He asks, if these are
     concretations that originated inside subsurface rocks, a) if
     erosion is astronomically slow on Mars, how could this truly
     astronomical number of tiny objects be spread out so uniformly
     over such a vast area? and b) where is there any sign of the
     strata from which they eroded? I think he's got a good point
     there.

         One of things that bothers me about his "fossils" is that they
     (usually) show no "color" or greyscale difference from the matrix
     "they" are embedded in (except for the trillions of blueberries).
     Even in the cleanest carbonate fossils, the residual matter of the
     organism tints the fossil to some degree.

         I grew up in the limestone heartland, on the Mississippi River
     between the mouth of the Missouri River and the Illinois River,
     home to more limestone than the law allows. My first fossil was
     collected at the age of six, with the help of a 2-lb. sledge and a
     chisel, out of the front steps of my home, a perfect Dinorthus
     shell, much to the dismay of my father who didn't think much of
     the hole I left in the steps. While he was filling the hole with
     cement, he explained that the steps were entirely made up of
     fossils and that I should study them in place if I wanted to be
     able to sit down comfortably.

         We had an entire slab of snowy white limestone that was almost
     nothing but crinoids (80%) for one of the steps. There was always
     a greyscale difference between individual fossils and the matrix
     or other fossils. Otherwise, there would be no way of
     distinguishing them. Xenotech's "fossils" are structural shapes
     without any tonal differences from their surroundings. Maybe the
     photos don't show enough greyscales for it to show or maybe the
     "fossils" are just artifacts of Martian erosion processes we don't
     know about. Equally, we don't know what fossils would be like on
     Mars, either.

         I'm not a geologist nor a paleontogist either, so I can't
     definitively judge his claims. Likely not one chance in a hundred
     that he's right, but even ONE Martian fossil would be blockbuster
     enough! He exhibits occasional mild paranoia, true, but wow, he's
     put a lot of work into his site and obviously been "living on
     Mars" for a while now, in a speculative sense.


     Sterling K. Webb

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David Freeman wrote:

> Dear List;
> Seems someone has fossils being found on Mars! Shark teeth,
> stromatolites, sea urchins, what next, piltdown man?
> No, piltdown man drove a car on Mars!
>
> http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsindx.htm
>
> Guess NASA hides much from us according to these jokers, see for a great
> laugh!
> Happy Monday,
> Dave F.
> WY
>
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Received on Wed 02 Feb 2005 01:16:01 AM PST