VOL VIII, No 1
March 15, 2004
EDITOR: Amy Acheson
PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong
LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart
CONTENTS
MOONWALKING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson
SPIRIT CHASES A MARTIAN MIRAGE . . . . . . Wal Thornhill
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
MOONWALKING
By Mel Acheson
Did Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon? Either he did or he didn1t. The answer
will be absolutely true or absolutely false. We need only look at the
appropriate evidence: a footprint in the dust of Mare Tranquillitatis. There
may arise quibbles about that evidence, but at least there can be no doubt
about the possibility of an absolute answer.
My quibble is not with the evidence or with the answer or even with the
possibility of an answer. My quibble is with the question. It's not a
question we can answer honestly. It leaves out too much. It assumes too
much. It's a beggar of a question. A better question is: Do we know if Neil
Armstrong walked on the Moon? An answer to this question must
incorporate an awareness of our cognitive processes and a theory of knowledge. It must advert not just to the readout but also to the instrument that's probing the question with particular sensors and circuitry. The appropriate evidence
will be not only footprints in the dust but also the organization of
synapses in our brains.
Absolute truth is too small and too simplistic for the large and complex
reality of which we and our cognitive instrumentation are a part. Absolute
truth fails to account for the curiosity and the creativity that ask and
answer the questions from which truth arises.
An assertion of absolute truth stumbles over an assumption that's common
especially in Western cultures: There exists an objective reality,
independent of human perception, that can be known by way of perception.
What could be more obvious? I'm thirsty for coffee, I grab my cup, I drink,
and my thirst is satisfied. The proof of the hypothesis is in the successful
completion of the task. The fact that the alleged objective reality was and
remains a HYPOTHESIS, a supposition, a cognitive map to guide behavior is
taken so much for granted that it's usually unconscious. Experiences
naturally divide into things that are classified as "me" and things that are
classified as "not me". These categories become linked with the categories
of "inside" and "outside", "here" and "there". Before we know it, we've
created a cognitive structure for understanding our experiences based on
metaphors: "Objective reality is entities out there" and "subjective reality
is entities in here." But an "entity" is an artifact of the way we classify
our experiences.
This metaphor of objective reality can be quite useful--as long as we don't
push it to do work as a foundation for philosophy. If I want coffee,
grasping my objective cup and sipping the objective liquid inside (rather
than, say, dreaming about it) will satisfy my desire. But if I ask if my cup
is really a ceramic container or an ensemble of atoms held in particular
relationships with each other by molecular forces, I've changed the subject:
I'm no longer drinking coffee from the cup, I'm fitting a cognitive
structure around my experience. And in discussing it--or even in thinking to myself about it--I'm no longer talking about drinking coffee; I'm talking about talking about it. I'm using language and concepts, symbols and metaphors. I can't even conceive of an objective phenomenon without CONCEIVING of it. My cognitive formulations that I conceive as "relationships with objective phenomena" are themselves a PART of the objective phenomena. I meet my own subjectivity as an object in my objective world.
These ideas that bite themselves on their ankles only seem confusing. It
doesn't have to be this way. The objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy is
useful for drinking coffee, but, as I said, it stumbles over itself when
it's taken as a ground for thinking about drinking coffee. We need to
add to our experiences of thinking about drinking coffee the experiences of
cognitive scientists: They have examined the responses of nerves to stimuli
and have noticed the resultant activity. The responses link into groups and
the groups into coherent structures of gestalts following sensorimotor nerve
connections established genetically or through repeated experiences. "Nerves
that fire together wire together."
This activity is not the direct perception of objects "out there" that
objectivism assumes but the creation of an organized manifold of metaphors.
This organization selects particular experiences, emphasizes certain
aspects, de-emphasizes others, and makes them feel familiar by linking them
(i.e., by generating metaphors) with basic experiences that are determined
by the structure and functioning of our bodies. Lakoff and Johnson, for
example, in PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH, demonstrate how abstract concepts are
built up from assemblages of more basic and concrete metaphors. Objective
reality--or subjective reality for that matter--is just one way we structure
our experiences so we can live to do it again tomorrow.
This answers the first half of my quibble with the question of Armstrong
walking on the Moon. The second half concerns what we count as "knowing."
There are a couple of difficulties with the concept of "knowing." In
English, the word generally means only extreme states: You know (for sure)
or you don't. It takes special effort to convey that you only "half know"
something. Most of what we count as knowing lies in this conditioned region,
but when we talk about it we sound more certain than we have any right to
be.
The second difficulty is a bias to count as knowledge only what's true. But
knowing what's false can perform exactly the same function: It's true
that I can't fly; it's false that I can fly; and knowing either one can save my
life if I'm tempted to follow a bird off a cliff. Douglas Allchin writes:
"The key epistemological distinction is thus not between true and false,
fact and artifact. Instead, it is between empirically unresolved questions,
or uncertainty, and resolved questions, where fact and error have been
differentiated". [K]nowledge is characterized by a resolved/uncertain
distinction."
His conclusion from this insight is that "fully resolving fact and error
means probing for error in addition to developing confirmation." In other
words, to develop RELIABLE knowledge--as distinct from merely VERIFIED
knowledge, which is unreliable--you must take seriously the question, "What
else could it be?" You must probe for alternative explanations and devise
tests that will differentiate among them.
Do we know if Armstrong's boot "really" left an impression in the moon dust?
Anyone sufficiently motivated might raise the money to build a rocket to
visit the southwest corner of the Sea of Tranquillity. His eyes could focus
the reflection of light to generate impulses in his optic nerves that might
link into a gestalt he thinks of as Armstrong's boot print (or not). If he
calls that process "knowing," then he knows Armstrong did (or didn't) walk
on the Moon.
But pay close attention: "that process" is NOT what is usually meant by
"objective knowledge." "Objective knowledge" is (aside from quibbles about
the accuracy of senses) absolutely-incorrigibly-really-there True. "That
process" is inherently vulnerable: New data or new ideas could drag the
"resolved" distinction back into the ambiguous territory of the "uncertain."
Cognitive knowledge is relatively true, not in the "absolute relativism"
sense of some postmodernists, but in an empirical sense of being related to
the morphologies of experiences and nerves. The manifolds of coherent
metaphors we call theories are not of equal and incommensurable value. They
compete for "optimal understandability" in a market-like dynamic that
connects evolving experiences with evolving cognitive structures.
Objectivism works well as a way of structuring practical experiences. But it has its dark side. When presumptions of objectivity are imported into more abstract thinking--say, about gravitation or the Big Bang--the ground of
discourse imperceptibly shifts from the process of making metaphorical sense
to a pseudo-religious affirmation of absolutely-incorrigibly-really-there
Truth. No human nervous system need be around and, not unexpectedly, any who
disagree are apt soon not to be around. Belief and conformity take the place
of understanding and inquiry. The One Truth eclipses the awareness of
metaphorical mapping. "What else could it be" becomes a declaration instead
of a question. And if the audio is muted, the video of scientific activity
becomes indistinguishable from that of an Inquisition.
Stephen Toulmin wrote: "For, though Nature must of course be left to answer
to our interrogations for herself, it is always WE who frame the questions.
And the questions we ask inevitably depend on prior theoretical
considerations." Cognitive science can trace this dependency to the
biological level of prior nerve linkages and tie abstract reasoning to
sensorimotor inference structures. This should be welcomed as a foundational
insight in the philosophy underlying the sciences. But the True Believers in
the Absolute Truth of currently accepted theories are greeting the results
with wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Did Armstrong "really" walk on the Moon? Did the universe "really" explode
15 billion years ago? Or do the ideas "Armstrong walked on the Moon" and
"the universe exploded" make sense of certain otherwise ambiguous
experiences, which sense could be undone and reconfigured with different
ideas in the flood tide of experiences? The choice between these questions
will distinguish science as a cognitive activity or as a pseudo-religious
ritual.
~Mel Acheson
thoth@whidbey.com
********************************************************
SPIRIT CHASES A MARTIAN MIRAGE
By Wal Thornhill
[editor's note: This article was written as a day-by-day commentary while
the Mars rover missions were in their early phases of exploration. It
reflects only that data which has been released to the public to date. More
will be added to the holoscience website later.]
23 January 2004
[Author's note: While this report was being written came worrying news that
the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, is not functioning normally.]
On January 21, 2004 ground controllers were able to send commands to Spirit
and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but
they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during
scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day.
Project managers have not yet determined the cause, but similar events
occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission. The team is
examining a number of different scenarios, some of which would be resolved
when the rover wakes up after powering down at the end of the martian day
(around midday Pacific time Wednesday).
As discussed later in this report, Spirit is moving about in an area where
there are frequent dust devils. The dust devils are not simply rotating
winds caused by rising warm air. They are the form lightning takes in the
thin Martian atmosphere. So they are a great hazard to surface craft, with
their powerful electrostatic and electromagnetic effects. Just as the
Galileo spacecraft suffered repeated computer glitches when it flew too
close above the plumes of the electrical jets on Io, it is possible that
Spirit has become a lightning rod and suffered internal arcing ? with
possibly serious consequences for its onboard electronics. I sincerely hope
not!
Full text of this article, with photos, is available at Wal Thornhill's
website, http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=b50z4mj1 .
PHOTO CAPTION: On the evening of January 3, the MER lander Spirit came
to a safe landing right in the middle of Gusev Crater (shown by red arrow). This
is an area riddled with dust devil tracks in the summertime (note the many
dark streaks). With some luck those dust devils have scoured the surface
clean of dust, exposing the underlying rocks which hold the secrets of Mars'
past. NASA/JPL
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
The official caption shows the problem of perception facing scientists who
are trained to believe that planets are electrically inert bodies and that
weather is caused largely by solar heating. The MER engineers have done a
great job within the limitations of what scientists have told them to
expect. And therein lies the greatest weakness in our exploration of space.
Postscript January 29, 2004:
>From Mars Mission News by Steve Squyres at Cornell University:
"We're back on track now, after getting a pretty serious scare from
Spirit. Spirit's problems seem to have been caused by little more than a
fouled-up computer file system... not too different from what can happen
when you hit the power button on your computer accidentally and corrupt a
bunch of files on your hard drive. The JPL flight software team is hot on
the trail of this thing now, and I'm hoping that Spirit will make a full
recovery."
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
Since no Martians have been spotted gazing into Spirit's cameras, we must
assume there was no extraterrestrial digit to 'hit the power button.' But
you can get the same effect on your home computer when lightning strikes in
the neighborhood.
Mars is not a hospitable planet. In August last year I wrote: "Gigantic
fresh scars show that Mars has suffered recently and terribly. Millions of
cubic kilometres of jagged boulders were burnt and torn from its surface and
strewn from horizon to horizon ? as all of the images relayed from the
surface have shown. The implications for the search for life on Mars are
profound. If there was a past environment conducive to life on Mars it has
been wrecked. Not only the surface suffered but also the atmosphere was
stripped and exogenous gases and solids dumped on the hapless planet. Mars'
orbit and climate changed drastically." See: "Mysterious Mars" 27 August
2003, www.holoscience.com
The Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, is adding to the weight of evidence for
this catastrophic scenario. Once again we saw a rock-strewn vista when
Spirit first "opened its eyes." Over the coming months, while Mars comes
under intense investigation, both from orbit and from rovers on the surface,
it is a great opportunity to predict what will be found and to compare the
conventional view of Mars with that of the Electric Universe.
Spirit is examining the floor of Gusev Crater, which terminates a large
channel called Ma'adim Vallis. I wrote about Ma'adim Vallis in July
2002, in "Water on Mars?": ". . what is the story of the formation of Ma'adim Vallis? An arc cutting Gusev crater will sap electrons from the surrounding terrain by creating a strong radial electric field that begins to rip electrons from the solid surface. When breakdown begins, a lightning bolt tears across the
surface, blasting soil and rock to either side of its sinuous path. A large
proportion of the excavated material is impelled electrostatically to follow
the main discharge toward space. Pieces not pulled into space would fall
back in a more or less random scattering all over Mars. That explains why
there is little evidence of deposition inside Gusev Crater from a channel
that is larger than the Grand Canyon. It is also the reason why every Mars
lander has returned a vista of rubble that extends to the horizon."
See Astronomy Picture of the Day's "Carving Ma'adim Valles" for a
conventional explanation:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020627.html
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
Already scientists have begun to express surprise at the information
streaming back from Spirit.
>From the press release of 19 January: Scientists chose Adirondack to be
Spirit's first target rock rather than another rock, called Sashimi, that
would have been a shorter, straight-ahead drive. Rocks are time capsules
containing evidence of the environmental conditions of the past, said Dr.
Dave Des Marais, a rover science-team member from NASA Ames Research Center,
Moffett Field, Calif. "We needed to decide which of these time capsules to
open."
Sashimi appears dustier than Adirondack. The dust layer could obscure good
observations of the rock's surface, which may give information about
chemical changes and other weathering from environmental conditions
affecting the rock since its surface was fresh. Also, Sashimi is more pitted
than Adirondack. That makes it a poorer candidate for the rover's rock
abrasion tool, which scrapes away a rock's surface for a view of the
interior evidence about environmental conditions when the rock first formed.
Adirondack has a "nice, flat surface" well suited to trying out the rover's
tools on their first martian rock, Des Marais said.
"The hypothesis is that this is a volcanic rock, but we'll test that
hypothesis," he said.
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
Most of the soil and rock found on Mars has been recently excavated from the
depths of craters, canyons and channels, like Ma'adim Vallis, elsewhere on
Mars. To gain some perspective, the Valles Marineris canyons are up to 9
kilometers deep. Mars is a major source of meteorites and asteroidal bodies
(just two of the latter remain as Mars' tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos). If
the rocks are "time capsules" from the past it is a very recent past. They
have had no time to weather. And the story they have to tell will not fit
any conventional geological theory.
The scattered rocks are not likely to be volcanic. Many will have suffered
plasma heating and shock effects from a cosmic electric discharge. The holes
in some of the rock surfaces may be plasma arc craters or they may be
due to trapped gases being explosively released by hot plasma.
Unweathered surface mineral
>From the press release of 20 January: ""We're starting to put together a
picture of what the soil at this particular place in Gusev Crater is like.
There are some puzzles and there are surprises," said Dr. Steve Squyres of
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the suite of
instruments on Spirit and on Spirit's twin, Opportunity.
One unexpected finding was the Moessbauer spectrometer's detection of a
mineral called olivine, which does not survive weathering well. This
spectrometer identifies different types of iron-containing minerals;
scientists believe many of the minerals on Mars contain iron. "This soil
contains a mixture of minerals, and each mineral has its own distinctive
Moessbauer pattern, like a fingerprint," said Dr. Goestar Klingelhoefer of
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, lead scientist for this
instrument.
The lack of weathering suggested by the presence of olivine might be
evidence that the soil particles are finely ground volcanic material,
Squyres said. Another possible explanation is that the soil layer where the
measurements were taken is extremely thin, and the olivine is actually
in a rock under the soil.
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
Olivine is a common mineral found on Earth in recent lavas and meteorites.
However, it rapidly breaks down when exposed to water and weathering. The
soil and rocks on Mars have lain exposed for a mere few thousand years, not
millions or billions of years. They have not been exposed to water or had
time to weather.
Cohesive Soil
The news item continues: "Scientists were also surprised by how little the
soil was disturbed when Spirit's robotic arm pressed the Moessbauer
spectrometer's contact plate directly onto the patch being examined.
Microscopic images from before and after that pressing showed almost no
change. "I thought it would scrunch down the soil particles," Squyres said.
"Nothing collapsed. What is holding these grains together?"
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
Gusev crater is situated in the heavily cratered southern highlands of Mars.
Crater floors are formed not by impact but by a rotating arc that neatly
machines the circular crater, leaving a flat floor. Many smaller craters
were subsequently burnt into the floor of Gusev crater. Today, the area
where Spirit landed is covered with the trails of so-called "dust devils."
Normal earthly lightning cannot occur in the thin atmosphere of Mars,
Instead it takes the slower diffuse form of a tornado. We should expect the
electrical activity on the Martian surface, both in the past and in the
present, to produce glassified soil with the cohesive strength of a
fulgurite (sand loosely fused by lightning). Electric discharges are
sometimes used to immaculately clean a surface. The dark paths left by the
Martian dust devils should show microscopic signs of having been cleaned by
a corona discharge. I would urge the Spirit team, if possible, to include
one of the dark trails in their traverse.
Chlorine and Sulfur
The news item continues: "Information from another instrument on the
arm, an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, may point to an answer. This instrument "measures X-ray radiation emitted by Mars samples, and from this data we can derive the elemental composition of martian soils and rocks," said Dr.
Johannes Brueckner, rover science team member from the Max Planck Institute
for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany. The instrument found the most prevalent
elements in the soil patch were silicon and iron. It also found significant
levels of chlorine and sulfur, characteristic of soils at previous martian
landing sites but unlike soil composition on Earth.
Squyres said, "There may be sulfates and chlorides binding the little
particles together." Those types of salts could be left behind by
evaporating water, or could come from volcanic eruptions, he said. The soil
may not have even originated anywhere near Spirit's landing site, because
Mars has dust storms that redistribute fine particles around the planet. The
next target for use of the rover's full set of instruments is a rock, which
is more likely to have originated nearby."
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
The presence of chlorine and sulfur in the Martian soil is of special
interest because sulfur is commonly formed in cosmic discharges by fusing
two oxygen atoms together. It is happening today on Io in cathodic arc jets
(mistaken for volcanoes) so that its surface is buried in sulfur. (Io was
probably an icy satellite originally, like the other Galilean satellites of
Jupiter). But there was another more direct source of these elements for the
Martian soil - the clouds of Venus!
Venus was identified by the ancients as having discharged spectacularly to
Mars for an extended period. For this reason the thin Martian atmosphere
still has a whiff of the Venusian atmosphere, with its carbon dioxide and
nitrogen. The Russian lander, Venera 12, found that the clouds of Venus hold
20 times as much chlorine as sulfur. This discovery was "so difficult to
reconcile with other measurements that American researchers have tended to
ignore or discount them, although no one has explained why they should
be in error." [Venus Revealed, D Grinspoon, p. 120.] The Martian soil seems to
retain a record of the encounter with Venus. It may also extend to the
hematite deposits at the site of Spirit's twin, Opportunity.
In addition there is a long-standing puzzle concerning the origin of the
chlorine in our salty oceans. There is far too little chlorine in rocks to
account for it. However, chlorine and sodium are strongly related in
low-energy nuclear transformations of light elements, so both Mars and the
Earth must have had chlorine added to their surface inventory from external
energetic plasma discharge events.
Concentrated plasma discharges are known to produce large numbers of
neutrons. We should therefore expect anomalous levels of heavy isotopes
formed by neutron capture. So we find the deuterium to hydrogen ratio (D/H)
on Venus is "phenomenally high" at 120 times greater than on Earth. On Mars
it is enriched 6 times the terrestrial value. It may represent the varying
exposures of the three planets to recent cosmic discharge activity. And as
was found on the Moon, anomalous radioactivity on Mars may be found to be
associated with the focal points of those discharges - recent craters and
other electrical scars.
Spirit Finds Carbonates
On Earth, carbonates such as limestone often form in liquid water. But one
of the biggest Mars mysteries deals with "missing carbonates." Orbital
images show valleys that look like dry riverbeds, suggesting that liquid
water existed on an early Mars that had a thicker atmosphere and a warmer
climate. If true, large quantities of carbon dioxide should have dissolved
out of Mars1s atmosphere into the water and chemically reacted with other
materials to form carbonates. But orbital data from Mars Global Surveyor's
instrument reveal much lower carbonate abundances than predicted. [From
SkyandTelescope.com]
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
Spirit has found the telltale signature of carbonates. The problem is to
know what tale it is telling. Mars has changed so drastically in the recent
past that its story may be indecipherable. But it is certain that it cannot
be used to prove that a hypothetical greenhouse existed on Mars aeons ago.
Any exogenous interference with Mars' atmosphere and surface material would
tear up this particular history book.
Hollow Mystery for Mars Rover
A close-up image of an undisturbed patch of Martian soil has revealed a
large number of hollow spheres or tubes. The Mars rover Spirit has completed
its first full set of scientific measurements with the instruments on its
robotic arm, revealing mysterious hollow grains in the soil. The one-metre
arm used its microscope to take a close-up image of an undisturbed patch of
soil next to the NASA rover. It shows mostly sand-sized particles, but with
a large number of apparently hollow spheres or tubes.
Such grains were completely unexpected. But John Grotzinger, a geologist at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says they closely resemble
formations he has seen in soils in the southwestern deserts of the US.
"There are little tubes that build up by capillary action," he told New
Scientist, as salty water evaporates from the nearly-dry soil. The Martian
grains must also be strong enough to withstand the region's strong winds and
perpetual scouring by dust devils - tornado shaped vortexes that can tower
to heights of kilometres. [From NewScientist.com]
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
The lunar surface has been subjected to electrical cratering and channel
formation like that on Mars. (The only difference is that scientists have
given up the idea that channels, or rilles, on the Moon were formed by
water). A report by scientists studying a lunar dust sample remarked upon
the large number of small glassy spherules and cylinders. It was their
opinion that "they must have been formed free from restraints, perhaps blown
from a melt as fine droplets or perhaps as a spray of molten glass; thus
they were able to solidify in free flight under influence of surface tension
forces. ..it is safe to conjecture that the cylindrical object in its
initial molten state was part of a breakup of a thin jet.. A number of the
grayish metallic-like spherules exhibit vacuole regions within their
otherwise solid interiors.." [Science, Vol. 167, No. 3918, pp. 742-3.]
THORNHILL COMMENTS:
A cathode arc melts a surface and forms a jet of the melted material. The
first microscopic investigation of the Martian soil supports the Electric
Universe model. As for the southwestern deserts of the US, they were formed
by the same electrical erosion processes that shaped the surface of
Mars. We should expect to find many parallels.
The European Space Agency and Mars Express
"In the testing of hypotheses lies the prime difference between the
investigator and the theorist. The one seeks diligently for the facts which
may overthrow his tentative theory. The other closes his eyes to these, and
searches only for those which will sustain it."
- Grove Karl Gilbert, Chief Geologist of the US Geological Survey, 1895.
THORNHILL:
In the search for water on Mars there is a powerful human tendency to see
only what you expect to find. Contrary data is forgotten or dismissed from
consideration. Mirages are easily mistaken for water. For example, while MER
is trundling about the surface the European Space Agency (ESA) has Mars
Express in orbit about the red planet. ESA has chosen to use one of the most
spectacular sights in the solar system - the colossal canyons of Valles
Marineris ? to publicize their success. Image data from Mars Express has
been used to generate a perspective view that is like looking out of an
aircraft window.
ESA1s news report says, "One looks at a landscape which has been
predominantly shaped by the erosional action of water. Millions of cubic
kilometres of rock have been removed, and the surface features seen now such
as mountain ranges, valleys, and mesas, have been formed."
THORNHILL:
This offhanded statement from ESA is not supported by any of the geologists
who have studied Valles Marineris. All now attribute the formation of its
canyons to faulting of the Martian crust. The experts go on to admit,
"However, why the Valles Marineris were faulted to form deep troughs is not
known." It is a mystery because the answer lies outside the expertise of
geologists. It was explained in Mars and the Grand Canyon and Spiral
Galaxies & Grand Canyons. (www.holoscience.com)
News releases like the one above are untruthful and self-serving. It seems
that both NASA and ESA are dominated by theorists with one eye on funding,
not impartial investigators. The great canyons and channels on Mars were not
carved by water. There is no need for large volumes of water hidden beneath
the surface to explain their peculiar features. The few gullies found in
crater walls look as if they have been etched into the wall, not eroded by
water. Mars had surface moisture or ice in the recent past as shown by
"sloppy" electrical craters but seems to have lost most of it in the
energetic events that caused the cratering.
See ESA images with this article at
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=b50z4mj1
On the left the caption reads: "Crater formed in soft, probably water-logged
ground. Note the splatter marks (lobate flows) around it."
THORNHILL:
Impact splatters do not form lobate flows. However, the heat from an
electric discharge does cause moisture to 'sweat' to the surface and flow
slowly away from the crater.
On the right the caption reads: "Channels in a Martian crater probably
formed by relatively recent running water."
THORNHILL:
In this example the channels were not formed by running water. The close-up
on the right shows clearly that the large channel is V-shaped in
cross-section with a narrow channel at its base and has transverse
striations. The narrow inner channel remains remarkably constant in width.
And one channel has crossed another with no sign of any diversion of
material into the earlier channel. These features are hallmarks of powerful
near-surface electric discharges travelling up the wall of the crater. The
fans at the bottom of the channels must then have an electrical origin too,
taking the form of diffuse corona discharge streamers.
Sadly, much of the educational information on the ESA website is theory not
necessarily supported by observations. We need more people like geologist G.K. Gilbert, who understand the difference between investigator and theorizer. "The one seeks diligently for the facts which may overthrow his tentative theory. The other closes his eyes to these, and searches only for those which will sustain it."
Potentially billions of dollars are about to be wasted chasing the
mirage of hidden water on Mars. But the search for water is only the first step in a quest of mythical proportions ? to land humans on Mars. If only scientists
understood the origin of the myths about Mars, the planetary god of war,
they might begin to see parallels with earlier irrational human feats to
reach the home of the gods - as witness the great pyramids. They might also
perceive that the shrapnel covered and blasted hero "died" in a battle
involving cosmic thunderbolts.
Comparative mythology gives us precise clues about what we should be looking
for on Mars and what to expect. It has been far more predictive and
explanatory than speculative theories about an undisturbed planet and
long-extinct oceans. It gives us a 'big picture' of the catastrophic forces
that recently shaped the planet's surface. Meanwhile, bewildered geologists
are crying out for a big picture to make sense of the images from Mars
orbiters. More urgently, comparative mythology is the key to our dimly
remembered astronomical past and offers clues about unanticipated physical
and electrical hazards facing Mars explorers. Only with the broad
interdisciplinary perspective of the electric universe will wisdom have a
chance to prevail in our exploration of space.
Wal Thornhill
copyright Jan 2004
www.holoscience.com
********************************************************
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http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/
http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/
http://www.bearfabrique.org
http://www.grazian-archive.com/
http://www.holoscience.com
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/
http://www.electric-universe.org
http://www.science-frontiers.com
http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/index.htm
http://www.dragonscience.com
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