While I agree it's amazing and inspiring, I'd also emphasize that we have pictures [1] and even sounds [2] from the surface of Venus and it's 91 atmospheres of surface pressure alongside 900F degree surface temperature. Those are from 40+ years ago. 20 years before that, we'd never sent a single object into space.
And so if you asked people from that time first consuming that media what they imagine the world (in terms of space) would look like 40 years later, us looking at somewhat higher resolution pictures from Mars would sound skeptical to the point of absurdity.
> And so if you asked people from that time first consuming that media what they imagine the world (in terms of space) would look like 40 years later, us looking at somewhat higher resolution pictures from Mars would sound skeptical to the point of absurdity.
As such a person, I do in fact concur. We really expected a moon colony fairly soon, and by now, a thriving colony on Mars.
We were wildly naïve about how hard it was. To have a self-sustaining colony on Mars, you would have to re-invent every single piece of technology we use on Earth to work in an environment of complete scarcity.
I agree, thus the discussion about stagnation of Peter Thiel.
I think that WW2 and the cold war push the US to outdo itself, after that we became comfortable.
It's absolutely nuts that I can be viewing a high definition picture from another planet with my morning coffee. Sometimes I wish we didn't lose our sense of awe so quickly. Every technological miracle we create quickly becomes a normal part of "every day life" so to speak.
I was buying my morning coffee today and the person in front of me paid with their watch. Things are pretty amazing, you just got to keep looking for it.
On Saturday morning I go and buy a cup of coffee and sit outside the shop and read the newspaper (physical paper) and watch people walk by. It’s really one of the pleasures of my week.
(I then go home a brew a pot for me and my wife - who prefers to sleep in on Saturdays.)
There's nowhere left near me at all that sells the New York Times, which was the paper I liked to read in physical form. Used to be a fun weekend ritual to pick up the Sunday edition from the coffee shop down the street and sit around reading things and doing the crossword, but I can't find it anymore. I'm not sure if it was covid that killed off the distribution or just the economics of print.
Almost certainly the latter. The economics of distribution are extremely harsh. Fixed cost per site per day has to be covered by all parties and a profit. Say it costs USD$30 for a van stop at a place, idle the vehicle, unload the goods, and pay the driver then you need to sell a whole lotta newspapers to break even. The solution, if you enjoy print as I do, is to purchase longer term periodicals. Weekly news magazines are good. The New Yorker, Economist, etc. Smiles from China where we have no such options.
Making those assumptions about IndrekR isn’t very fair. Like him/her, I brew my own coffee (using locally purchased beans) but I go out of my way to support local businesses. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since 2010 and the only online purchases I’ve made in the last three years were FFP masks (I couldn’t find a local chemists who stocked them for some strange reason), RAM chips and an SSD drive (the local PC shops are gone). Having said that, I regretted paying €20 for a bicycle chain from a local bike shop (who weren’t particularly pleasant to deal with) when I could have purchased the same chain from an online retailer for €5.
I think people believe that you need complex/expensive equipment for good coffee, but that's not true. Get yourself a grinder and a chemex and be happy!
I think the prevalence of people buying morning coffee is a more complex phenomenon.
In Malaysia, you would see people complaining if their Nasi Lemak costed more than RM 5, but the same person would happily pay RM 15 for coffee. It appeared that there was a norm at play, that Nasi Lemak belongs to Malaysian streets and should be cheap, while coffee is a western thing and it's normal to be expensive.
For some others, queuing up, the micro-interactions, and drinking while walking to the office (or even back to their home office) seems to be a morning ritual. I could see myself in this group if I did not prefer my own blend and brew.
Pour-over, single-origin coffee costs about 120฿ in Thailand, 3× street food as well. Cafés are often used for setting for social media photos as much as the coffee itself and they are popular—especially right after lunch.
But with coffee being grown in the North coffee itself isn’t seen as “Western”, and the older styles using robusta beans—like กาแฟโบราณ, โอเลี้ยง, etc.—are still sold for 20–30฿ from street carts, while the arabica espresso options with an ‘experience’ to it costs way more.
It's a fun ritual. I go with my wife to get a coffee in the morning twice or three times a week. I pay with my watch, and we sometimes talk about astronomy.
I wonder what the data-rate is like (or rather, I'm too lazy to look it up myself). The image is 1010K which with a 14.4 Kbit/s connection would take ~10 minutes to download from Mars. 1 KBit/s would take ~2.5 hours.
NASA's Mars rovers use several orbital probes to relay communications back to Earth. They do have radios that can talk directly to Earth up to 32kbps but primarily use the relays. The UHF uplink to the Mars Recon Orbiter is up to 2Mbps and it's visible to the rover for about eight minutes a day. The orbiter's uplink to Earth is can hit up to 6Mbps.
The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have a fair amount of on-board storage (for an interplanetary probe). So they can spool a lot of data and then send a batch to the orbiters and then go about their next tasks. The orbiters also have a lot of storage (for interplanetary probes) and can themselves spool a lot of data until they're in a transmit window to Earth.
The Mars rovers aren't doing OnlyFans livestreams. They've got science data to upload and can empty their spool in the time the orbiters are in range. They also have their direct uplinks to Earth at up to 32kbps for control and telemetry.
It looks like a plant in my opinion, which doesn't mean it is necessarily a plant but it means that its appearance is like a plant. I don't see any inaccuracies in the description.
Of course if someone thinks that doesn't look like a plant but crystal or an animal, they are fre to describe it as "crystal-like" or "animal-like".
Its alright bo be impressed with its looks I guess, noone is going to make a salad of it, so it is not dangerous to think that it looks like a plant.
This reminds me of when I heard the phrase "lenticular cloud". I looked it up, hoping to learn something about how these clouds are formed, etc. It simply means "shaped like a lentil".
Perhaps this is autocorrect gone awry, but it has nothing to do with lentils.
Not a meteorologist, but from all I understand it means lens-shaped, and to me that immediately gives a strong clue as to how they form since lenses have focal points and can, to some degree, have shapes expressed as formulae about some origin. Which to me is suggestive of the relation to the mountains around which they form.
I agree, I often forget that corals are not plants(but they look like plants, which probably means that the Mars rock that look like a coral also looks like a plant).
And they act like plants: they photosynthesize; they are sessile; and they are structured as a thin layer of living tissue over a dead, rigid internal support.
I think he got offended because he understood "plant-like" in a functional sense (e.g. that it uses photosynthesis), maybe "plant-shaped" would be more accurate.
Stalagmite-like formation would also be an accurate description, without the hype. The abuse of bombastic announcements like this one does a disservice to science in general and the space exploration in particular. This gotta stop.
On Twitter someone said that it looks like the result of lightning striking sand. I did not know that this would create such awesome structures. Look up "lightning sand" if you never heard about it.
Considering it's a mostly barren landscape with little that could wear down and prevent accumulation of such things, chances are pretty good.
Mars isn't quite the Moon, where you could drop a marble and expect to find it in exactly the same condition 10,000 years later, but it's not quite Earth either.
There's no organisms that will cover and break down anything you throw at them within weeks, obviously there's no rain that could cause erosion, wind speeds are about the same you'd see on earth, but atmospheric pressure is only about 1/150th.
This looks like it could have been caused by water penetrating a softer substance, causing it to harden, and then the surrounding material was removed by erosion.
When you say "just salt" ... what kind of conditions produce that sort of salt formation? Does it tell us anything about the conditions when it was formed? Was there some brine pool or something? How did it get exposed where it is now?
Maybe describing it as "plant-like" was not really called for, can we still learn something interesting from this?
There was very definitely large* amounts of water on Mars, and there is also evidence of salinity[1], so it seems possible that there would be saline in volume to produce deposits.
My first thought was some sort of crystal formation. Not sure if it's salt but it does look crystalline in nature. I'll get off my exogeologist armchair rest now.
Could Mars have developed chemosynthtic life? Sure, it happened ridiculously fast on Earth and I'm quite prepared to believe it happened on Mars before it lost its liquid water.
Photosynthetic bacteria? That's a stretch but I could imagine it happening.
Plants? Not just the prokaryotic to eukaryote transition but differentiated multicellular organisms? No, it would take an incredible amount of evidence to convince me that that happened on Mars and this does no in any way count.
NASA has been strategically ambiguous about the possibility of life on Mars since Viking 1. What’s changed now that they’re touting “plant-like formations”? That seems uncharacteristically suggestive.
This is really neat, and oddly it makes me wish that there were people walking around on Mars looking at these things, taking samples, etc. And generally figuring things out in real time.
I think what's more remarkable are the couple of snickerdoodle cookies a few inches to the right of the plant-thing. Someone is leaving a welcome basket with housewarming gifts for Curiousity. I wonder what the coupons for local businesses will be.
Space is unbelievably boring. It is so boring that it’s a news story when something in space reminds us of a thing on Earth. Mars is dead, dead, dead; and it’s depressing to even think about how dead and boring it is.
The subject is Mars, not the conversation about Mars.
And GP's comment is interesting. Consider that Earth, even after nuclear war, comet strike, caldera explosion, destroyed habitats, etc is still infinitely more habitable than Mars.
Mars is definitely dead, and nothing there within current human technical abilities to brink it back to life. Living underground or in airtight capsules is the only way of living on that planet. Which is pretty much the same thing that would happen on Earth in any of those doomsday events you suggested.
The main threat to earth is uninhabitable atmosphere, so if we figured out how to reverse those changes, then perhaps we could reverse Venus' atmosphere. If that were possible, then we might actually have a second livable planet in our solar system.
The commenter joined the conversation about that discovery to say nothing other than that they don't find the topic interesing.
There is no getting around the fundamental ignorance and offensiveness of that.
My comment IS exactly about conversation not about Mars.
It's about the curious but not at all uncommon phenomenon of joining a conversation for no other purpose but to tell everyone in it that you are not interested in it.
My point is to point out that that is what they are doing when they do that, not merely adding their own perfectly valid opinion on a topic the same as anyone else's. It's uniquely invalid and offensive.
It's walking down a hall, hearing a conversation behind one of the doors, stopping, entering the room, and announcing to everyone in that room "It's stupid to discuss this topic".
Obviously, the ignoramus who does this doesn't realize that this is what they are doing. Obviously they think they are delivering a valuable observation and conclusion, or at least expressing their opinion which they are entitled to have and even to express.
The problem is the context. They were not already in a conversation where something came up and their opinion was relevant. They were not specifically asked for their opinion like with a poll or an article that poses the question. They went out of their way to join a conversation in the first place for no other purpose than to say it's a pointless conversation.
I am distilling their action to it's essense to expose just what they are actually doing, and lay bare the lack of any valid motivation for an action like that.
You are supposed to see this, and understandably try to find a hole in it to save face, but then eventually when there turns out to be no way to avoid the essential facts after unpacking, realize that's what you're doing and maybe do it less.
Or failing that (honestly, more likely, but at least they no longer have the excuse of ignorance), at least maybe some bystanders will be wiser to the phenomenon in the future an be better able to recognize a tool for what they are on first sight and not grant them the time of day by bothering to get into any arguments with them. IE, recognize that peculiar form of mental Turet's and thereby feel no attack from it, and feel no need to defend against it.
Agreed. Not sure if a space colony on Mars is worth the ROI from a scientific standpoint. Technologically we would learn a lot about how to sustain multi-planetary life.
Subsistence isn’t the actual threat to a Martian colony, and that is what is so maddening about it. We can go and we can figure out the technical hurdles. But even with those magical capabilities we cannot eliminate ourselves from the equation. The danger for a Martian colony will not be from Mars, but from the “Martians” (just as it is on Earth).
“Boring” is subjective. I find interplanetary geology very interesting.
You don’t know that Mars is dead, and we are also looking for previous signs of life.
I am excited about us learning about other planets, their mineral composition, what technological advancements we must make to create habitable environments for us, what robotic advancements we must made to study and build remotely. What protocol enhancements must be made to streamline high latency communications.
And then later stage stuff, once functioning, self sustaining civilisation is established, how is it governed? What are the economics of trading in high latency scenarios? What’s next after Mars?
There’s so many interesting things to discover and areas to be excited about.
Indeed, all descriptions of how big space is can be followed by, "and the most interesting part is right outside your window, and in your own body and mind". As far as we know at least.
I think of the words at the end of Battlestar Galactica, "so much life". As far as we know, there are entire galaxies where the most exciting and interesting thing you could hope to find is some crystals. Then I look around our planet and can hardly see a square inch that isn't covered in life.
I may never travel to other planets, and will certainly never go to another galaxy, but at least I'm here, in the most interesting part of the universe.
Except, it isn't. It is a desert at the deep bottom of a gravity well far from the sun. We can build in solar orbit much better than on Mars, and more sustainably.
Interesting that it looks small yet is able to withstand the winds and didn’t get eroded. Wonder how strong it is. Does the rover try to investigate it at all?
As a fun factoid this is one of the few things that was intentionally fudged in "The Martian." Andy Weir was well aware that the most brutal sandstorm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze, but felt it was one of the more interesting ways to create a catastrophe. That in itself is really phenomenally encouraging for the future developments on the planet - when one of the things a hard sci-fi book has to resort to fiction on is the trigger for catastrophe!
People on HN downvote twitter posts, but that is much more informative than the raw picture. Given that pennies are 19mm in diameter, that suggests a width more like ~12mm for this object.
