Mushrooms on Mars

So far loyal readers of Skeptophilia have sent me four different links to the same underlying story, along with a message along the lines of "Whaddya think of this?"  The links all take various angles on a paper by Rhawn Gabriel Joseph and Xinli Wei in Advances in Microbiology claiming that photos taken by the Mars rover Curiosity show the presence of live fungi.

Without further ado, here are the photos, which are real enough:

[Photos are in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

When I saw the top photo, my immediate thought was that if you think the only way to explain wiping away stuff and having it reappear is if the stuff is a living organism, you need to come take a look at how long furniture in my house remains clean after being dusted.  I'll admit that I'm kind of housework-impaired, and chances are one day I'll go missing and when people come to investigate they'll find me trapped inside an enormous dust bunny, but still, the fact remains that "dirt blows around" seems to be a universal tendency.  Second, the lower photo looks like a fungus or at least fungus spores, but saying "it looks like X, so it is X" is not how science is done.

The claim has generated a lot of hype and also a lot of backlash from actual science types, such as this scathing piece by Tristan Greene over at TheNextWeb, wherein Joseph and Wei basically get their asses handed to them for leaping to an entirely unwarranted conclusion based on a handful of photographs that can be explained by any number of other, more likely hypotheses.  There are lots of microscopic round things besides fungal spores, so without any sort of biochemical analysis there's no way these can conclusively be labeled as alive, much less as terrestrial-type fungi.

Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, however, is not a man to take this sort of criticism lying down.  Saying Joseph is "combative" is a little like saying Stalin had "anger management issues."  He has sued NASA for ignoring his previous claims about life on Mars, sued Springer (the academic publishing company that publishes the journals Nature and Scientific American) for retracting one of his papers, and on his website defiantly proclaims that he has "published major scientific studies in the fields of neuroscience, development, embryology, evolution, quantum physics, consciousness, genetics, and astrobiology."

Funny, if he's an expert in basically everything, how just about every reference to him in actual scientific journals describe him as a "crank," a "kook," and "a self-aggrandizing spotlight seeker."

Then there's the issue of the journal the paper is published in -- Advances in Microbiology.  AiM is one of the journals owned by SCIRP -- Scientific Research Publishing -- a China-based company long associated with predatory, pay-to-play practices:

[T]here may be some strong and honest articles published in SCIRP journals. However, these articles are devalued and stigmatized by association with all the junk science that SCIRP publishes.  The authors of the good articles are being victimized by the publisher’s policy of publishing pseudoscientific articles like “Basic Principles Underlying Human Physiology.”  SCIRP only rarely retracts articles, preferring instead to protect the interests of its customers, the paying authors.

Oh, and apropos of not much, here's the photo of himself he has on his website:

No, I'm not joking.

The issue here goes back to the ECREE Principle; Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  Okay, maybe those are Martian fungal spores.  But before you can conclude that, you'd better have some damn good evidence supporting your claim, something more than "we see stuff moving around":

Hundreds of dimpled donut-shaped "mushroom-like" formations approximately 1mm in size are adjacent or attached to these mycelium-like complexes.  Additional sequences document that white amorphous masses beneath rock-shelters increase in mass, number, or disappear and that similar white-fungus-like specimens appeared inside an open rover compartment.  Comparative statistical analysis of a sample of 9 spherical specimens believed to be fungal "puffballs" photographed on Sol 1145 and 12 specimens that emerged from beneath the soil on Sol 1148 confirmed the nine grew significantly closer together as their diameters expanded and some showed evidence of movement.

Look, no one would be more excited than me if the rovers did discover Martian life.  Honestly, it's not that I think microbial life on Mars is all that unlikely.  It's just that you don't support your claims in science by pointing and yelling, "Hey, lookit that!" over and over.  If these are fungal spores, then there are a lot of them, so it's only a matter of time before they'll be detected by the actual rigorous biochemical analysis the rovers are equipped to do.

And I can guarantee that the results will be published in a reputable science journal, not an open-access affair like Advances in Microbiology, and almost certainly the lead author won't be some Disco-Era refugee who claims to be the intellectual equivalent of Stephen Hawking, David Eagleman, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Gregor Mendel put together.

So, sad to say, that's where the issue stands.  If I'm wrong, I will happily eat crow and publish an update and/or retraction.  I'd like to think the firestorm Joseph has ignited will cause him to retreat in disarray, but his motto seems to be "Death Before Backing Down," so I'm guessing this isn't the last we'll hear from him on the topic.  Stay tuned.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Perseverance

In the episode of Doctor Who called "The Ark in Space," the Fourth Doctor says, "Homo sapiens.  What an inventive, invincible species.  It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk.  Puny, defenseless bipeds.  They've survived flood, famine and plague.  They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts.  And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life.  Ready to outsit eternity.  They're indomitable."

I immediately thought of that quote yesterday afternoon as I watched NASA's Mars Rover Perseverance make a textbook-perfect landing on the surface of Mars.  It traveled a total of about 480 million kilometers, and despite being launched from a moving target at a different moving target, landed right where the scientists and technicians wanted it to.

To put that into perspective, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and found that launching an object from Earth and hitting anywhere on Mars -- much less exactly the spot you wanted -- is analogous to aiming for, and hitting, an object the size of a pinhead from three hundred kilometers away.

The first image sent back by Perseverance.  Don't be concerned by the distortion and the blur; this was taken with the landing camera, used by the onboard computer to target the landing site.  Subsequent images will be a great deal clearer.  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Everywhere we've looked lately we've seen bad news.  The pandemic.  Here in the United States, the economy, the nasty partisan divisiveness, the lying and sniping and blaming amongst people who are desperate not to be held responsible for what they've said and done.  Just this week, the horrible cold wave and winter storm that hit as far south as Texas, leaving people without electricity and water, the casualties of which have yet to be tallied.

We're a species capable of awful things.  What we do to each other based upon race, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs, and gender is mind-boggling.  If there's a deity up there keeping score, humanity will have a lot to answer for.

And yet.

We are also capable of incredible beauty, kindness, courage, compassion, love... and perseverance.  We are as surprising in the loftiness of our spirit as we sometimes are in the depth of our selfishness.  We're complex, full of contradictions and paradoxes, but can reach soaring highs, achieve things that almost beggar belief.

There were cheers and applause and high-fives when the announcement came that Perseverance had made a safe landing and was already sending back images from Mars's surface, and sitting here in my office, I was cheering along with them.  It illustrated once again how when we band together to accomplish something worthwhile, the sky is -- literally, in this case -- the limit.

I know that to people who aren't astronomy buffs, the Mars Rover Mission is probably no big deal, and might elicit a shrug and the question, "Why did they put all that money and time into this?"  Perseverance, and other endeavors like it, are important not only for the advancement of science, but are symbolic of what we can achieve.  It represents hope, it represents the potential for good in humanity, for reaching toward something beyond our petty concerns -- which often gets lost in all the bad news and dismal accounts of how we've fallen short.

So I hope you will watch as the images start to roll in, photographs of a landscape on another planet, and you will catch a little of the wonder of this moment.  Let it remind you that despite everything you read and hear, we're a pretty amazing species.  I'll end with another quote, this one from a poem that is justly famous -- "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann.  I've read it many times, and even so it never fails to bring me to tears.  Here's how it ends, which seems a fitting way to wrap up this post:

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

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Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Alien rock mania

In the last week or so, there's been a sudden rash of claims of discovering alien artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

To which I respond: will you people please get a grip?

It's often hard enough, here on Earth, with the actual item in your hand, to tell the difference between a human-created artifact and an object with entirely non-human origins.  Chance resemblances and oddball natural processes sometimes result in rocks (for example) with strikingly organic-looking appearance.  For example, what do you make of this?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Looks like coral, right?  Or maybe some sort of fossilized plant?  Nope, it's a fulgurite -- a rock that forms when lightning strikes sand.

So chance appearances don't tell you much.  Especially when you are looking at a grainy photograph of the object in question.  And especially when you want very much for there to be something impressive there.

For example, we had a claim a couple of days ago over at the International Business Times that the Mars rover Curiosity had photographed what appears to be a thigh bone.  "None of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration scientists have spoken about it," the article states, with some asperity, "but the news has been going viral."

Well, when you look at the photograph, you'll see why NASA really didn't want to spend their time debunking it:

[image courtesy of NASA]

It's a rock, folks.  Being a biology teacher, I know what a thigh bone looks like, and this ain't one.  It's a rock.

Oh, and to the folks over at the IBT: you do not improve your credibility by following up the story on the Martian thigh bone with the statement, "In the past, there have been claims of noticing objects on the surface of Mars like a dinosaur spine, dinosaurs, mysterious light, a toy boat, an iguana, a cat and a half-human and half-goat face."  Just to point that out.

Then, over at The UFO Chronicles, we had Skeptophilia frequent flier Scott Waring claiming that what is almost certainly a digital imaging glitch was "clearly an alien base on the Moon."    Here's the image:

According to Waring, you can see all sorts of things in this, like a wall and the entrance to an underground facility.  Me, all I see is a black blob.  Not the first time that imaging glitches have caused a furor; remember when a glitch in a NASA photograph of the Sun caused all the conspiracy-types to claim that the Earth was about to be attacked by the Borg cube?

Then just this morning, we had another report from Mars over at UFO Sightings Daily that there's an outline of a wolf on the Martian surface.  Here's that one, which made me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee:

Helpfully colored in so that you can see it.  Sad for Mr. Wolf, however -- he seems to be missing one of his hind legs.  Maybe with the lower gravity, you can get by with three.

So anyway.  I really wish people would stop leaping about making little squeaking noises every time one of the lunar or planetary explorers stumbles on something that has a vague similarity to a familiar object.  Aren't there enough cool real things out there in space to think about?  You have to invent Moon bases, thigh bones, and three-legged Martian wolves?

I'm sticking with the science.  That's always been plenty awesome enough, as far as I'm concerned.

Rabbits in space

A few days ago I made a statement that believing in the various end-of-the-world predictions was about as foolish as thinking that we're in danger of being attacked by Giant Space Bunnies.  So imagine my surprise when the following photograph came in from the Mars rover Curiosity:

I wasn't the only one who had that reaction; the woo-woo websites were lighting up like Christmas trees with posts speculating that extraterrestrial life had been found at last, and that we were looking at a Martian Space Bunny.  "Of course," one of the sites hinted darkly, "pretty quick the scientists will cook up a 'scientific explanation' of the whole thing and sweep it under the rug.  No way will they admit that they've discovered life on Mars."

Because, you know, scientists just loathe new, groundbreaking discoveries.  The whole purpose of the Mars rover was to confirm how boring and ordinary Mars is.  It'd really suck if they discovered anything interesting up there, something worth studying.  Scientists hate that.

But even so, I had to admit that the likelihood of it actually being a bunny was pretty small.  Whatever any possible Martian life might look like, it's unlikely to resemble our terrestrial forms.  So I figured, like our abovementioned conspiracy theorist, that the Space Bunny would be explained in short order, and wasn't going to turn out to be Bugs' distant cousin.

And sure enough.  As described in an article in the website of the National Paranormal Association (and despite their name, they're pretty careful to maintain a skeptical outlook on things), the scientists noticed some odd things about the Martian Bunny.  The first was that despite the fact that the air on Mars is extremely thin, and the wind was fairly calm that day, the Bunny was moving gradually across the ground.  In the time they observed it, it moved five or six meters, without leaving a mark on the ground.  "There's no evidence of a mark that it left in the soil as it moved," Jeff Johnson, a member of the camera team, stated.  "It was light enough and small enough to not leave any ‘footprints'."

Curious, however, the rover team posted a "bunny watch" to keep an eye on the object; and it was Johnson who finally came up with a consistent, plausible explanation.  He examined the spectrum of light reflected from the object's surface, and found that it matched exactly the spectrum of light reflected from the material that composed the rover's airbag, that was deployed as it descended toward the surface.  So it seems like what we have here is of decidedly terrestrial origin -- a vaguely bunny-shaped scrap of airbag material.

So, there you are.  The search continues.  But I'm very impressed at how this was solved -- using science, logic, and skepticism.  The caution that the Curiosity team showed, in not leaping to the conclusion that this object was what it looked like, is what separates science from woo-woo.  And it's why, given the choice, I trust the scientists.  They're generally pretty good at telling fact from fiction, and airbag cloth from a Martian Space Bunny.

The Mars rover's cleaning crew

A few days ago, I posted about the contention that the NASA rover Curiosity had discovered life on Mars, in the form of a couple of UFOs and a Martian groundhog.  Today, we have the contention that the Mars lander was actually a (covertly) manned spacecraft.

What is the proof, you might ask?  It's a photograph, to wit:

What we are looking at, claims an article over at UFO Blogger entitled, "Who is Cleaning the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity?", is a man in a space suit leaning over and applying Windex to the camera lens.

Amongst the many problems with this conjecture is that if NASA was smart enough to be able to send a human crew along with Curiosity, lo under our very noses, then presumably they would be smart enough not to post photographs publicly showing the shadow of one of said crew.  Especially given that supposedly they're doing this with evil intent.  Notwithstanding that argument, the poster over at UFO Blogger says if we don't buy the manned-mission hypothesis, we can only come to one other possible reasonable conclusion -- that the Mars landing was a fake, and the rover is currently sending back photographs from the Atacama Desert (and the article conveniently has some photographs of the Atacama Desert for comparison).  Way at the end the writer admits that it could be a "shadow illusion," but you get the impression that (s)he doesn't think that's likely at all. 

And neither do the people who posted the comments section.  A couple of samples will suffice:

"Why would they pull such a scam? This government truly sucks. Not even surprised by anything anymore."

"You know guys... its becoming clear to me that NASA is doing this purposely for the 'conspiracy crowd'. they know we're not buying it yet they still have us distracted, our attention diverted, from whats really important as we waste our time and mental energy on their BS. we need to totally ignore NASA at this point."


Yup.  Those doggone attention hogs down at NASA are never satisfied unless we're watching them.

Of course, the other problem with this whole idiotic contention is that it's remarkably difficult to determine what an object looks like from its shadow.  If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this amazing shadow art by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, in which mounds of trash illuminated with light from a particular angle create shadows that look like people, a pair of rats having sex, two severed heads on spikes, and a variety of other things.  Add a bit of pareidolia into the mix -- the tendency of people to see human forms in random shapes -- and you've got an explanation for the shadow in the Mars photograph that doesn't require you to believe that NASA is either duping us all by sending the rover to Chile, or else sneakily including a human crew on the mission for their own nefarious purposes.

So anyhow, that's pretty much that, as far as I can see.  The rover will have to manage without any space-suited humans cleaning the camera lens, and the woo-woos will have to find another ridiculous conjecture to blather on about.  The latter might actually be a forlorn hope, because as we've seen before, once woo-woos catch hold of an idea, they hold on like grim death despite the most cogent argument to the contrary.  But at least the rest of us can go back to enjoying the photographs from Curiosity for what they are -- amazing images of our strange and uninhabited neighbor world.

Curiosity finds a shoe, a finger, and various aliens

It was only a matter of time.

Ever since NASA's roving Mars explorer Curiosity sent its first photographs back to Earth, I've been waiting for some wingnut to use one of them to "prove" something -- that aliens live there, that a superintelligent race had visited there before, or possibly that the US has had a working base there for thirty years, and President Obama visited there when he was a teenager. 

Enter the British YouTube aficionado who goes by the handle StephenHannardADGUK.  (I'm assuming his actual name is Stephen Hannard, which seems likely, so I'll refer to him by that name for the remainder of my post, and my apologies if this is incorrect.)  Hannard has analyzed the Curiosity photographs, examining them down to the last detail, and even applying various filters to them to see if anything is hiding, up there on the dusty Martian surface.  And lo, seek and ye shall find!  Hannard discovered:

An alien poking his head out of a burrow!

UFOs!

A fossilized human finger!

 A shoe!

What is NASA saying about these photographs?  Predictably, they deny that anything weird is going on.  The "UFOs" are dead pixels in the camera's imager, which have lost function and therefore create a white dot on the image that was accentuated by Hannard's use of filters.  As for the grinning alien, the fossilized finger, and the shoe, those are... rocks.  Just plain old Martian rocks.

Hannard and others, however, beg to differ.  After telling us what we're looking at, Hannard concludes with, "What are these objects?... as always, you decide."  In other words, you're free to disagree, as long as you don't mind being a Credulous Fool Who Believes Everything NASA Says.  Of course that's what NASA spokespeople would say.  They're paid to cover stuff up, especially the top-secret covert stuff that's been going on out there on Mars.

Um, yeah.  That's why they've (1) sent a roving robot up there to take photographs of everything it can, (2) had it beam those photographs back to Earth, and (3) made those photographs public.  So if NASA is acting as a covert-operations unit, it might want to rewrite its protocol manual, because right at the moment its methods of maintaining secrecy kind of suck.

Also, if these really are evidence of the presence of aliens (or humans, for that matter) on Mars, I'd really appreciate it if they'd do a better job of cleaning up after themselves and not leave shoes and severed fingers all over the place.  The Earth has gotten mucked up enough with litter and pollution, let's not start doing the same to Mars, okay?

Anyhow, that's the news from the world of Ridiculous Outer Space Alien Conspiracies.  As usual, I'm pretty certain that my missive from the world of rationality won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced, but I feel compelled to post it anyway.  Just call me a Missionary of Skepticism, proclaiming my message to anyone who will listen, lo, even unto the Grinning Alien Groundhogs of Mars.