Looking for a signature

Finding unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial life is not as easy as science fiction makes it sound.

The problem is, we're biased toward detecting terrestrial life -- living things that have a similar chemistry to the familiar life forms here on Earth.  It's understandable; I mean, why would we not be?  While there is a great diversity of species here on our planet (something on the order of nine million extant, at an estimate), they all share the same basic biochemistry, including:

• ATP as an energy driver
• some form of sugar-fueled cellular respiration to produce that ATP
• phospholipid bilayers as cell membranes, and (for eukaryotes) for the internal membranes that compartmentalize the cell
• proteins to facilitate structure, movement, and catalysis (the latter are called enzymes)
• nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA for information storage and retrieval
• lipids for long-term energy storage

While there are obviously different twists on how exactly these things work, those features are common to just about all life on Earth.  (Interestingly, a 2010 paper claiming a microbe had been discovered in California's Mono Lake that incorporates arsenic into the backbone of its DNA instead of phosphorus was just retracted by the journal Nature -- although the retraction is controversial, and the authors are still defending their work as valid.)

The question remains unsolved, therefore, of the extent to which the genesis and evolution of life are constrained -- by which we mean that the pathways taken by biology might be expected to repeat on other Earth-like worlds.  (Or, to use Stephen Jay Gould's pithy phrase, we might find that evolution would produce similar forms again here on Earth if we were somehow able to "replay the tape of life.")  Would living things, down to the biochemical level, be at least somewhat like terrestrial life, or would they be entirely different?

To be fair to the science fiction writers, there have been instances where they've made a significant effort to consider what life "not as we know it" might look like.  Star Trek's Horta ("The Devil in the Dark"), Crystalline Entity ("Silicon Avatar"), and Tholians ("The Tholian Web") come to mind, as well as Doctor Who's Vashta Nerada ("Silence in the Library"), Boneless ("Flatline"), Not-Things ("Wild Blue Yonder"), and Midnight Entity ("Midnight").  

Even Lost in Space gave it a creditable try with the Bubble Creatures in "The Derelict."

The problem is more complex than that, though.  Since we can't actually go to other planets and search for living things -- even going to planets and moons in our own Solar System is crazy expensive and fraught with difficulties -- we're stuck with looking for biosignatures, traces (either structural or chemical) that show unequivocal evidence of being created by living things.

The sticking point is that word unequivocal.  Two good examples of this came to light in the last couple of weeks, one of them (from the standpoint of people like me who would love nothing better than to find out we're not alone in the universe) bad news, and the other one -- at least tentatively -- good news.

Let's start with the bad news first.

Back in 2005, NASA's Cassini mission spotted something exciting -- the presence of organic molecules in water-rich plumes erupted from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.  The surmise was that these plumes were created by pressure in the moon's interior, where water might be kept liquid by tidal deformation from the huge gas giant's gravitational pull.  Now, organic doesn't mean produced by life; it's a chemistry term meaning "containing carbon and hydrogen."  (Formaldehyde, for example, is an organic compound, and has been found by its spectral signature in interstellar gas, and no one's claiming that it was made by aliens.  At least, no one I'd want to have a conversation with.)  On the other hand, lots of organic compounds are made by living things, so their presence in Enceladus's geysers certainly seemed to raise at least the possibility that underneath the ice, there might be a watery ocean that harbored life.

Well, a study led by scientists from Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziale has found another possible explanation.  The organic molecules could be formed right there on the surface by radiation funneled in by Saturn's magnetic field, then blasted off the surface -- i.e., they didn't come from an interior ocean at all.  "While the identification of complex organic molecules in Enceladus's environment remains an important clue in assessing the moon's habitability, the results demonstrate that radiation-driven chemistry on the surface and in the plumes could also create these molecules," said Grace Richards, who led the study.  "Molecules considered prebiotic could plausibly form in situ through radiation processing, rather than necessarily originating from the subsurface ocean.  Although this doesn't rule out the possibility that Enceladus's ocean may be habitable, it does mean we need to be cautious in making that assumption just because of the composition of the plumes."

The second paper had more hopeful news.  It comes out of Stony Brook University, and is an analysis of some mudstones found in Jezero Crater on Mars by the Perseverance rover.  The analysis -- done long-distance, obviously -- found traces of organic material, along with ferrous sulfate and ferric sulfide.  Most interestingly, the organic material seems to have undergone post-deposition redox reactions; redox reactions are the mechanism by which all terrestrial life forms harvest energy for their life processes (cellular respiration is, basically, one long string of redox reactions).  The minerals, the researchers say, "challenge some aspects of a purely abiotic explanation" -- cautious science-speak for, "Life?  Yeah, could be."

Of course, this is not proof, and Sagan's principle that I mentioned in a post a few days ago -- "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- certainly applies here.  But it is fascinating, and if further inquiries support the biotic explanation for the odd chemistry of the Jezero mudstones, it'll be somewhere beyond exciting.  I've always thought it likely that life is common in the universe, but having a real, honest-to-Gallifrey extraterrestrial example would be amazing.

In any case, keep your eyes on the science news.  Despite the ridiculous budget cuts NASA is facing, they're still doing some wonderful science.  And hopefully, at some point, we'll actually find proof of aliens.  Wouldn't that be cool?

I hope it's not the Vashta Nerada, though.  Those mofos are scary.

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Dry times

If I asked you to name the driest spots on Earth, I wonder if this one would come to mind -- even though it's a top contender for the number one spot.

You might have thought of Chile's Atacama Desert, or possibly somewhere in the Gobi, Sahara, or the Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia.  All good guesses, and certainly they're not what I'd call wet climates.  In fact, parts of the Atacama come in second; the high elevation and perpetual clear skies are why it's such a great spot for astronomical observatories -- it's currently home to three of the best, and a fourth is being built.  The La Silla Observatory, the Paranal Observatory (which includes the Very Large Telescope), the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory (which hosts the ALMA international radio observatory), and the Cerro Armazones Observatory (site of the future Extremely Large Telescope), are all in the Atacama Desert.

As an aside, can astronomers please try to come up with better names for their observatories?  I mean, what the hell?  The "Very Large Telescope" and the "Extremely Large Telescope"?  What's next, the "Abso-fucking-lutely Humongous Telescope, No Really I'm Totally Serious You Won't Believe How Big It Is"?

Probably not.  AflHTNRITSYWBHBII would be hard to fit on a grant application.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the top spot for the driest climate on Earth is the McMurdo Dry Valley region of Antarctica, and beats most of the other possibilities by a significant margin.  Some studies indicate the place hasn't had any significant accumulated precipitation in over two million years.  What small amount does fall -- estimates are in the range of a hundred millimeters per year -- almost all evaporates before it reaches the ground because of the fierce katabatic winds.  Katabatic winds occur because air density is strongly dependent upon temperature, and the McMurdo Dry Valleys are surrounded by mountains.  Air masses above the mountaintops lose heat faster, making them become more dense; the air then flows downhill, easily reaching hurricane speed, and pools in the valleys.  Most of the air already started out dry; any humidity it originally had was precipitated out as snow on the windward side of the mountains.  This drops the relative humidity to only a few percent and keeps it there.

Any snowflakes falling into that don't stand a chance.  They don't melt; it's too cold for that.  They sublimate -- turn from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid phase.

That's how cold and dry it is.

The result is that the McMurdo Dry Valleys are basically nothing but a vast expanse of extremely cold rock, gravel, and sand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dturme, Labyrinth, Wright Valley, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The exposed rocks are mostly of Triassic age, and belong to the Beacon Formation, which is largely made of sandstone.  There are a few volcanic intrusions only a few million years old, but by and large, the whole place is just one big bunch of very old wind-eroded sandstone, quartzite, and pebble conglomerate.

And yet... there are living things there.

Not many, of course, but the McMurdo Dry Valleys are home to endolithic bacteria, which live in the cracks and fissures inside rocks, subsisting on the minerals therein and the tiny amount of water in the soil (supplemented from time to time by trickles of glacial meltwater).  They're still poorly understood, but are thought to be metabolically similar to the mid-ocean vent bacteria, which are able to use minerals like sulfur, iron, and manganese as the basis of their metabolism.

All of which makes me wonder if Mars hosts life.  McMurdo has been described as "the most Mars-like environment on Earth;" the site has been used to test equipment for the Mars rover missions.  Hell, if bacteria can survive in McMurdo, it's not much of a stretch to surmise that there might be life underground on Mars -- perhaps a holdover from the distant past, when Mars was a much warmer, wetter place.

I find places like this fascinating.  The idea that we have here on our (mostly) temperate and green planet a spot so profoundly inhospitable is pretty astonishing.  I wonder how (or if) climate change will alter things there?  The entire continent is climatically isolated by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, one of the hugest oceanic water transporters in the world -- the amount of water flowing through the Drake Passage, between South America and Antarctica, is estimated at around 130 times the volume of all the world's rivers put together -- so it's hard to imagine this shifting in any significant way.

But given that many oceanographers fear that meltwater from Greenland is going to block the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the best-known part of which is the Gulf Stream -- maybe I shouldn't speak too soon.

So that's our look at the Earth's answer to Mars.  Not, I'm afraid, a locale I'm eager to visit, given how little I like the cold.  I'm adventurous, but I draw the line at a place that hostile.

Plus, I like rocks as much as the next guy, but when there's nothing else to see -- well, I can think of a few other places that are higher on the destinations list.  I'm content to appreciate McMurdo from afar.

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Rock of ages

One of the most amazing strides that's been made in science in the last hundred years is our ability to figure out how old stuff is.

Geologists have known for a long time that the Earth is old; how old, on the other hand, was a matter of serious debate.  Scottish geologist James Hutton, who pioneered the idea of uniformitarianism -- that the same slow, steady processes we see going on today have proceeded at essentially the same rate throughout Earth's history -- guessed that our planet was at least tens of millions of years old, and a far cry from the six-thousand-odd years the creationists of both his day and ours believe.  In fact, because the rocks he studied seemed to have been melted, eroded, remodeled, and remelted over and over, he thought it was entirely possible that the Earth was infinitely old; "The result of our present enquiry," he wrote, in his 1738 book Theory of the Earth, "is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

It was undeniable, though, that things had changed over time.  A century later, English geologist William Smith went all over the British Isles tracking similarities in rock outcroppings, and used index fossils -- fossil organisms characteristic of only short geological timespans, and therefore useful in dating strata -- to create a map of the country by geological age.  (That map has stood the test of time; in the nearly two centuries since he created it, there have been very few changes needed.)

But still, Hutton and Smith could only speculate as to how old particular rock outcrops were.  There might be Jurassic fossils to be found in Lyme Regis (on the Dorset coast) and in Cleveland (in Yorkshire), suggesting they're close to the same age, but what is their actual age?  It wasn't until American chemist Bertram Boltwood had a major brainstorm in 1907, realizing that the steady breakdown of radioisotopes in rock samples could act like a natural clock, that geologists had a tool to determine exactly how old various rock strata are.

Still, it's not easy.  Radioisotope dating rests on the assumption that the rock in question hasn't been significantly altered since formation.  If something has changed the amount of the radioisotope you're using (or its decay product), it will throw off your estimate of the age.  (That's why there's still argument over the Shroud of Turin; although radiocarbon dating has pretty conclusively shown that it's from the Middle Ages, there was a fire in the church where it was housed that deposited soot in the cloth, potentially altering the amount of carbon-14 in the fibers.  Almost all scientists, however, are of the opinion that this doesn't affect the calculation enough to increase its age by the twelve hundred years required to buy its divine origin.)

So radioisotope dating is a cool idea, but rests on some serious assumptions.  How do you make it more accurate?

Enter the humble zircon.

Zircons -- mostly made of zirconium silicate -- are crystalline minerals found kind of everywhere.  When big enough, they're decent semiprecious gemstones, but geologists love them for a different reason; they are amazingly good for geochronology.  They crystallize in many kinds of igneous rocks, and once they form, they are incredibly durable, resisting both physical and chemical weathering.  They contain trace amounts of radioactive elements, and when those decay, the decay products stay put, allowing zircons to act as extremely accurate radiochemical clocks.  They also trap the gases that were in the atmosphere at the time of formation, and the ratio of two oxygen isotopes (oxygen-16 and oxygen-18) gives a good idea of what the environment was doing at the time of formation.

This is how zircons from the Jack Hills Formation in Australia have been found to date from over four billion years ago -- and to show that even at that time, the Earth was cool enough to have a liquid water ocean.

The reason all this comes up, though, is not because of a terrestrial rock, but a Martian one.  The meteorite NWA 7034, found in Western Sahara in 2011, was blasted out of the surface of Mars by a (different) meteorite impact, ultimately landing on Earth; we know it's from Mars because of gas bubble inclusions that have a gas composition matching what we know of the Martian atmosphere.  And NWA 7034 contains zircon crystals that not only date back to 4.45 billion years ago...

... they show that they were formed in the presence of hot water.

A slice of zircon crystal from NWA 7034 [Image credit: Aaron Cavosie and Jack Gillespie]

The banding pattern shows alterations in iron, aluminum, and sodium concentration indicating that it formed in contact with high-temperature water, perhaps a hydrothermal vent system.

So amazing as it sounds, considering the Red Planet's current dry, dusty, windswept surface, four billion years ago it had liquid water, maybe even oceans of it.  Its lower gravitational pull meant that its atmosphere gradually leaked away to space, lowering the pressure and evaporating away the water it had.  But for a time, Mars was a wet planet.

And given how ecosystems flourish around Earth's hydrothermal vents, it may even have had life.

Even fervent aficionados of extraterrestrial life like myself doubt that Mars had time to evolve life of any great complexity; so I'm afraid C. S. Lewis's vision of the intelligent Hrossa and Séroni and Pfifltriggi in Out of the Silent Planet are going to remain forever in the realm of fiction.

A Malacandrian Hross [Image by artist Deimos Remus, licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA]

But it's entirely possible that it might, at some point, have had microbial life.  There's a slim (but nonzero) chance it still exists somewhere underground; what's more likely is that it left microfossils that could potentially be detected with more careful study of Martian rocks.  At this point, we don't know for sure, but the new study of the Western Sahara Martian meteorite certainly seems to support the possibility.

Whether or not that pans out, it's still pretty incredible that in only a little over a hundred years we've gone from "okay, this rock is probably about the same age as that rock" to being able to say "this tiny crystal formed on Mars near a hydrothermal vent 4.45 billion years ago, then got blasted into space and landed here."  Science will always have a capacity to astonish us.  

And if you're curious about the universe around you, the one certain thing is that you'll never be bored.

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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!]

Unreal estate

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I found out yesterday that those of you who would like a nice place to retire can now buy property...

... on Mars.

I'm not joking, although the people who set up the site may well be.  Here's the idea:

Own an acre of land in our Solar System’s 4th planet; package includes the deed, a map with location of your land, and a Mars info eBook.

Which sounds like it's completely aboveboard, given that it comes with an official deed and an informational booklet and all.

Home, sweet home.  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

They go on to give us more details:

Buying land on Mars sounds like a plot line in some futuristic sci-fi flick about billionaires.  In truth, it's a modern-day possibility for thousandaires.  Buy Planet Mars gives astrophiles the chance to buy one acre of land on the Red Planet.  Much like the purchase of a star, Martian Land Packages include a map charting your acre's location, an owner's deed, a NASA report on Mars exploration, and a photo eBook.  These packages are issued digitally, meaning they're available for download immediately after purchase.

Yes, thousandaires, as long as they have more money than sense.  An acre of land on Mars costs $35, which sounds pretty cheap, until you realize that (1) you're never going to go there, and (2) even after you purchase it, you don't really own land on Mars, because (3) the person selling the property on Mars doesn't technically own what he's selling.

Which evidently is not apparent to the 210 people who have paid actual money for this unreal estate.  The seller's Groupon page has a lot of positive testimonials, such as the following:

• When you can't afford land in California, might as well invest in the future!
• It's fun, thought provoking, unique and a great conversation peace [sic] I have never owned property, how could I pass it up?
• Fun gift, who knows what it could be in the future?

Worthless!  Yay!  Isn't that fun?

Okay, I know I'm coming across as a sarcastic, grumpy, humorless, sour-tempered curmudgeon here.  Which is hardly fair, because I am not humorless.  As far as the others, well, okay, maybe.  For example, my wife contends that I've been a curmudgeon since infancy.  I can't quite dodge the "sarcastic" thing, either, given that it's in the tagline of this blog.

But in my own defense, I'm not immune to pointless stuff sometimes.  After all, I'm the guy who was fully in favor of everyone purchasing alien abduction insurance.  (After posting that one, an anonymous reader of Skeptophilia purchased alien abduction insurance for me, and made my dog the beneficiary.)

So maybe I should be encouraging people to buy property on Mars.  You never know, maybe one day we'll have manned missions to Mars, and you could go visit your homestead.  Although this didn't work out so well for Matt Damon in The Martian.  As I recall, it became uncomfortably breezy.  He ended up having to do some impromptu self-surgery with a staple gun.  And he learned that Mars is really not the place if your lifelong dream is growing potatoes.

Anyhow.  If you've got an extra $35 that you can't think of doing something more productive with, which in my opinion would include using it to start a campfire, you can buy an acre of land on Mars.  If you do, make sure to post here and let me know the details.  I'm especially curious about the deed, because you have to wonder under whose jurisdiction it's being issued.

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When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

[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!]

Looking for Martians

When I first read C. S. Lewis's book Out of the Silent Planet, when I was in high school, one of the things that struck me was his vision of life on Malacandra -- what we here on Earth call Mars.

Malacandra, Lewis tells us, is evolved sentient life much earlier than the Earth did, and is therefore approaching the end of its habitability -- the planet is cooling (the majority of its surface is too cold, and the air far too thin, to support life), and its three species of intelligent life have retreated to the deepest parts of the canyons, where the hot springs keep things comfortable.  Given that this is Lewis, there are supernatural overtones to the story, and it's a rollicking good adventure, but what stuck with me most is his vision of a planet that is dying.  Just about every other science fiction novel or movie or television show at the time seemed to picture things as static -- whatever the civilization was, it was just kind of there.  You got the impression things could go on that way forever.

Lewis, on the other hand, recognized not only that organic life forms evolve, but that the planets they live on change as well, and not just in relatively minor ways such as the arrangement of the continents and the depth of the oceans and the presence or absence of ice caps.  The entire planet can shift in such a way as to become uninhabitable -- and, as Lewis points out, that will be the ultimate fate of the Earth as well.

Mars just happened to be closer to the end than we are.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA - European Space Agency & Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research for OSIRIS Team ESA/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, OSIRIS Mars true color, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]

The truth of Lewis's vision has been realized lately in our discovery that long ago, Mars was warm enough to have liquid water and a significant atmosphere.  And this week, a paper came out in Nature Communications that analyzes date from the HiRISE camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing that Mars's rivers and oceans left behind layers of sedimentary rock -- a site where future exploration might look for fossils of Martian life.

"Unfortunately we don’t have the ability to climb, to look at the finer-scale details, but the striking similarities to sedimentary rocks on Earth leaves very little to the imagination," said lead author Francesco Salese, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, in a press release.   "To form these 200-metre-thick deposits we needed conditions that would have required an environment capable of maintaining significant volumes of liquid water."

What this means is that not only was it warmer, the atmosphere was thicker.  The current thin atmosphere on Mars's surface means the pressure is low enough that water would evaporate away post-haste.  A billion years ago, Mars's climate was a great deal more like Earth's is today, but why the change happened isn't known.

I doubt it was the evil eldil from Thulcandra smiting the planet with his mighty fist, but otherwise, Lewis's picture of Mars's evolution toward the dead world it currently is was remarkably prescient.

"We’ve never seen an outcrop with this amount of detail on it that we can definitely say is so old,” said study co-author Joel Davis, postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London.  "This is one more piece of the puzzle in the search for ancient life on Mars, providing novel insight into just how much water occupied these ancient landscapes...  The rivers that formed these rocks weren’t just a one-off event — they were probably active for tens to hundreds of thousands of years."

I hope this will spur us to launch more projects with landers that can excavate and analyze these rocks, looking for (amongst other things) fossils.  What we can do remotely, albeit amazing, is still pretty rudimentary -- we can't launch an electron microscope into space yet -- but even a preliminary analysis of the sedimentary layers could produce some fascinating results.

Unfortunately, even if further exploration will discover traces ancient Martian life, I doubt they'll resemble Lewis's hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi.  A pity.  Those things were pretty cool.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

Time-traveling Martian tourist for president!

I know that a lot of us have been pretty distressed by the people who have successfully been elected or appointed to positions in the federal government.  (Hell, the state governments, too, given that nearly half of voters in Alabama voted for an ultra-right-wing alleged pedophile who was removed as the state's Chief Justice for failing to follow the law, and thinks the bible should replace the Constitution.  Oh, and that only the first ten Amendments should count, thereby legalizing slavery and disenfranchising everyone but white Christian males.  I could go on and on.)

So the situation is discouraging, to say the least.  But I have good news for you, apropos of the 2020 presidential election:

Andrew Basiago has thrown his hat into the ring.

Basiago is one of those people who looks perfectly sane.  I mean, check out his official election campaign photograph:

He looks like the kind of guy you could immediately trust, right?  Basiago is a Seattle lawyer, but if you recognize his name, it's probably not because of his law practice.

If you're a long-time reader of Skeptophilia, the name will ring a bell because he's been something of a frequent flyer here.  Back in 2012, he claimed that he and President Obama had participated in "Mars training classes" in the early 1980s, and that shortly thereafter he ran into Obama on Mars.  Oh, and they got there by teleporting.  Later that year, he informed the public that not only had he teleported, he was able to time travel, and in fact had zoomed back to the 1860s so he could hear President Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.  He stuck around until 1865 so he could see Lincoln get shot in Ford's Theater, which must have been pretty upsetting.

The following year, Basiago teamed up with noted wingnut Alfred Lambremont Webre to issue a dire prediction: the planet Nibiru, which makes more unscheduled public appearances than Kim Kardashian, was going to make a near pass of the Earth in the summer of 2013, causing "electrical discharges" which would fry most of humanity.  He knew this, he said, because he'd developed a tool called a "chronovisor" which allowed him to see into the future.

Well, I lived through 2013, and I don't remember any electrical discharges.  Sounds like his "chronovisor" needs recalibration.

So this guy is going to run for president.

Basiago says he's going to run on the platform of putting money into developing better time travel and teleportation technology.  There's already such a program in place (obviously, since he says he's used it), called "Project Pegasus," and he's not only going to fund it, he's going to reveal its marvels and secrets to the general public.

If he's elected, that is.  If not, I guess it'll be "fuck everybody" and he'll be back to his law practice in Seattle and writing articles about Martians for Before It's News.

Me, I'm all for him.  We've proven already that America is resilient enough to survive for a year under the questionable leadership of a man who is either demented or insane, so I'm sure we could make it for four years with a president who claims to have been to Mars.  His press release sounds so... normal:

Today, Andrew D. Basiago is running for President of the United States with a New Agenda for a New America. He has vowed that if elected President, he will lead the American people into a bold, new era of Truth, Reform, and Innovation as great as they are great. Join us in supporting Andy in his quest to establish a Presidency as honest, just, and ingenious as the American people.

Which is easily saner than any of Donald Trump's tweets.

So my general view is: "Basiago 2020!"  At least we could be sure that NASA wouldn't be defunded.  And consider some of the other people who've run for president, and the one who actually won the office.  We could do a hell of a lot worse.

Alien cannonball

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about a guy who claims to have had an alien mistress, today we have: a cannonball on Mars proving that there was a war there back in the day.

The origin of this claim comes from one Scott Waring, who has been something of a frequent flier, here at Skeptophilia.  In fact, he's more or less become our resident specialist with regards to unhinged claims about Mars.  Among other things, Waring has claimed that the Mars lander has snapped pictures of:

• a flip-flop
• a coffin
• a fossilized groundhog
• the shadow of a human
• a skull
• a hammer
• a thigh bone
• the rare and elusive Martian bunny

So it's not to be wondered at that I view anything Waring dreams up with a bit of a wry eye.  But without further ado, let's take a look at his evidence:

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

What this looks like to me is a concretion, which is a sedimentary rock formation in which concentric layers of a cementing material are laid down around some central core.  It can produce some weird-looking rocks; take a look, for example, at this photograph from Kazakhstan:

[image courtesy of photographer Alexandr Babkin and the Wikimedia Commons]

If I didn't know a bit of geology, I would certainly wonder about what the hell this could be, because it looks to my eye like Kazakhstan received a visit by the rare and elusive giant Martian bunny.  But no, these are just rocks.  Odd rocks, yes, but rocks.

Waring, however, doesn't see it that way.  The rock in the first picture is a cannonball.  And from this, he has concluded that there was a war on Mars millions of years ago, which resulted in two things:

1. the complete destruction of the Martian atmosphere; and
2. a single fossilized cannonball.

Which strikes me as pretty bizarre.  How can he deduce all this from a single alleged cannonball?  Plus, if the warring factions on Mars possessed weapons sufficient to destroy the atmosphere, why the hell would they bother with cannons?  It'd be like Luke Skywalker et al. trying to defeat the Stormtroopers using slings, stones, and catapults.

Oh, wait.  They did that, in Return of the Jedi.  My bad.

But my feeling is still that Waring is batting zero.  A pity, really, because it would be so cool if the Mars lander had stumbled upon some evidence of Martian life.  On the other hand, maybe it's better that there are no Martian bunnies.  I have enough trouble keeping the ordinary terrestrial bunnies out of our vegetable garden as it is; it would suck if I had to worry about an invasion of alien bunnies.

Alien press release

People who are in the know about artificial intelligence research have quipped that true AI is "twenty years in the future -- and always will be."  I'm beginning to think that the same is true for the discovery of extraterrestrial life.  Every time something has seemed promising -- from the experiments designed to find microbial life on Mars conducted by the Viking landers in the 1970s, to the peculiar "Wow!" signal, to anomalies like the weird intensity fluctuations of "Tabby's Star" -- the results have all been labeled "inconclusive."  The fact is, we don't have any good evidence for extraterrestrial life besides the purely probabilistic argument of the Drake equation, and even that doesn't come close to answering physicist Enrico Fermi's question, "Where is everyone?"

So when the worldwide hacking group that goes by the sobriquet "Anonymous" announced a couple of days ago that they had intelligence that NASA was about to announce the discovery of clear proof of extraterrestrial life, I didn't exactly jump for joy.  In fact, my first thought was, "Boy, either Anonymous got hoodwinked, or their standards are slipping.  Or both."

But as usual in the world of skepticism, judge for yourself.  Here's what they said:

Latest Anonymous message in 2017 just arrived with a huge announcement about the Intelligent Alien Life! NASA says aliens are coming! 

There are many who claim that unofficially, mankind has already made contact with aliens and not just little micro-organisms floating around inside a massive alien ocean, but advanced space-faring civilizations.

Twenty-five years ago, we didn't know that planets existed beyond our solar system. Today we have confirmed the existence of over 3,400 exoplanets that orbit other suns, and we continue to make new discoveries. We are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented, discoveries in history.

Along the way they cite Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate as evidence, ending with an exhortation to watch for an upcoming press release.

No one would be as excited as me if this turned out to be true.  I've been pining away for hard evidence of extraterrestrial life since I was a kid.  But my feeling is that if NASA had evidence, they wouldn't be playing coy, and they wouldn't have let themselves get scooped by Anonymous.

So just a hunch, but I think this'll turn out to be a bust.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

On the other hand, maybe it's just that NASA has had other fires to put out since last week, when noted raving loony Alex Jones had a guest named Robert David Steele on his radio show InfoWars.  It may well that Jones got Steele on his show so that he would look sane by comparison, because what Steele claims is that NASA is holding a colony of human children on Mars for the purposes of slave labor:

We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride.  So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.

And instead of guffawing directly into Steele's face, which is what I would have done, Jones responded as if what he'd said made perfect sense:

Clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening.  Every time probes go over they turn them off...  Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea.  There is so much stuff going on.

Steele, encouraged by this, zoomed off even further into CrazyTown by saying that the children weren't just being used for slave labor:

Pedophilia does not stop with sodomizing children.  It goes straight into terrorizing them to adrenalize their blood and then murdering them.  It also includes murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested as well as body parts.

Yup.  "Adrenalizing their blood."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Maybe Alex Jones does, because he responded, "Yes.  It's the original growth hormone."

So NASA figured they'd better respond.  Guy Webster, spokesperson for the Mars exploration program, answered the allegations a couple of days ago, and you can almost hear the long-suffering sigh in his voice:

There are no humans on Mars.  There are active rovers on Mars.  There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t.  There are.  But there are no humans.

He stopped short of saying, "So will you people go back to your previous occupation, which was probably pulling at the straps of your straitjackets with your teeth, and let us get back to doing actual science?"

Anyhow, that's what's new from the world of astronomy.  As far as the Anonymous announcement, I hope like hell I'm wrong.  Maybe NASA is gearing up to tell us they've finally found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  That'd be awesome, especially considering that Alex Jones is pretty good evidence that ordinary terrestrial intelligence is in short supply.

Unreal estate

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I found out yesterday that those of you who would like a nice place to retire can now buy property...

... on Mars.

I'm not joking, although the people who set up the site may well be.  Here's the idea:

Own an acre of land in our Solar System’s 4th planet; package includes the deed, a map with location of your land, and a Mars info eBook.

Which sounds like it's completely aboveboard, given that it comes with an official deed and an informational booklet and all.

Home, sweet home.  [image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

They go on to give us more details:

Buying land on Mars sounds like a plot line in some futuristic sci-fi flick about billionaires.  In truth, it's a modern-day possibility for thousandaires.  Buy Planet Mars gives astrophiles the chance to buy one acre of land on the Red Planet.  Much like the purchase of a star, Martian Land Packages include a map charting your acre's location, an owner's deed, a NASA report on Mars exploration, and a photo eBook.  These packages are issued digitally, meaning they're available for download immediately after purchase.

Yes, thousandaires, as long as they have more money than sense.  An acre of land on Mars costs $35, which sounds pretty cheap, until you realize that (1) you're never going to go there, and (2) even after you purchase it, you don't really own land on Mars, because (3) the person selling the property on Mars doesn't technically own what he's selling.

Which evidently is not apparent to the 210 people who have paid actual money for this unreal estate.  The seller's Groupon page has a lot of positive testimonials, such as the following:

• When you can't afford land in California, might as well invest in the future!
• “It's fun, thought provoking, unique and a great conversation peace [sic] I have never owned property, how could I pass it up?
• Fun gift, who knows what it could be in the future?

Worthless!  Yay!  Isn't that fun?

Okay, I know I'm coming across as a humorless curmudgeon here.  Which is hardly fair, because I'm not humorless, although my wife contends that I've been a curmudgeon since infancy.  And after all, I'm the guy who was fully in favor of everyone purchasing alien abduction insurance.  (After posting that one, an anonymous reader of Skeptophilia purchased alien abduction insurance for me, and made my dog the beneficiary.)

So maybe I should be encouraging people to buy property on Mars.  You never know, maybe one day we'll have manned missions to Mars, and you could go visit your homestead.  Although this didn't work out so well for Matt Damon in The Martian.  As I recall, it became uncomfortably breezy.  And the upshot of it was that you might want to consider doing something with your land other than potato farming.

Anyhow.  If you've got an extra $35 that you can't think of doing something more productive with, which in my opinion would include using it to start a campfire, you can buy an acre of land on Mars.  If you do, make sure to post here and let me know the details.  I'm especially curious about the deed, because you have to wonder under whose jurisdiction it's being issued.

The shadow knows

I'm getting a little fed up with the continual stream of aberrant stuff that the Mars Rover keeps finding on the Martian surface.

So far, we've had:

• a coffin
• a fossilized groundhog
• a flip-flop
• a skull
• a hammer
• a thigh bone
• a rare Martian bunny

With all of this, you'd think that NASA would be all over the news with stories like, "Mars Rover Finds Proof of Life on Mars!"  But no.  Somehow, they're content to cover the stories up, and let Congress slash their budget over and over.  Because that's how scientists roll.  Coverups have a much higher priority than grants and funding, if you're a scientist.

Or, perhaps, the people who are proposing these "finds" don't understand the concepts of "digital artifact" and "chance resemblance" and "pareidolia."  This last one is the reason behind the latest claim -- that the Rover caught a photograph of the shadow of a human (or other bipedal species) in a space suit, reaching out to make an adjustment of something.

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

See it, there, on the left-hand side?  Clearly a guy, doing something.  At least that's the claim of Scott Waring, whose name has appeared here before, and always in connection to the aforementioned Martian stuff.  Waring is always finding things on Mars.  You have to wonder if he has a day job, or anything, or if he spends his every waking moment poring over NASA photographs looking for Martian bunnies.

"Someone who wants to remain nameless has found a shadow of a human-like being messing with the Mars Curiosity rover," Waring writes, on his blog UFO Sightings Daily.  "The person has no helmet and their short hair is visible and in high detail.  The person has on air tanks on their back and a suit that covers most of the body except the hair."

This brings up two questions:

1. A human on Mars who leaves his scalp exposed?  Mars is a little cold for that, don't you think?  At least he should be wearing a wool hat.  Someone should probably tell his mom.
2. A vague shadow constitutes "high detail?"

Waring thinks that there's only one solution to all of this, which is that there is a secret base on Mars, and this was one of the guys who lives there, making some kind of repair.  Others, though, have suggested more ominously that this is evidence that the Mars Rover isn't on Mars, but is in some kind of studio on Earth where fake Martian photographs are taken, and the camera accidentally snapped a photo of one of the studio staff who didn't move away fast enough, and the people at NASA are so unobservant that they didn't notice and accidentally put it online for Scott Waring to find.

What's interesting, of course, is that if you look at subsequent photographs, like the one below, you find that the "person" hasn't moved.  At all.

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

So the resident of the Mars base or the worker in the earthly film studio (whichever version you went for earlier) must have realized that he had been captured in a photograph, and so he stood there perfectly still so that more photos would be taken and he wouldn't be found out.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is the shadow of part of the Rover itself.

As I've said before, no one would be more delighted than me if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life, whether on Mars or anywhere else.  I would just think that was the coolest thing ever.  But people who are actually using scientific methods to look for such evidence -- like SETI -- are not being helped by wingnuts like Scott Waring claiming that NASA is covering up evidence that socks that have gone missing in your dryer end up on Mars.

So unfortunately, as we might have guessed from the outset, the human shadow claim turns out to be a non-starter.  As have all of the other claims, which mostly have turned out to be weird-shaped rocks.  (Except for the bunny, which was a piece of the Rover's landing parachute.)  So the science-minded amongst us will keep waiting for good evidence, and everyone else will just wait until the day after tomorrow, when Waring et al. will be claiming that the Rover has photographed a giant Martian weasel.