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Originally Posted by CraigS
Just to balance it up .. this one appeared just the other day … (notice it was NASA spinning the optimistic story .. again .. )
NASA research offers new prospect of water on Mars
.. all invented to explain why the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft's spectrographic camera can't detect more carbonates than expected.
Notice that they're modelling it all on the conditions in the Mojave Desert (on Earth !). The gist is that they're imagining that 'missing' carbonates on Mars, which would be indicative of the presence of 'big' liquid water in the past, might be buried under a 'varnish of iron oxide 'skin'.
Invoking some kind of condition, which may exist somewhere exotic on Earth, to me, is the problem with a lot of this type of speculation. Its vastly different from basing hypotheses on pure physics or chemistry. The formation of geology is subject to Complexity (a flow-on from Chaos Theory). As such, determinism is not the logical outcome of such processes.
They're all caught up with trying to continue the story about previous 'vast oceans' of water … which then forces them into having to invoke some kind of mysterious, catastrophic disappearance phenomenon.
Cheers |
That's all they have to go on....what they can see and comparison with Earth analogues. You take what you can see and know and then extrapolate from that into areas you don't know but find similarities between the two. Unless the laws of physics and chemistry are totally different on Mars as they are on Earth, if similar processes have appeared on both planets, then their outcomes will generally be similar. For instance, the weathering of granites via aqueous solution produces clays...both of which are abundant of both planets. Therefore, the processes and chemistry which occurs in the formation of clays will be similar on both planets. There's nothing wrong in speculating that the carbonates on Mars maybe covered by an iron oxide crust, like here in the Mohave Desert. Both the Mars areas and those areas in the Mohave return the same spectral signatures. That would point to a similarity in both areas. Now, all the have to do is ground truth it...and how many times have I said that??.
It's quite obvious you've never studied geology, because you're invoking Complexity in the determination of the processes occurring. You've got this bug under your bonnet about Chaos/Complexity and you see it in everything. As a matter of fact, you see it as the be all and end all of what is occurring. It's not. There's a lot more to geology, physics or any other subject/process etc, than chaos or complexity. Far more. That's not to say it's not important but you really need to be aware of the level at which it is important and to be aware of where determinism arises from any underlying chaos/complexity. Chaos and complexity do not function in a vacuum, so to speak. Neither does geology, or chemistry, or physics etc.