Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS
Perhaps.
The point I'm getting from this is that I have never seen it openly admitted that the "Big water on Mars" story is just that … a hypothesis !!
In the past, it has been that this is the only explanation.
Clearly, it is now OK to speak of other explanations.
Y'know .. lightning bolts and 'stuff' !! 
Cheers |
Not perhaps, Craig. It's a fact and a certainty. You can't really solely on remote sensing (either in orbit or on the ground) to tell you what's going on. You have to be there, sit on the rock, smell it, taste it, touch it, break it up and look at it through a hand lens or microscope, do all the tests needed to determine what's going on, map the rocks etc etc, to figure out what's going on. I can show you from plenty of 1st hand experience where remote sensing has misled people looking at the geology of a locality. It's only a tool and it's only as good as those who make the interpretations. and all those depend on the accuracy and the function of the detectors being used.
It's always been a hypothesis....to the scientists. This is another case of media beat up. However, the scientists can also be blamed for some of the beat up as well. So what if some of them want "big water" to be true. Surely they're entitled to some belief in something, or a feeling about the possibilities. It's no different from any other theory that ever been posited. Including SR/GR or QED, QCD, LCG, String Theory or anything else. It just waits to be either confirmed or refuted.
Lightning bolts.....yeah and my grandmother was Davy Crockett