Phoenix Spacecraft Set to Land on Mars Today

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Speculating from both sides of the coin until we are blue in the face.

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Or green :alien:

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Then tell me why NASA has to beg and plead every financial year to NOT get its budget cut from the piddly 0.58% it has down even further, against people who argue that aliens don't exist? Why why why? Why wouldn't you shove PROOF of aliens right into their faces so you could get the funding?

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I'd speculate because the second they did shove that evidence into their face, the project would instantly be taken over (or tightly regulated) by the military. A good portion of your staff would probably be replaced and you would live under the threat of punishment if you leak classified info. Isn't this why all these old ex-officers and military folk are just now coming forward? The government believes the general public are idiots and would freak out (mass panic). For the most part, I'd agree on the former. But, I think we've been slowly introduced to the idea of extraterrestrial life over the years that I don't think people would freak out. If anything, it might unite us as one race. Again, something the higher powers don't like - it's harder to control large masses when they are united.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really taking to either side - proof to me is when I'm standing either below one of these UFO's or high-five'in one of the occupants. I just think it's absolutely naive to think we're the only life in the universe and that no other life out there could possibly have the intelligence (or years in existence) to develop vehicles that can travel the distances (or through dimensions ;) ) needed to reach us.

One thing that bothers me is, if they DO exist - why haven't one of them simply come down right in the middle of Time Square at noon on a Weekend yet?



PS - Hey, this thread need splitting? :hrm:

In the interest of getting somewhat more back on track...

Here are some pretty pictures of Mars for those who wanted them. Most are pretty large, so I only included as links:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10245.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10216.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10213.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10128.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10105.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10072.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10071.jpg
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10070.jpg

Some of these are very beautiful. I hope these have slaked your thirst for nice pictures of our red neighbor. If not, NASA has plenty more like this hidden away from the public on their website. I actually had to go there and perform a search!

Now that that's out of the way, perhaps we can let the mission continue in what it was meant to do.

So clearly since the photos that skysaw graced us with are clearly of sufficient quality, which is what this was originally about, we won thread closed.

First of all, thanks Alextanium for saving me a lot of grief explaining all of this to these people (and you clearly have a lot more knowledge about it than me anyways).

Secondly, some of these people make me really value education and the fact that NASA highers people who actually understand scientific principles and goals as opposed to average joes who have a "pimp my space probe" attitude.

"Let's put a sweet ass high-def camera in there to beam some excellent tubeage back to the earth dwellers. Let's put some monster rims on this baby so it came move mach-3 across the martian terrain and find alien cities. Then let's put some ownage boosters on there powered by magic which can make it go really fast so we can keep on sending it back and forth from mars with samples. Fuck yeah, this is gonna be sweet."

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Originally Posted by wasup

First of all, thanks Alextanium for saving me a lot of grief explaining all of this to these people (and you clearly have a lot more knowledge about it than me anyways).

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All I've got is a google search engine and critical thinking. I used to be the guy that would jump at that tether video and instantly proclaim it to be aliens or 'something spooky' just because it was the cooler and more fascinating option.

But then I grew up :D

I don't think you grew up or have much critical thinking because lens flaring, space junk, or pieces or dust does not explain the many objects flying around in that video.

Because hundreds of 3-mile wide alien space craft that should be visible from the ground in broad daylight (but weren't) are far more reasonable, right?

How do you know they would be that size and how do you know it should be visible in broad day light when you can't even see all the stars in the day and they are much brighter.

Yet again, you're not absorbing anything from the thread, and asking questions for which answers have already been provided. I'll try again...

http://www.rense.com/general/stsd.htm

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Originally Posted by Me, top of page 2, quoting the website I linked in said post

Other issues remain with the interpretation of the scene as showing genuine kilometers-wide circles in space near the shuttle. Such hypothesized objects would be on the same angular size and brightness of a full moon as viewed from Earth's surface. It is not a matter of a handful of amateur astronomers viewing and not seeing such immensely impressive apparitions -- these are images which would have been visible in the daytime sky to anybody on Earth, on the ground or on ships or in aircraft, along the track of the shuttle (they would also have been visible in satellite imagery, including weather satellite views). Not a single report of fast-moving moon-like circles in the sky has been found from anywhere on Earth during this period when the videos were showing the images that have been thus interpreted. The mandatory deduction from this is that such objects never existed.

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And stars aren't bright at all, comparatively. The moon is 500,000 times dimmer than the Sun and we can still see it in the day because of its proximity to Earth. The stars are hundreds to hundreds of thousands of light years away and as such appear fantastically dimmer. The only reason you can see them at night is because the light from the Sun isn't bouncing around our atmosphere and washing them out completely. The only 'star' you'd ever hope to see during the day (other than the Sun, obviously) is a supernova in the 'local neighbourhood'.

Ok but how is it we can't see the tether thing too if that was the case.

Again.... all right there in the link

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The tether thickness must be an illusion, because the tether itself is less than a centimeter in diameter. Yet on the scenes of the free-flying tether, its full 20-kilometer length is matched by a scaled width, in angular terms (or in pixels), on the order of hundreds of meters. At the tether range (140-180 km), a pixel is only about 100-meters across, so an image several hundred meters in size has "spilled over" several pixels (five or so) beyond the actual pixels illuminated directly by the bright reflecting tether.

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Have you read the article at all?

If the tether size is an illusion then how can you say how big the flying objects were?

It's the UFO conspiracy people that extrapolated the size of the objects, from the video that SolSkye posted. And as the article points out, they are using the falsely represented width of the tether and the 'shadow' it casts (impossible) to guess the size of the objects, and they are the ones that say the objects are miles wide. Watch his video from the 2:45 mark, and see the mistakes they make. How can something less than a centimetre wide look several hundred metres across WITHOUT camera artefacting?

Read . the . article.

I still don't understand how the camera can create those objects. The article doesn't convince me. I'm not saying the objects are real. There is just no way of proving it for sure.

oh god...

I think this

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I still don't understand

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epitomizes the nature of your side of the argument

:(

Minervas, why be so closed minded about the whole UFO thing? Do you know anything about how cameras behave in space? OK, even if you think the objects are UFO's, shouldn't you give the guys who know a thing or two about the science a little bit more credit? Should your 'instinct' mean you should completely ignore the plausible explanations? I'm not saying they're not UFO's, they may well be, but you're not in a position to make such an assumption based on gut feelings and sketchy evidence. There are so many unexplained phenomenon in the universe that we don't understand yet - it's highly irrational to jump to conclusions. Why not just keep an open mind?

I do have an open mind. I said it can't be proven for sure.

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Originally Posted by Minervas Phoenix

I don't think you grew up or have much critical thinking because lens flaring, space junk, or pieces or dust does not explain the many objects flying around in that video.

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actually, they do.

epic fail.

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Originally Posted by wasup

Secondly, some of these people make me really value education and the fact that NASA highers people who actually understand scientific principles and goals as opposed to average joes who have a "pimp my space probe" attitude.

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Ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner.
You'll have to fight your way through a lot of mindless crap on these forums if you want to find a single scientifically sound idea.

As for the mission, I'm quite excited to see what it finds as well. That we're constantly improving our methods of chemical analysis is pretty exciting as well, considering it means we're coming closer to finding life away from earth, if there is any.