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Tom - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter question
18 years 9 months ago #10427
by emanuel
Reply from Emanuel Sferios was created by emanuel
So MRO made orbit! It's cameras have a resolution 10 times that of MGS. This is exciting, isn't it? Does anyone know if/when Cydonia will be photographed? And will the data be made public? As far as I am concerned, none of the debates going on presently have been worth stepping into because the resolution of the photos is so low. And new photos should end all the debates once and for all. Doesn't someone know when new photos will come out?
Emanuel
Emanuel
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18 years 9 months ago #15264
by tvanflandern
Replied by tvanflandern on topic Reply from Tom Van Flandern
MRO has just entered a high Mars orbit, and will take at least six months to get down to its final low orbit for photography. Then it will be just a matter of time until the spacecraft happens to be over targets of interest. It might take up to two years before Cydonia is imaged, assuming those in charge don't avoid it.
I'd look for early results dealing with the "glassy tubes" because they are all over the place, so MRO can't miss them. I don't think they will look very natural at high resolution. But I'm convinced that people see what their minds allow them to see. If one's mind is certain that artifacts on Mars cannot exist, the viewer will not see artifacts.
The process of acceptance of artifacts will continue its slow pace until the bulk of the world is ready, and no longer considers such a finding "threatening" to their existing world view. This is not unlike the Copernican revolution, or the cardinals not being willing to look through Galileo's telescope. But eventually, every school child will know what's on Mars and laugh about what a difficult time we had with the concept in the early 21st century. -|Tom|-
I'd look for early results dealing with the "glassy tubes" because they are all over the place, so MRO can't miss them. I don't think they will look very natural at high resolution. But I'm convinced that people see what their minds allow them to see. If one's mind is certain that artifacts on Mars cannot exist, the viewer will not see artifacts.
The process of acceptance of artifacts will continue its slow pace until the bulk of the world is ready, and no longer considers such a finding "threatening" to their existing world view. This is not unlike the Copernican revolution, or the cardinals not being willing to look through Galileo's telescope. But eventually, every school child will know what's on Mars and laugh about what a difficult time we had with the concept in the early 21st century. -|Tom|-
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18 years 9 months ago #14925
by jrich
Replied by jrich on topic Reply from
Oh, great! More grist for the <i><b>Who's on Mars?</b></i> Rorschach thread. I predict you're all going to be very disappointed for about 60 seconds until you decide that the proof must have been "processed" out of the data. Tom, a Patron Membership if I'm wrong.
JR
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18 years 9 months ago #14926
by tvanflandern
Replied by tvanflandern on topic Reply from Tom Van Flandern
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by jrich</i>
<br />Tom, a Patron Membership if I'm wrong.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Wrong about what's on Mars, or wrong about how we will react if the new photos don't support artifacts?
JR, what's important in science is setting up a testing protocol that assures objective results that cannot be influenced by the experimenters. Otherwise, all tests tend to come out in accord with the experimenter's pre-existing beliefs and biases. Data that goes against those beliefs is scrutinized until reasons to exclude it are found; and data that supports the beliefs is often not even checked. A competent analyst can almost always create ad hoc hypotheses to explain, or explain away, almost any result if no controls against such biases are in place.
You are probably fairly certain that everyone seeing artifacts is acting out of a pro-artifact bias. Yet you are presumably basing that on your own anti-artifact bias, because you have no reason and no data to support a conclusion that artifacts are not present, or even that they are improbable. In point of fact, until we look, the probability of artifacts is unknown, which is very different from being small. For all we knew before getting any imagery, it might be the case that every terrestrial-type planet in the Galaxy has already been explored and contains artifacts, in which case the probability of our finding artifacts in a thorough search approaches 100%.
In the early 1990s, when I seriously doubted artificiality, Hoagland bet me that the Face was artificial at 100-to-1 odds. At the same time, in a USENET discussion, Richard Schumaker offered to bet anyone that the Face was natural at 100-to-1 odds. My position at that time was to take no position until the data was in, because taking a position creates biases. But my mother did not raise a fool, so I took both bets, then announced what I had done. Of course, for every dollar bet both ways, I would get $99 richer when the truth is known. But my real point was that both sides were acting out of bias, and had developed a completely inappropriate certainty of correctness in their own minds. Clearly, certainty of correctness is not a good guide to actual probability of correctness, at least in this instance.
The Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR) set up eight tests of artificiality for the Face image seen at Cydonia by Viking in 1976. I contributed two of those tests, based on the the impossibility of seeing the Face from the surface of Mars, and its only being visible as a Face from above: (1) If the Face was built to be seen as a Face, it would have been built upright, not at an angle, so that it can be seen as a Face from above; and (2) it would have been built on the equator to maximize visibility from a space station or spacecraft approaching from any direction. But the Cydonia Face was at latitude 42 degrees north and tilted about 35 degrees from upright. By 1996, six of the original tests favored an artificial origin, but my two tests favored a natural origin.
Then in December 1996, an Art Bell listener heard me speaking about the exploded planet hypothesis and how it had so drastically changed Mars. One of the many marks of this was a sudden large shift in the geographic pole location on Mars. A listener sent me an email, and remarked that maybe the EPH event was what ended the civilization on Mars that had built the Face (a subject I had not mentioned). He then asked "Where was the Cydonia Face on Mars before that large pole shift?" I immediately understood why he asked, because the answer was relevant to my two tests. So I took the published coordinates of the old Martian pole from planetary geologist Peter Schultz, and the well-known coordinates of the Face at Cydonia, and calculated the surface angle between those two points. The computer result astonished me: 90.1 degrees! (That put the Face right on the old Martian equator.) So I then did the slightly harder calculation of orientation, and was once again shocked: 2 degrees from upright, with an uncertainty of about +/- 2 degrees! The combined odds against this result with no degrees of freedom coming up by chance were longer than 1000-to-1.
Of course, as I hastily noted, that did not prove the Face was artificial. I was still very relucatnt to be driven in the direction of artificiality. (I already had enough problems with my colleagues without adding another reason for them to distance themselves.) But neither could I ignore that all eight objective tests now favored artificiality over a natural origin, because doing so would just be reverse bias. I had to spend a few days in a state of semi-shock adjusting to the idea that this object just might be an artifact after all.
A year later, SPSR approached NASA to request priority imaging of the Face when MGS was ready for photography. Then we set about setting up a protocol, approximately as follows: If and only if the Face was artificial, it was clearly an attempt to portray a humanoid-like face. So the impression from Viking (an eye socket, a nose, a mouth) should be augmented by secondary facial features when high-resolution MGS images came in. Specifically, we listed eyebrows over the eye sockets, irises in the eye sockets, two nostrils at the end of the nose, and two lips for the mouth. We listed the range of size, shape, location, and orientation for each of these features to be considered deliberate rather than random. And we insisted that no other candidates exist elsewhere on the mesa, allowing us to pick and choose such features from a noisy background to fulfill the wiring in our brains to see faces in natural terrain.
The combined odds against a chance fulfillment of all these strict criteria by the Cydonia Face at higher resolution, on a mesa that had no other such features except those with the right specifications, were roughly 1000 billion billion to one.
When the 1998 MGS hi-res image of the Face came down from the spacecraft, every one of the protocol-predicted features was present well within the allotted ranges of size, shape, location, and orinetation, with no other candidate features elsewhere. See the first animation at metaresearch.org/media%20and%20links/animations/animations.asp to see this image and watch the corrections for spececraft slant angle and poor solar lighting get applied. This is why we concluded that artificiality of at least this one feature was far more probable than any other explanation.
And where there is one artifact, it is no longer extraordinary for there to be more than one. -|Tom|-
<br />Tom, a Patron Membership if I'm wrong.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Wrong about what's on Mars, or wrong about how we will react if the new photos don't support artifacts?
JR, what's important in science is setting up a testing protocol that assures objective results that cannot be influenced by the experimenters. Otherwise, all tests tend to come out in accord with the experimenter's pre-existing beliefs and biases. Data that goes against those beliefs is scrutinized until reasons to exclude it are found; and data that supports the beliefs is often not even checked. A competent analyst can almost always create ad hoc hypotheses to explain, or explain away, almost any result if no controls against such biases are in place.
You are probably fairly certain that everyone seeing artifacts is acting out of a pro-artifact bias. Yet you are presumably basing that on your own anti-artifact bias, because you have no reason and no data to support a conclusion that artifacts are not present, or even that they are improbable. In point of fact, until we look, the probability of artifacts is unknown, which is very different from being small. For all we knew before getting any imagery, it might be the case that every terrestrial-type planet in the Galaxy has already been explored and contains artifacts, in which case the probability of our finding artifacts in a thorough search approaches 100%.
In the early 1990s, when I seriously doubted artificiality, Hoagland bet me that the Face was artificial at 100-to-1 odds. At the same time, in a USENET discussion, Richard Schumaker offered to bet anyone that the Face was natural at 100-to-1 odds. My position at that time was to take no position until the data was in, because taking a position creates biases. But my mother did not raise a fool, so I took both bets, then announced what I had done. Of course, for every dollar bet both ways, I would get $99 richer when the truth is known. But my real point was that both sides were acting out of bias, and had developed a completely inappropriate certainty of correctness in their own minds. Clearly, certainty of correctness is not a good guide to actual probability of correctness, at least in this instance.
The Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR) set up eight tests of artificiality for the Face image seen at Cydonia by Viking in 1976. I contributed two of those tests, based on the the impossibility of seeing the Face from the surface of Mars, and its only being visible as a Face from above: (1) If the Face was built to be seen as a Face, it would have been built upright, not at an angle, so that it can be seen as a Face from above; and (2) it would have been built on the equator to maximize visibility from a space station or spacecraft approaching from any direction. But the Cydonia Face was at latitude 42 degrees north and tilted about 35 degrees from upright. By 1996, six of the original tests favored an artificial origin, but my two tests favored a natural origin.
Then in December 1996, an Art Bell listener heard me speaking about the exploded planet hypothesis and how it had so drastically changed Mars. One of the many marks of this was a sudden large shift in the geographic pole location on Mars. A listener sent me an email, and remarked that maybe the EPH event was what ended the civilization on Mars that had built the Face (a subject I had not mentioned). He then asked "Where was the Cydonia Face on Mars before that large pole shift?" I immediately understood why he asked, because the answer was relevant to my two tests. So I took the published coordinates of the old Martian pole from planetary geologist Peter Schultz, and the well-known coordinates of the Face at Cydonia, and calculated the surface angle between those two points. The computer result astonished me: 90.1 degrees! (That put the Face right on the old Martian equator.) So I then did the slightly harder calculation of orientation, and was once again shocked: 2 degrees from upright, with an uncertainty of about +/- 2 degrees! The combined odds against this result with no degrees of freedom coming up by chance were longer than 1000-to-1.
Of course, as I hastily noted, that did not prove the Face was artificial. I was still very relucatnt to be driven in the direction of artificiality. (I already had enough problems with my colleagues without adding another reason for them to distance themselves.) But neither could I ignore that all eight objective tests now favored artificiality over a natural origin, because doing so would just be reverse bias. I had to spend a few days in a state of semi-shock adjusting to the idea that this object just might be an artifact after all.
A year later, SPSR approached NASA to request priority imaging of the Face when MGS was ready for photography. Then we set about setting up a protocol, approximately as follows: If and only if the Face was artificial, it was clearly an attempt to portray a humanoid-like face. So the impression from Viking (an eye socket, a nose, a mouth) should be augmented by secondary facial features when high-resolution MGS images came in. Specifically, we listed eyebrows over the eye sockets, irises in the eye sockets, two nostrils at the end of the nose, and two lips for the mouth. We listed the range of size, shape, location, and orientation for each of these features to be considered deliberate rather than random. And we insisted that no other candidates exist elsewhere on the mesa, allowing us to pick and choose such features from a noisy background to fulfill the wiring in our brains to see faces in natural terrain.
The combined odds against a chance fulfillment of all these strict criteria by the Cydonia Face at higher resolution, on a mesa that had no other such features except those with the right specifications, were roughly 1000 billion billion to one.
When the 1998 MGS hi-res image of the Face came down from the spacecraft, every one of the protocol-predicted features was present well within the allotted ranges of size, shape, location, and orinetation, with no other candidate features elsewhere. See the first animation at metaresearch.org/media%20and%20links/animations/animations.asp to see this image and watch the corrections for spececraft slant angle and poor solar lighting get applied. This is why we concluded that artificiality of at least this one feature was far more probable than any other explanation.
And where there is one artifact, it is no longer extraordinary for there to be more than one. -|Tom|-
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18 years 9 months ago #14930
by jrich
Replied by jrich on topic Reply from
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
Wrong about what's on Mars, or wrong about how we will react if the new photos don't support artifacts?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Tom, either.
Your willingness to explain and defend your analysis of the Cydonia region over the years is deserving of respect. If Cydonia is an artifact, then in addition you are deserving of support for being right. On the other hand, if the higher resolution images do not obviously support artificiality, then I would expect you to admit it. I will be very disappointed if you try to argue that the image data were manipulated or the imager isn't capable providing images of sufficient resolution and we'll have to wait for the next better mission. Note that I have no such expectation of integrity of many others who regularly post on this topic, hence the exasperation in my previous post. I would liken most of what is claimed in the <i>Who's on Mars?</i> topic as akin to the likenesses of the Virgin Mary on toast for sale on Ebay. How long do you think it will be before someone sees the Blessed Virgin on Mars, or better yet, Elvis? I bet if I looked, I could find them. (Has it happened already? Maybe I missed it)
You may be surprised that I have complete confidence that I will be a Patron Member, though despite the evidence you presented in your book and this website I am thoroughly skeptical that there are any artifacts on Mars other than the ones we have put there.
JR
Wrong about what's on Mars, or wrong about how we will react if the new photos don't support artifacts?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Tom, either.
Your willingness to explain and defend your analysis of the Cydonia region over the years is deserving of respect. If Cydonia is an artifact, then in addition you are deserving of support for being right. On the other hand, if the higher resolution images do not obviously support artificiality, then I would expect you to admit it. I will be very disappointed if you try to argue that the image data were manipulated or the imager isn't capable providing images of sufficient resolution and we'll have to wait for the next better mission. Note that I have no such expectation of integrity of many others who regularly post on this topic, hence the exasperation in my previous post. I would liken most of what is claimed in the <i>Who's on Mars?</i> topic as akin to the likenesses of the Virgin Mary on toast for sale on Ebay. How long do you think it will be before someone sees the Blessed Virgin on Mars, or better yet, Elvis? I bet if I looked, I could find them. (Has it happened already? Maybe I missed it)
You may be surprised that I have complete confidence that I will be a Patron Member, though despite the evidence you presented in your book and this website I am thoroughly skeptical that there are any artifacts on Mars other than the ones we have put there.
JR
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18 years 9 months ago #15270
by emanuel
Replied by emanuel on topic Reply from Emanuel Sferios
Hey Tom,
Can you give more details about the "advanced image processing" used on the 1998 MGS photo of the face? When I compare images 1, 2 and 3 shown here:
www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo...fact_html/slide7.jpg
with the unfiltered JPL photo here:
www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo...fact_html/slide6.jpg
(basically slides 6 and 7 in the sldieshow)
it is not obvious that the progression from unfiltered through each of the steps has not included some bias towards artificiality. What did the three individuals actually do to the unflitered photo during each of these steps? After showing the slides to some people, a few made comments to the effect of, "yeah I could apply some 'advanced image processing' too, and make it look like anything I wanted." I had to admit I did not know whether the image processors (the individuals, that is) added some of their own bias into the process.
So if the steps could be described in more detail, so it was clear that they contained no artificiality bias, the artifacts claim would be more convincing to some.
Can you do this?
Thanks,
Emanuel
Can you give more details about the "advanced image processing" used on the 1998 MGS photo of the face? When I compare images 1, 2 and 3 shown here:
www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo...fact_html/slide7.jpg
with the unfiltered JPL photo here:
www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo...fact_html/slide6.jpg
(basically slides 6 and 7 in the sldieshow)
it is not obvious that the progression from unfiltered through each of the steps has not included some bias towards artificiality. What did the three individuals actually do to the unflitered photo during each of these steps? After showing the slides to some people, a few made comments to the effect of, "yeah I could apply some 'advanced image processing' too, and make it look like anything I wanted." I had to admit I did not know whether the image processors (the individuals, that is) added some of their own bias into the process.
So if the steps could be described in more detail, so it was clear that they contained no artificiality bias, the artifacts claim would be more convincing to some.
Can you do this?
Thanks,
Emanuel
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