Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/22/mars-rover-has-detected-methan.html
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Or the rover is farting and trying to blame it on someone else
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Methane has been known to exist in the martian atmosphere for decades. I really wish that it didn’t take this type of ‘science woo’ to keep science funded.
How about getting excited about the human race surviving the end of earth if we develop space exploration?
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The NYTimes article talks about the previous methane detections.
What is new is that the rover detected a spike 3x the largest previous spike it has seen.
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I thought the wow is that this particular type of methane is typically from organic synthesis?
ie biotic rather than abiotic origin (I could very well be wrong here).
Said by a buddy of mine as we were discussing spaceX (new launch on Monday) last week:
not bad for a bunch of fucking monkeys with explosives!
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Don’t worry, it won’t work, anyway. Backward regressives will still continue to whittle away at anything resembling reason.
I’m emitting signs of life right now.
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Methane is interesting. If it gets into the Martian atmosphere, it should get broken down by UV over a hundred years or so. So any that is detected ought to be pretty recent. However, some of the instruments that found it were on their sensitivity limits, while others found nothing. Earlier, curiosity detected methane at a concentration of 7 parts per billion in the thin, Martian atmosphere. This time they detected a spike of 21 parts per billion.
Big woop.
Well, that’s how science usually goes. We still don’t know what makes the methane, or why it comes in bursts. It is tempting to think that it collects in pockets underground, and then pops out, but there is little proof of that. Most of us don’t feel any wiser than before. We will probably get there in the end. But having the press yell “Signs Of Life Detected On Mars” every friggin’ time we get a new datum isn’t helping.
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In less than 70 years, we achieved flight and then landed on the moon. Clever monkeys indeed.
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After a rough night in Tijuana, street tacos, and mucho tequila, I’m detecting methane from planet myanus.
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The amazing developments of Twig TechnologyTM.
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You played that card awfully quick, King.
Ye who mapped it …
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I’m not familiar with Twig Technology in this context; I’m obviously missing something …
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My grandfather remembered seeing the newsreel of the Wright brother’s first flight when it first came out. He also saw the moon landings.
I, personally, think the monkeys are as smart as they ever were. But giant rockets have gone the way of giant buildings, canals, and ships, the smarter monkeys have gone into nanotech and quantum physics. And the real leftovers from everything have gone into politics.
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It would be interesting to know the wind direction at the moment of the detection. Maybe over time curiosity could narrow down the point of origin that way. It would be a big deal if multiple detections from multiple locations all lead back to the same small area.
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Type of methane? Methane is methane.
Which, incidentally, provided the basis for an early experiment to disprove the god-centred origin of life thesis.
Killer quote from Wöhler:
" I cannot, so to say, hold my chemical water and must tell you that I can make urea without thereby needing to have kidneys, or anyhow, an animal, be it human or dog "
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No word yet on the source of this methane?
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calling it now, the first life form mars Rover will find is Elon Musk taking a self with it for a meme.
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my social studies teacher used to tell about his father who went from seeing horse and buggies to seeing people land on the moon.
my teacher then said something like: we’ll probably never see change like that again.
of course, the internet didn’t exist in the public eye, people didn’t have supercomputers in their pocket, and climate change was virtually unknown - so what did he know anyway 
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