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Congress

Congressman Asks NASA About Those Secret Ancient Martians

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 18, 2017
Congressman Asks NASA About Those Secret Ancient Martians

Congressman asks scientists if they’ve found ancient civilizations on Mars, Ars Technica
“The hearing was respectable, with on-point witnesses and mostly incisive questions. That is, until California Republican Dana Rohrabacher had his turn at the microphone. After asking a reasonable, if rambling, question about NASA’s plans for a Mars sample return mission and the kind of fuel used by spacecraft, Rohrabacher got down to business. He asked, “You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago. Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?”
Goofy Mars Conspiracies Part 2 (child slave colonies on Mars), earlier post

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

20 responses to “Congressman Asks NASA About Those Secret Ancient Martians”

  1. Donald Barker says:
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    OMG. And these people are running this country???!!! OMG…!!!

  2. fcrary says:
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    Well, part of this is a good example of how conspiracy theories work.

    > Now Rohrabacher wanted to make things crystal clear: “Would you
    >rule that out? See, there’s some people… Well, anyway.”
    >
    >”I would say that is extremely unlikely,” Farley responds.’

    It’s virtually impossible to rule something out completely. Occam’s razor and Newton’s “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy” (at the beginning of book three of Principia) are opposed to some complex, convoluted theory in favor of a simple, straight-forward one. But they are, in fact, philosophical principals, not absolute rules.

    As an example related to ancient, unknown civilizations, a well-known planetary scientist (McKay, I think) once asked how you would disprove the following claim: “There was once a species of intelligent dinosaurs on Earth, which reached at least the level of mid-20th century human technology before becoming extinct.” Of course, he wasn’t serious about the possibility, but he was serious about how difficult such a hypothetical would be to rule out.

    • MountainHighAstro says:
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      I have thought the same. How could you tell an intelligent species just by inspecting its remains? We can’t even be sure while observing a living creature. Although the question is a bit silly giving the context, it’s not as if the Representative insisted NASA was hiding the existence of the Lizard People from us…

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      It’s a fun thought experiment though, you know? And it helps to focus exactly the level of impact/damage we are having now, as well as how long it will take Mother to recover once she somehow rids herself of this cancerous pestilence.

      I love the concept of Deep Time, by which I mean something deeper than the Congressman’s conception of “thousands” of years. One of those lovely Morgan Freeman shows had a physicist talking about the future heat death of the universe, a time when matter had disintegrated, a time when the weak force and the strong force no longer bound particles, a time when only gravity controlled a hot universe that was cooling with the passage of time. Time beyond the Degenerate Era, beyond the Black Hole Era (if I remember the terms correctly); past black hole dissipation and into a time that Wikipedia calls 10^10^10^10^56 years in the future.

      This is a useful number to keep in mind when one is having a bad day.

      And considering that the actual history of our fair planet is one of those huge numbers that are so difficult to comprehend (a bit like, say, the number of stars in the universe): how long would be required to wipe out a remnent civilization?

      Maybe more interesting: what is the highest level of civilization that could be fully obliterated in, say, 5 million years? 20 million? 100 million? This probably leaves out concrete of any type, I suppose, let alone real technology.

  3. Yashmak says:
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    Asking if such a thing is possible isn’t quite the same thing as asking if they’ve found such a thing. . . .

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      Yes, especially given this recent SETI paper by Dr. Wright, a PI for NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science…

      https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704….

      Prior Indigenous Technological Species

      Jason T. Wright
      Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds
      525 Davey Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

      Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Astronomy
      Breakthrough Listen Laboratory
      501 Campbell Hall #3411, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

      PI, NASA Nexus for Exoplanet System Science

      It is an interesting speculation paper.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Interesting indeed. Thanks.

        Jack McDevitt is one of my favorite SF writers. He speculates in one of his novels about a large artistic sculpture clearly of alien origin found on Iapetus (pretty sure that’s the moon). His description is worth the read.

        McDevitt’s novels do include a form of FTL travel. Aside from that, he speculates consistently that technological civilizations are extremely rare, and they are short lived. And while several high tech civilizations are included in his universe, they are uniformly abandoned, having disappeared aeons ago.

  4. Upward and Outward! says:
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    Lucky me, he’s my Representative. Almost as pathetic as the one a few years ago, a congressman was meeting with the military who wanted to expand or develop a base on a southern Pacific island. The congressman expressed a concern that the “additional weight added to the island” might cause it to tip over….

  5. Matthew Black says:
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    Insert Picard/Riker double-facepalm meme here…

  6. Michael Spencer says:
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    Finally! At last! Someone with some real gravitas is asking the questions that nobody will ask – or dare answer!

  7. Donald Barker says:
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    Yes, but do we need to keep voting in or tolerating people like this leading our country, incessantly providing such examples of “excellence” to our youth?

  8. rb1957 says:
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    Of course NASA has found evidence of past civilization and are covering it up. In fact, not so past, as the aliens have infiltrated NASA and other space agencies and governments. But at least they are benign, and are leading us in the best possible direction.

    • Paul451 says:
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      Your conspiracy theories are silly. The “Mars” you see in the sky is the size of a basketball. No “aliens” could live on that, any more than a rover could land on it.

      Obviously, NASA’s rovers simply land a little ways beyond the Antarctic ring, on the great plain beyond the Ice Wall. It’s amazing that they’ve convinced people not only in the false “round” Earth theory, but to pay for exploration beyond the Earth’s disk.

      • rb1957 says:
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        Well, your conspiracy theories are dumb ! The Mars I see is about the size of a grain of sand … what can land on that ? and if they used the Antarctic … well, where are the penguins ?? maybe they use the Arctic (and carefully avoid the polar bears), maybe at that place this Keith guy talks about ? but most likely it’s just CGI.

        ok, I’ll call it quits now, fun thought it was.

  9. moon2mars says:
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    There is plenty of stupidity to go around in both parties. But the great wisdom of Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat (from Houston of all places!) has to top them all.

  10. Vladislaw says:
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    “On the planet where Voyager’s crew had previously been marooned, Professor Gegen and his assistant Veer, two paleontologists of a space-faring saurian species known as the Voth, discover the skeletal remains of a human. They are fascinated by the similarity of its genome to their own species, and Gegen suggests that this supports the highly controversial Distant Origin theory, that the Voth had originated on a far-distant planet instead of the current area of space from which they rule their empire. Proof of the theory has been sought by other Voth scientists, but the heretical theory has often led to their exile.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

  11. DJE51 says:
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    It’s not the Congressman, as far as I can see, it looks like he is asking this on behalf of his constituents. I cannot believe that he actually believes this, I mean, he is not totally stupid, even if most of these posts seem to imply this. He is fulfilling a pledge to one (or maybe a few) of his constituents (possibly big donors). Mind you, it does give us all an indication of the intellectual level of his constituents, which is a different discussion entirely…

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      This is most likely.

    • rb1957 says:
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      “which is a different discussion entirely…” … nah, actually it’s the same discussion.

      the most “sensible” reason I can think of for asking the question is either it was a dare, or it was meant to generate this type of discussion (along the lines of “there is no bad publicity”) as an extension of the ruckus the president creates.

    • fcrary says:
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      Of course, one of the supposed advantages of representative rather than direct democracy is to avoid that. The truly crazy ideas get filtered out, since a representative who was that crazy or stupid would have little chance of being elected. No matter how crazy or stupid a small number of his constituents are. Of course theory and practice aren’t the same thing.