6 ms·

Is Mars Habitable? (1907)

63 points by kimmk 2y ago

bkjshki 2y ago
[flagged]
- WhitneyLand 2y ago
  Did you write this? Pardon me if you did, but your comment sounds ChatGpt heavy, especially the open call for participation at the end.
  - defrost 2y ago
    There's a slew of bot-army template comments from new-ish accounts, getting comment credit to work up to voting rights for a spruiking up-vote spree. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xzxa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xzxa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hsag https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hsag https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidfkj https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidfkj https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linkjp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linkjp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lndsh https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lndsh https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mnjksd https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mnjksd https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bhjgjy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bhjgjy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bjgiusg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bjgiusg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhkug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhkug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dfgdgf https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dfgdgf etc. etc. Once you see them, they stand out like dog's bollocks.
    - WhitneyLand 2y ago
      I guess we have to enjoy the last year or so before better models are indistinguishable from us? With some better/clever prompting I’m not sure they could be as easily detected now.
      - smusamashah 2y ago
        I wouldnt mind a bot writing a comment on HN if it's thoughtful, which is HNs trademark. These comments are so damn void of any thought. You can flag them for being thoughtless alone.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
        That's the premise of xkcd 810, "Constructive": <https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/> It's one of the more spectacular cases in which I think Munroe utterly missed the plot. It's not that it's possible to create bots which at a superficial assessment are making constructive / helpful comments. It's that bots which do this often have covert goals or purposes, "alignments" in the LLM/ML context. These might or might not be known or evident to either the bots' creators or users, and might even be exploited by still other parties. But bots are capable of a scale of operations which fundamentally changes the community dynamics of sites such as HN (or of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc., etc.). It also fundamentally violates the prime directive of HN, "[T]o make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial": <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html> Or as dang so often notes, optimising for intellectual curiosity: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20intellectual%20curiousity&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Bots, so far as we're aware, are neither intellectual nor curious.
    - smusamashah 2y ago
      So an hn comment is just "Praise, repeat, question". These are so fucking shallow.
antonvs 2y ago
Wow, a fantastic work. Thanks for posting it.
tempodox 2y ago
A commendable effort to preserve history. Chapter VI has an irritating equation that claims the fourth root of one-hundredth equals one-sixth. It should be obvious even without the help of any computing aid that this is wrong. Was it a typo or what else may have led to that mistake?
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  The denominator of that fraction is meant to be interpreted as what we would write today as 3.2, not 3x2, and indeed fourth root 100 = about 3.16. The interpunct (the mid-line dot you're interpreting as multiplication) was historically a common way of marking what we now mark with a . character. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#English-speaking_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#English-spea...
rachofsunshine 2y ago
It's really interesting how he constructs a self-consistent narrative with half true and half false premises. For example, he totally whiffs on the geology due to bad starting premises. At this time, the Earth was believed to be relatively young (on the order of millions of years) because simple calculations would show that even a very high initial temperature would have cooled to at most the surface temperature within that time. What they missed was the internal heat budget of the planet, which we now know is driven by radioactivity (which, in 1907, had just been discovered - the Curies had shared a Nobel for it in 1903). Wallace was right that this is a very small contributor to Earth's surface temperature, but the false assumption that the planet had dramatically cooled was behind the idea that continental shapes and faulting were due to the movement of a cooling and thus contracting planet. Plate tectonics was a few years away from even being proposed as a serious theory at this point, and it wouldn't gain much traction for another fifty years after that. But it turns out that tectonics is responsible for a lot of the geographic differences between the three bodies under discussion here. Earth has plate tectonics today, Mars probably did early in its history but does not today, and the Moon never did. Yet despite being totally wrong about this, Wallace is correct (as best we currently understand it) that the Martian valleys are indeed fault lines. He comes around to it from a totally wrong direction: that Mars, being smaller than the Earth, began with less heat, and that its interior solidified first, causing its surface to contract onto that rigid surface and crack in a way Earth's did not. There's a lesson here in the ability to form consistent, empirical, wrong theories given even slightly wrong inputs.
- brabel 2y ago
  > There's a lesson here in the ability to form consistent, empirical, wrong theories given even slightly wrong inputs. Is this really a lesson? Every single theory evolved this way, starting with an almost certainly naive hypothesis, then with incomplete evidence leading to bad conclusions, then as better data came in, adjustments to the theory until we had something that fit the evidence to a high degree (though it's almost always possible further adjustments are necessary even when it looks like we've found the perfect theory: e.g. Newton physics VS relativity). I think you would be hard pressed to find any theory that did NOT evolve in this exact manner.
lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
100^(-1/4) is not 1/6. It's closer to 1/3.
- _dain_ 2y ago
  it's not a multiplication. decimal points used to levitate in those days.
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
    TIL
Moon_Y 2y ago
This post is a bit difficult to understand.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
I don't think a whole lot of the Earth is actually habitable to begin with ;)
tim333 2y ago
There was an interesting more recent article on life on Mars from idelwords. https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm Not proposing little green men who are unlikely but suggesting there may be bacteria like organisms underground which seems quite possible. A reason I think Musk shouldn't be allowed to build a human settlement there in a hurry. It should be more like a national park with no biological humans. We can always have robots and FPV goggles for the visitors. (1000+ comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549)

63 points by kimmk 2y ago

bkjshki 2y ago

[flagged]

WhitneyLand 2y ago
Did you write this? Pardon me if you did, but your comment sounds ChatGpt heavy, especially the open call for participation at the end.
- defrost 2y ago
  There's a slew of bot-army template comments from new-ish accounts, getting comment credit to work up to voting rights for a spruiking up-vote spree. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xzxa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xzxa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hsag https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hsag https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidfkj https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidfkj https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linkjp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linkjp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lndsh https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lndsh https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mnjksd https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mnjksd https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bhjgjy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bhjgjy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bjgiusg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bjgiusg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhkug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhkug https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dfgdgf https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dfgdgf etc. etc. Once you see them, they stand out like dog's bollocks.
  - WhitneyLand 2y ago
    I guess we have to enjoy the last year or so before better models are indistinguishable from us? With some better/clever prompting I’m not sure they could be as easily detected now.
    - smusamashah 2y ago
      I wouldnt mind a bot writing a comment on HN if it's thoughtful, which is HNs trademark. These comments are so damn void of any thought. You can flag them for being thoughtless alone.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        That's the premise of xkcd 810, "Constructive": <https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/> It's one of the more spectacular cases in which I think Munroe utterly missed the plot. It's not that it's possible to create bots which at a superficial assessment are making constructive / helpful comments. It's that bots which do this often have covert goals or purposes, "alignments" in the LLM/ML context. These might or might not be known or evident to either the bots' creators or users, and might even be exploited by still other parties. But bots are capable of a scale of operations which fundamentally changes the community dynamics of sites such as HN (or of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc., etc.). It also fundamentally violates the prime directive of HN, "[T]o make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial": <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html> Or as dang so often notes, optimising for intellectual curiosity: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20intellectual%20curiousity&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Bots, so far as we're aware, are neither intellectual nor curious.
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    So an hn comment is just "Praise, repeat, question". These are so fucking shallow.

antonvs 2y ago

Wow, a fantastic work. Thanks for posting it.

tempodox 2y ago

A commendable effort to preserve history. Chapter VI has an irritating equation that claims the fourth root of one-hundredth equals one-sixth. It should be obvious even without the help of any computing aid that this is wrong. Was it a typo or what else may have led to that mistake?

rachofsunshine 2y ago
The denominator of that fraction is meant to be interpreted as what we would write today as 3.2, not 3x2, and indeed fourth root 100 = about 3.16. The interpunct (the mid-line dot you're interpreting as multiplication) was historically a common way of marking what we now mark with a . character. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#English-speaking_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#English-spea...

rachofsunshine 2y ago

It's really interesting how he constructs a self-consistent narrative with half true and half false premises. For example, he totally whiffs on the geology due to bad starting premises. At this time, the Earth was believed to be relatively young (on the order of millions of years) because simple calculations would show that even a very high initial temperature would have cooled to at most the surface temperature within that time. What they missed was the internal heat budget of the planet, which we now know is driven by radioactivity (which, in 1907, had just been discovered - the Curies had shared a Nobel for it in 1903). Wallace was right that this is a very small contributor to Earth's surface temperature, but the false assumption that the planet had dramatically cooled was behind the idea that continental shapes and faulting were due to the movement of a cooling and thus contracting planet. Plate tectonics was a few years away from even being proposed as a serious theory at this point, and it wouldn't gain much traction for another fifty years after that. But it turns out that tectonics is responsible for a lot of the geographic differences between the three bodies under discussion here. Earth has plate tectonics today, Mars probably did early in its history but does not today, and the Moon never did. Yet despite being totally wrong about this, Wallace is correct (as best we currently understand it) that the Martian valleys are indeed fault lines. He comes around to it from a totally wrong direction: that Mars, being smaller than the Earth, began with less heat, and that its interior solidified first, causing its surface to contract onto that rigid surface and crack in a way Earth's did not. There's a lesson here in the ability to form consistent, empirical, wrong theories given even slightly wrong inputs.

brabel 2y ago
> There's a lesson here in the ability to form consistent, empirical, wrong theories given even slightly wrong inputs. Is this really a lesson? Every single theory evolved this way, starting with an almost certainly naive hypothesis, then with incomplete evidence leading to bad conclusions, then as better data came in, adjustments to the theory until we had something that fit the evidence to a high degree (though it's almost always possible further adjustments are necessary even when it looks like we've found the perfect theory: e.g. Newton physics VS relativity). I think you would be hard pressed to find any theory that did NOT evolve in this exact manner.

lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago

100^(-1/4) is not 1/6. It's closer to 1/3.

_dain_ 2y ago
it's not a multiplication. decimal points used to levitate in those days.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
  TIL

Moon_Y 2y ago

This post is a bit difficult to understand.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

I don't think a whole lot of the Earth is actually habitable to begin with ;)

tim333 2y ago

There was an interesting more recent article on life on Mars from idelwords. https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm Not proposing little green men who are unlikely but suggesting there may be bacteria like organisms underground which seems quite possible. A reason I think Musk shouldn't be allowed to build a human settlement there in a hurry. It should be more like a national park with no biological humans. We can always have robots and FPV goggles for the visitors. (1000+ comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549)