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That looks so much like mold.
by DougWebb 14y ago
That looks so much like mold.
- jlgreco 14y agoIt really does. However, one should keep in mind that humans have overzealous pattern-matching engines. We are really good at erroneously seeing things that we recognize.
- betterth 14y agoAnd when it comes to Martian geography, we are hopelessly bad at judging scale. It's very easy to be several orders of magnitude off without a guide or legend.
- jlgreco 14y agoTrue. While there are examples of life getting this large or larger on Earth (blooms, clonal colonies, etc), this seems unexpectedly large for a planet that seems otherwise lifeless.
- rapind 14y agoSo you're saying it is a Chow Chow looking down on us.
- RickHull 14y agoGoogle Mars, the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.
- JonnieCache 14y agoCorrection: humans are overzealous pattern-matching engines.
- jlgreco 14y agoEh, we have other things as well. Meat for one. ;) Maybe you could say that we are meaty pattern matching engines.
- jrajav 14y agoWho said computers couldn't be made out of meat?
- jlgreco 14y agoI'd say we are proof that they can be. ;) Saying that humans are pattern matching engines seems equivalent to saying VW Bugs are internal combustion engines to me though.
- JonnieCache 14y agoI meant the "essence" of humanity, as in "what separates us from the animals." That is what it means to be uniquely human: to match patterns, overzealously.
- technolem 14y agoMost animals are pattern matchers. Overzealous ones at that. Our specialty is abstraction and formal logic.
- js2 14y agoHow could you make that comment and not link to http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
- shangaslammi 14y agoYou mean like http://techland.time.com/2012/04/18/crab-computing-the-future-of-computers-powered-by-crabs-wait-what/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/18/crab-computing-the-futur...
- dwd 14y agoFirst thing that comes to mind is the xenofungus from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
- squidsoup 14y agoI'm keeping my fingers crossed for a giant sentient fungus.
- loteck 14y agoGravemind?
- tripzilch 14y agoI agree, that particular image really reminds me of roots of some sort (though obviously if you zoom in, they're not really roots). However, in this other picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Global_Surveyor_1.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Global_Surveyor_1.jpg the structure really looks more like a Diffusion Limited Aggegrate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation ), which can also be generated by non-living chemical processes. I'm not sure if these two pictures are of the same phenomenon, actually?