Dog gone! And here I thought we had found the secret Mars Base! But no, it is cosmic rays! Sounds almost as much fun!
Science once again kills our dreams, claiming ‘Bio Station Alpha’ is cosmic ray glitch
“Well, that was fun while it lasted.
Science has come galloping up wagging its finger and telling us all to stop believing, because it already knows what ‘Bio Station Alpha’ is.
For those that believe US amateur astronomer David Martines, Bio Station Alpha is some kind of building on Mars made up of cylinders and appears to be painted red, white and blue.
He saw it on Google Earth’s Mars explorer and his video of the discovery is about to hit the one million mark on YouTube.
The object, according to Mr Martines, is ‘about 700 feet long and 150 feet wide’.
‘It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large,’ he said yesterday.
‘It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage. I hope it’s not a weapon.’
According to a planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona, it isn’t.
Alfred McEwen, who is also the director of the Planetary Imaging Research Laboratory and therefore should know a bit about this type of thing, says it’s a — wait for it — glitch.
‘It looks like a linear streak artifact produced by a cosmic ray,’ he told Space.com, probably somewhat gleefully.
Cosmic energy from the stars can interfere with a camera’s image sensor, depositing electric charges in pixels. If it hits at the right angle, it can affect several pixels in a row, forming a bright streak.
When it’s converted to a JPEG, it smears out and looks pixellated.
Kind of like ‘cylinders’.
Ah. Boo.
But if you want to get angry at someone, save it for Google. According to Mr McEwen, they should know this and identify the source of such images — which could come from any number of orbiters or telescopes — for the rest of us trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.
‘I can’t tell whether this image was taken by Viking or what,’ he told Space.com.
‘The people at Google need to document what the heck they’re doing.’
Here’s part of what Martines said during the video:
This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident. I call it Bio-station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it. It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders. It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage – hope it’s not a weapon. Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars. It could be a way-station for weary space travelers. It could also belong to NASA, I don’t know that they would admit that. I don’t know if they could pull off such a project without all the people seeing all the material going up there. I sort of doubt NASA has anything to do with this. I don’t know if NASA even knows about this.
Yeah.
My question is: “Could all this just be a lame cover-up?” And, where is my tin-foil hat anyway?!?
No, I’m not kidding! Imagine not knowing what a cat is, but “discovering” the concept of “cat” and then being able to identify “essential catness” enough to find cats on the Internet. Well, now imagine that it is a computer doing that. Cool! That’s what Google engineers have wrought!
You MUST see this movie, it will radiate green epic-ness! GL has always been one of my MOST favorite super-heroes! MAN! I am SO looking forward to this movie! It looks like it will be true to the comic book story… and very science fiction-y as well! Coolness!
Cool Geek Culture! Now you can play an old DOS game from 1994 in the Chrome Browser or the Chrome OS! Nostalgia rules!