Complex Numbers

Curiosity

Speaking of extraterrestrials...

    Star Trek Starfleet insignia spotted on Mars  

In case you were wondering what it would take for me to go through the process of incorporating an image into a blog entry (might have to scroll down), well, wonder no more. It helps when it's in the public domain. Less work. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Like the infamous Face on Mars,   it's entirely possible that this particular example of pareidolia would go away, or at least diminish, under different lighting conditions or at a different angle or whatever.

Until then, let us Star Trek fans have our hour of glory.

From the linked "article:"

Amateur astronomer Scott Atkinson found the stone sculpture of the Starfleet insignia among a pile of rocks on the Red Planet's Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons).

Just to be clear, Atkinson didn't travel to Mars or use a giant telescope; he apparently combed through the publicly available images from NASA's Curiosity robot. Well, they call it a rover, but come on; Mars is the only planet known to be inhabited solely by robots (to the best of our knowledge).

Curiosity itself (the robot) is a remarkable achievement. You can see more about it, and its images, here.  

As of this entry, according to that site, the gadget has produced 1,165,040 images over 4105 sols, an average (because I can use a calculator) of over 280 photos/sol. Which would be a remarkable output even for a social media influenza.

Oh yeah, if you don't know, a sol is what they call a solar day on Mars. It's not too different from our own solar day: roughly 24 hours and 40 minutes.

More, all of those photos are transmitted, pixel by pixel, back to Earth. Truly a monumental achievement that this has been going on for, if I've done the math right, about 11 and a half Earth years, or roughly 6 Martian years.

Which is itself about four times as long as the original Star Trek series aired.

I wrote yesterday about the possibility of encountering alien life. But if we ever encounter technologically capable aliens, given our own history of exploring with robot probes before sending humans out there, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if our first contact was with one of their machines.

Those machines might send back videos of Star Trek, and since a sense of humor appears to be a requirement for technologically advanced life, they'll probably freak us out by showing up dressed as Ferengi.

And here I was planning on talking about how the image clearly shows indications of erosion, which is cool enough by itself without invoking science fiction. Oh, well. Sometimes I go in unexpected directions, which proves I'm not an alien robot.

Or does it?