Christopher wrote:
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:
"Christopher" wrote:
Umm, that's now how it works Christopher.
The one making the claim has the burden of proof.

Not so, hoagy is putting forward a hypothesis, not a claim, the other
side has to forward a reasoned counter argument, not dismiss
everything out of hand with no counter logical argument or counter
hypothesis.

A hypothesis IS a claim. He has to support it.

So, NASA has to support the claim that on Eurpa has an ocean under the
ice, even though its just conjecture at this moment as NASA dosn't
know for sure.

NASA and the planetary scientists it pays to be on
the mission science teams *have* supported the claim.
There is both gravitational data on the density of
the bulk material below the surface from higher order
gravitational terms and observational evidence of
liquid coming to the surface.

The face-on-mars theories were supported by data which
was old (1970s) and only about 8-10 pixels wide.
That is down in the noise. A lot of people tried to
extract signal from that, and got what you normally
do when you're looking for meaning in a few bits:
exactly what you are looking for.

The acid test of all those theories was the Mars Global
Surveyor imagery. It was orders of magnitude higher
resolution than the Viking orbiters, and did image the
Cydonia 'interesting' spots quite nicely.

Before MGS got there, we got some of the pro-face hypothesis
people to agree to some reasonable tests for whether the
artificiality hypothesis was accurate, based on what the
MGS data might tell us. How accurately the MGS data supported
the hypothesized symmetrical face structure, for example,
and whether the hypothetical fractal geometry of the face
and other nearby structures remained the same at the higher
resolution imagery etc.

The MGS data completely blew those tests away. The 'face'
region is neither symmetrical nor anything like what the
hypothesized structure looked like, and the fractal geometry
of the region fell back down to background levels when the
higher resolution imagery was used. The fractal geometry of
the region as hypothesized has been demonstrated to be an
artifact of the chosen parameters and the pixel resolution
Viking provided, nothing inherent in the actual landforms.

What is sad is that despite preagreement on these tests
for artificiality, the pro-artificiality people are to
some degree still arguing the case.

Or are you saying the face survived 3 billion years of dust erosion only to
completely change in the last 30?

No, but if you exposed the pryamids in Egypt to 3 bilion years of
martian dust erosion they wouldn't look artificial, even though we
know that are and the Egyptian pyrimids line up mathematically with
the 3 stars of orions belt.

Some of the Egyptian pyramids do. Most of them don't.
They were completed by individual pharoahs over hundreds
of years and don't have any sort of master site plan related
to astronomy, for the most part.

It is a trivial exercise to take any large enough area of
natural landforms and line some of them up with significant
astronomy in the sky above. It is mathematically demonstrable
that you can do it even given a completely random surface.
It is not at all unusual that Hoagland and others were
able to do it with the Face region in Cydonia, even if
it were completely natural.


-george william herbert