"Avoiding the 'F word' on Mars -- F*SSIL" -- Oberg

msnbc.com (Oberg): "Avoiding the 'F word' on Mars -- F*SSIL"
NASA won't speculate about possibility of fossils, but that doesn't mean
others aren't
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4480097/

photo: This artist's illustration shows a whimsical vision of a future Mars
astronaut with a startling exo-paleontological discovery. Credit: NASA and
Patrick Rawlings For more space illustrations, go to
http://www.patrawlings.com.

COMMENTARY // By James Oberg, NBC News space analyst // Special to MSNBC

People have imagined Mars as an abode of life for so long — centuries at
least, probably much longer — that NASA’s recent self-styled “significant”
announcement of strong evidence for liquid water long ago was, let’s face
it, pretty ho-hum to both space enthusiasts and the general public.

So where did the breathless Internet rumors come from? Where was the
evidence for current water, such as brine springs? Are those microscopic
threads really just debris from the airbags, and if so, why do they seem to
keep appearing even as Spirit moves farther away from the landing site? And
aside from the junk that the two rovers brought with them and strewed across
the landscape (didn’t the NASA science team expect to be confused by some of
that?), are there any other shapes seen in the images that look, well,
organic?

Sure, intellectually, it really is “significant” that the evidence is now in
that there’s a location somewhere off Earth where “life as we know it” could
once have survived if it had developed at all. It’s the first, but by no
means the last, such location that our explorations will encounter.

But a habitat that’s only “potential” is empty, and leaves an emptiness
inside us too. There is a seductive urge to fill that emptiness with
imaginations in the suggestive shapes that the rovers have been seeing.

The one that intrigues me most — so far — was referred to by "New Scientist"
magazine’s veteran space writer David Chandler with the delicate, neutral
phrase, “resembling a piece of curly macaroni.” It’s also been called “the
rotini pasta,” and similar gastronomic analogies.

There’s a word for what it might be. Everybody knows it, but it’s too risky
to use it lest you get bundled up with the crackpot Martian visions of bunny
rabbits, ski jumps, ribbed sandworms, capital letters, and stone faces that
have been flooding the Net.

The word is “fossil”. But using it seems to be generally thought of as some
sort of Howard Stern impersonation that could get a careless scientist
ostracized for life.

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