Thread: "capitalism may have ended life on Mars" says Hugo Chavez

The communist dictator of Venezuela has recently said that he believes capitalism is what killed off the Martians.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world's problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up.

"Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts," Chavez said, sipping from a glass of water.

He added that the West's attacks on Libya were about water and oil reserves.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Research Council recommended that NASA's top priority should be a robot to help determine whether Mars ever supported life and offer insight on its geological and climatic history.

It would also be the first step in an effort to get samples from Mars back to Earth.

A NASA team recently tested a space suit in a setting with extreme conditions akin to some of those found on Mars -- an Argentine base in Antarctica -- for possible use on a visit to the Red Planet.

Source: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/chavez-says...14731-131.html

Originally Posted by DinoCrisisFan

The communist dictator of Venezuela has recently said that he believes capitalism is what killed off the Martians.

From the article:

He added that the West's attacks on Libya were about water and oil reserves.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/chavez-says...14731-131.html

Well look at that. He was right...

McClatchy Newspapers: WikiLeaks cables show that it was all about the oil

Uncle Ferd says its a sign fer space aliens to invade earth...

Student researcher spies odd lava spirals on Mars
26 Apr.`12 — A researcher has spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth.

These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii's Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find. "I was quite surprised and puzzled when I first saw the coils," Andrew Ryan, a graduate student at Arizona State University, said in an email. He reported the discovery in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The biggest surprise? The largest Martian lava spiral measured 100 feet across — bigger than any on Earth. It is further evidence that Mars was volcanically active recently — geologically speaking within the past 20 million years.

For more than a decade, scientists debated whether this maze of valleys near the Martian equator was sculpted by ice or volcanic processes. As part of a class project last year, Ryan analyzed about 100 high-resolution photos of the region snapped by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been photographing the Martian surface since 2006. One evening, while taking a second look at the images, Ryan zoomed in and noticed the lava coils. He counted 269 spirals ranging from 16 feet to 100 feet across.

Ryan said he was not surprised the features were overlooked in the past since they blended in with the terrain. The coils looked strikingly similar to Hawaiian lava flows, leading Ryan to conclude that lava — not ice — was the driving force. Planetary scientist David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, said the new work provides convincing evidence that the curious patterns were forged from volcanic activity.

This "illustrates just how complicated Mars' geologic history appears to really be," Paige wrote in an email. He was not part of the research team. It's believed that rivers of molten lava flowed through the Martian valleys into a broad basin where they settled and formed the coil shapes. The spiral shapes were preserved as the lava cooled. There are no clear signs that the region today is volcanically active. With more observations, Ryan said it is possible lava coils may exist elsewhere on the red planet.

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UFO Spaceship Orbiting the Sun, or a Camera Glitch?
UFO hunters have spotted a curious object near the sun in a new NASA image. It is, in the words of a blogger for the website Gather, "what looks like a metallic, jointed spaceship with a gigantic extension, perhaps a boom arm, anchored off its lower end." The YouTube video drawing attention to the object has quickly made its way to discussion forums and the tabloid press, and many seasoned UFO believers are calling it a definite "spot."

But does this image, which was taken by a camera on board NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Tuesday (April 24), really show a spaceship dropping by the sun to harvest some solar energy, as one YouTube commenter suggested? Or is this object something much more mundane? We asked scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) — the group that analyzes data from Lasco 2, the telescopic camera that snapped the picture.

According to Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer in the NRL's solar physics branch, the "spaceship" is merely a collection of streaks left by cosmic rays, charged particles from space, which whizzed through the camera's sensor, or CCD, as the image was taken. [See footage] "The streaks in question are consistent with energetic particle (proton) impacts on the CCD, something which is apparent in just about every image," Rich told Life's Little Mysteries. "Notably," he added, "these artifacts do not persist from image to image," — proving they are momentary blips in the camera sensor rather than an actual object in the field of view. Some images taken by the Lasco 2 camera are swarming with artifacts, caused by particles zipping across the CCD in every direction.

As a cosmic ray passes through a camera's image sensor, it deposits a large amount of its electric charge in the pixels that it penetrates. If the particle passes through at a shallow angle to the plane of the camera, it affects several pixels along its path. The result is a bright streak on the image. In the image in question, a burst of cosmic rays happen to hit the camera lens at just the right angles to create the form of a hinged spaceship. The "boom arm," angled at a slant across the rows and columns of pixels, was formed by a cosmic ray streaking through the camera sensor diagonally and at a shallow angle, depositing charge in several pixels along a diagonal line.

Cameras on Earth are less susceptible to interference by charged particles from space, because the Earth's protective magnetosphere blocks them from hitting the planet's surface, Alfred McEwen, director of the Planetary Imaging Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona, explained last year, when another artifact was mistaken for an alien base on Mars. "But with space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it's very common to see these cosmic ray hits," he said.

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