I haven't forgotten my long-time interest in the Planets and all things exploratory among them. I haven't followed as closely as I once did. in part because the field and the probes seem to have fossilized (maybe like I have...?) over the years, and the explorations seem to be off point and repetitive.
I could use what happened after the Viking landers (in 1976!) as an example. The Vikings couldn't move and could only explore what their cameras could see and their arms could reach. Nevertheless they did extraordinary explorations as the first landers on Mars and arguably they found evidence of active life on Mars as well as many discoveries about the surface and atmosphere of the Red Planet that overturned or could have overturned many of the prior conclusions of the planetary science community.
But what happened? There was no follow up, especially no follow up to the possible discovery of life on Mars, and no follow up to the conclusion that there was instead "exotic chemistry" that mimicked life signals. Nope. Nothing. Not for decades. And only recently have Mars landers and rovers begun to check up on some of the findings of the Vikings (such as potential surface ice/water sources, both historical and current) so very long ago.
Probe after probe was sent to Mars, but none of them actually tested for the supposed "superoxides" that were supposedly sterilizing the Martian surface, one of the conclusions derived from Viking experiments and one that was taught as fact for decades. None of the probes sent post-Vikings (until very recently) tested for the presence/absence of carbon compounds at the surface -- their absence being required for the Viking results conclusions. On and on. No follow up. Extraordinary conclusions with a paucity of evidence, and nothing done in the decades to follow to sustain or refute (or something in between) these conclusions.
Why?
Much the same -- without the issue of is there/isn't there Life -- took place with regard to all the planetary explorations that took place between the 1970s and the 2000s. WTF? Had the whole field fossilized into a routine of dismissing clear (or murky!) evidence that contradicted or even expanded on expectations? I don't know.
Some time back I intervened in a controversy between Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy and a young man who had had an insight about how the Solar System actually rotates and makes its way through the Galaxy and had made an animation of it which had become a YouTube sensation. It was a lovely illustration and more accurately showed solar and planetary motions than the standard versions we're all taught.
Phil went batshit over it and excoriated the young man for his Errors, and worse for not belonging to the Planetary Science Community and for daring to come up with something so... beautiful... without credentials, without approval, and without consulting his betters. Even worse, according to Phil, the young man had come to his insight after the reading false and unacceptable planetary "science" of an East Indian mystic whose bullshit theories were dangerous to any serious examination of the facts.
I felt I had to intervene. Phil's attack was simply wrong. Ethically, morally, and scientifically.
The young man had done something no one in the planetary science field had publicly tried in all the history of the field. He had illustrated in a very compelling way what he could of the actual movements of the Solar System through the Galaxy would look like to an observer. And it was beautiful. Compelling. There were errors, yes, in his initial illustration and animation, but they weren't fatal, and they could be corrected fairly easily.
The claim was made that "science" had long known what the actual movements of the planets and the Solar System looked like from outside the system, and that scientific papers were published from time to time to describe it. Therefore, it was "known" widely -- which was simply false.
No, what "science" had done was utilize a several hundred year old illustration of the Solar System -- that I called the "dinner plate model" -- to show and explain planetary movements and the Solar System's place in the Galaxy which was simply,,, wrong. I said so. Over and over again.
The young man, for his part, corrected his animation to make it more accurate and compelling and the corrected version was even more popular which seemed to drive the field nuts.
Someone, I forget who, but someone with credentials attempted to animate some version that derived from a published paper and to say the least, it was an effort, more than the field had bothered with in hundreds of years, but it was weak. Close enough, though.
The controversy over an Outsider doing such a thing continued for several years. Eventually, an actual planetary scientist got involved and agreed to work with the young man to both educate him in the field and help him create even better illustrations and animations. That was nice, but this is what happened: the young man's work to animate and illustrate the exquisite movements of the planetary bodies and the Solar System through space literally stopped. I've heard from him but haven't seen anything since the corrected animation he did as a follow up to the criticisms he was slammed with. Becoming part of the scientific community -- or at least its periphery -- effectively shut him up.
Since that time, quite a few years ago now, I've seen both progress and reversion in the field. Lay people are now routinely included in the science to do all kinds of observational and illustrative efforts that more widely disseminate the exploratory work of the field. Some of it is accepted by the field as good science, too. I remember Greg Orme's observations of "spiders" on Mars that he worked for years finding and attempting to explain only to be dismissed or ignored until... suddenly... the field not only accepted his observations but praised him for his discoveries.
In my own modest way, I presented evidence of geysers on Mars that was essentially rejected as all but impossible for decades until -- suddenly again -- they became standard scientific knowledge. Wow. How did that happen?
It was complicated. The field is largely the product of Big Men whose conclusions -- and speculations, sometimes -- become standard models. Goes back to Copernicus. Their errors continue on indefinitely. Like the bizarre conception that the outer planets are "Ice Giants." I'm not going to go into the whole Ice controversy and enforced belief, but it is a very old way of looking at the planets in the outer Solar System, it's wrong, grossly so, and the field knows it but keeps repeating it no matter. It's one of the many self-contradictory things the field does largely because of the continuing influence of and deference to the Big Men of the past.
But in recent years, the field has reached out to lay observers and offered them a role to play within the field and has actually included their findings and illustrations in the process of planetary science. Years ago, that would never happen, as the field was literally a closed society that had no contact with or respect for the efforts of lay observers to understand and appreciate the wonders of the Universe.
That has changed somewhat and I think it is a good thing worthy of praise. But I no longer spend the kind of time and effort I once did as a lay observer of planetary (particularly Mars) discoveries. That time passed in part because of other discoveries that made Mars quite a difficult and likely impossible planet for human colonization and ultimately due to my questioning of the whole "colonization" enterprise.
Is this something we should contemplate and do? Is there really a compulsion to colonize outside the Earth? And so on.
Leave Mars be.
But I still have an interest. Oh my yes. It's just that the upshot has... changed.
🙏
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