<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by jrich</i>
<br />Tom, a Patron Membership if I'm wrong.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Wrong about what's on Mars, or wrong about how we will react if the new photos don't support artifacts?
JR, what's important in science is setting up a testing protocol that assures objective results that cannot be influenced by the experimenters. Otherwise, all tests tend to come out in accord with the experimenter's pre-existing beliefs and biases. Data that goes against those beliefs is scrutinized until reasons to exclude it are found; and data that supports the beliefs is often not even checked. A competent analyst can almost always create ad hoc hypotheses to explain, or explain away, almost any result if no controls against such biases are in place.
You are probably fairly certain that everyone seeing artifacts is acting out of a pro-artifact bias. Yet you are presumably basing that on your own anti-artifact bias, because you have no reason and no data to support a conclusion that artifacts are not present, or even that they are improbable. In point of fact, until we look, the probability of artifacts is unknown, which is very different from being small. For all we knew before getting any imagery, it might be the case that every terrestrial-type planet in the Galaxy has already been explored and contains artifacts, in which case the probability of our finding artifacts in a thorough search approaches 100%.
In the early 1990s, when I seriously doubted artificiality, Hoagland bet me that the Face was artificial at 100-to-1 odds. At the same time, in a USENET discussion, Richard Schumaker offered to bet anyone that the Face was natural at 100-to-1 odds. My position at that time was to take no position until the data was in, because taking a position creates biases. But my mother did not raise a fool, so I took both bets, then announced what I had done. Of course, for every dollar bet both ways, I would get $99 richer when the truth is known. But my real point was that both sides were acting out of bias, and had developed a completely inappropriate certainty of correctness in their own minds. Clearly, certainty of correctness is not a good guide to actual probability of correctness, at least in this instance.
The Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR) set up eight tests of artificiality for the Face image seen at Cydonia by Viking in 1976. I contributed two of those tests, based on the the impossibility of seeing the Face from the surface of Mars, and its only being visible as a Face from above: (1) If the Face was built to be seen as a Face, it would have been built upright, not at an angle, so that it can be seen as a Face from above; and (2) it would have been built on the equator to maximize visibility from a space station or spacecraft approaching from any direction. But the Cydonia Face was at latitude 42 degrees north and tilted about 35 degrees from upright. By 1996, six of the original tests favored an artificial origin, but my two tests favored a natural origin.
Then in December 1996, an Art Bell listener heard me speaking about the exploded planet hypothesis and how it had so drastically changed Mars. One of the many marks of this was a sudden large shift in the geographic pole location on Mars. A listener sent me an email, and remarked that maybe the EPH event was what ended the civilization on Mars that had built the Face (a subject I had not mentioned). He then asked "Where was the Cydonia Face on Mars before that large pole shift?" I immediately understood why he asked, because the answer was relevant to my two tests. So I took the published coordinates of the old Martian pole from planetary geologist Peter Schultz, and the well-known coordinates of the Face at Cydonia, and calculated the surface angle between those two points. The computer result astonished me: 90.1 degrees! (That put the Face right on the old Martian equator.) So I then did the slightly harder calculation of orientation, and was once again shocked: 2 degrees from upright, with an uncertainty of about +/- 2 degrees! The combined odds against this result with no degrees of freedom coming up by chance were longer than 1000-to-1.
Of course, as I hastily noted, that did not prove the Face was artificial. I was still very relucatnt to be driven in the direction of artificiality. (I already had enough problems with my colleagues without adding another reason for them to distance themselves.) But neither could I ignore that all eight objective tests now favored artificiality over a natural origin, because doing so would just be reverse bias. I had to spend a few days in a state of semi-shock adjusting to the idea that this object just might be an artifact after all.
A year later, SPSR approached NASA to request priority imaging of the Face when MGS was ready for photography. Then we set about setting up a protocol, approximately as follows: If and only if the Face was artificial, it was clearly an attempt to portray a humanoid-like face. So the impression from Viking (an eye socket, a nose, a mouth) should be augmented by secondary facial features when high-resolution MGS images came in. Specifically, we listed eyebrows over the eye sockets, irises in the eye sockets, two nostrils at the end of the nose, and two lips for the mouth. We listed the range of size, shape, location, and orientation for each of these features to be considered deliberate rather than random. And we insisted that no other candidates exist elsewhere on the mesa, allowing us to pick and choose such features from a noisy background to fulfill the wiring in our brains to see faces in natural terrain.
The combined odds against a chance fulfillment of all these strict criteria by the Cydonia Face at higher resolution, on a mesa that had no other such features except those with the right specifications, were roughly 1000 billion billion to one.
When the 1998 MGS hi-res image of the Face came down from the spacecraft, every one of the protocol-predicted features was present well within the allotted ranges of size, shape, location, and orinetation, with no other candidate features elsewhere. See the first animation at
metaresearch.org/media%20and%20links/animations/animations.asp
to see this image and watch the corrections for spececraft slant angle and poor solar lighting get applied. This is why we concluded that artificiality of at least this one feature was far more probable than any other explanation.
And where there is one artifact, it is no longer extraordinary for there to be more than one. -|Tom|-
