Man on Mars?
 

Ok, this has been all over the news, a picture has been taken by a probe on Mars that shows a figure that looks a lot like a humanoid creature...a lot like the supposed "Bigfoot" I suppose.
Here's a link to an ITN news report, and you make your own mind up.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m5lnavfxZWo&feature=related

I say it could be faked, but the photo is from NASA apparently, so why would they fake it?
It does look suprisingly like the creature shown in the "Patterson Bigfoot" video.
Here's a link below, so you can compare them.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OJIMbBcZgwc&feature=related

So what do YOU think? I'm very interested in what people make of this.
I personally think that the thought of it actually being true is intriguing, and so I'm interested in it. But I also think that it could be easily faked.

To me, they're rocks, but we haven't had a half decent story for people to produce 10,000 theories on for ages so I'm going to humour everybody. ;)

I think aliens are out there, but most certainly not on Mars.

The fact is, all these so called pictures of monsters or aliens are almost always grainy, blurred, small and taken at long range with no hope or zooming in.

The other fact is those Mars Rovers have been damaged and battered and a lot of bits are not working, they are hardly in the best condition at all.

Apparently, it's "a 2-inch sedimentary rock that has been eroded by the wind".

If so, we'll never meet them. Not with the size our universe is, and the astronomical chances of ever travelling at or faster than the speed of light.

You don't need to travel at the speed of light. Conventional speeds work just fine. The only limit you have to break is that of the human lifespan. Once death is corrected, the amount of time it takes to get from point A to point B is a trivial matter.

RV's solution is best if it turns out Hyperspace doesn't exist.

Then there's that whole "relativity" deal...

RV makes a good point. If humans can perfect the cryo-stasis technique then it's just a matter of time. Right now we can only freeze dead bodies so we can find the technology to revive them later. Perfect that and we can go anywhere.

Yeah go anywhere and return to a world completely different from the one we left.

I think you missed my point. I wasn't talking about temporarily stopping death, I was talking about permanently stopping death. There are actually gene sequences that make us age and die. If you modify those so that you only age up to a certain point, you'll live forever.

Piece of piss. How hard can it be? :P

I thought age was just entropy, cells can't keep repairing degraded cells. So I thought the way to prevent death would be to refine and perfect the cells' regeneration capacity. I mean, computers and cars age but they don't have any genetic programming to do so. It's just not as visible as on people.

Yes, in hindsight I did. My mistake. <blush>

From Wikipedia:

They also have no genetic programming to repair or replace their parts, unlike we do.

Mankind is almost at the point where natural selection will become irrelevant in the face of genetic engineering and technological developments, particularly nanotechnology. Check out this article if you want to know more.

So what you're saying is that it IS a possibility to become pratically immortal, and that that possibility could become a reality very soon.
There are people who would think that was bad, but maybe it isn't. It COULD be deemed as a god send for it would give humans the chance to look at greater potentials than what we are right now.

Does overpopulation come into this discussion at all?

That's true, I think anyone who gains this kind of longevity should be made sterile to prevent that.

Indeed, otherwise with an ever increasing birth rate and no death rate, we would multiply faster then an Australian rabbit on Viagra

Very soon as in 30-40 years.

Only because they're delusional and would be scared we're 'playing God'.

Much greater potential.

Breeding would become centralized or heavily controlled (think China x 9000). We would only breed to replace those killed in accidents or to fill a quota for some kind of expansion into new places. The manner of the breeding, whether it's that we're grown in some kind of tanks or more 'naturally' produced is up in the air.

The best part about immortality is not so much the fact you live forever, but it makes people realize that the problems they create now will effect them in the future. It will also completely negate any need for religion to provide false hope, which is another nice bonus.

So we would have reached an equilibrium of sustainable development where we are only putting out as much as we are taking in. If you can see what I mean.

You are correct.

If that's going to be the case I think the creation of babies and sex should become completely seperate processes. Human nature is subject to change but that's one thing that's never going to change, and controlling that would be impossible.

And condoms do break sometimes.

Which probably wont be difficult at the time.

It really depends how far you go. Immortality is one thing, but there are so many things we could change. By the time we're finished, humanity as we know it could cease to exist. Life as we know it could cease to exist.

Like we all know, the most basic form of life is the cells that make up our bodies. If we replace these cells with nanomachines, imagine the kinds of things we could do. These ideas scare a lot of people (see: Cybermen), but I find it fascinating.

The optimal form for life to take is a form of self-replicating nanomachine with a collective intelligence which would then spread across the entire universe until all matter was a single collective intelligence, which would effectively become like a God.

After that point you can spend all week speculating as to what happens. I'm inclined to follow Scott Adam's theory, which is that 'God', having done absolutely everything it could possibly do, destroys itself, creating the Big Bang and starting the Universe over again.

But that raises this question... could such an intelligence already exist? It obviously doesn't give a hoot about us if it does, but it is possible. Regardless of when it appeared, if there is life elsewhere, surely one rose to this level of advancement or was born that way.

If such an intelligence already existed, we wouldn't. The universe and this intelligence can't exist simultaneously, this intelligence becomes the universe.

Immortality FTL.

Suit yourself. :P

So eventually, we could wipe out disease altogether also, and make ourselves indestructible as well as immortal over natural causes.
Yeah, I'm beginning to see how this could be the greatest thing that would ever happen to humanity, and it could all happen in the next 100-200 years by the sounds of it.

Immortality FTW forever then! =D

Why don't you kill yourself now and see for yourself how mortality suits you?

Indestructible is impossible, we'd still die if we were sucked into the sun, for example. We just wouldn't age.

We'd become immune to all diseases mostly due to incompatibility.

It depends how much say idiots like Ross have in it. It could happen in under 50.

+1

WTF? I'm with Superkid -- suit yourself.

I hope so. I'd like to be around to see it happen (and yes, benefit from it).

I think we all could feel the same way

DS.com to last until the end of time maybe? ;)

Wow.

Can you imagine still hanging around here 200 years from now?

Also, on the topic of space travel... you know, if Jet Lag's bad I wonder how bad spaceship lag would be?

Well, if it's any consolation, I'll keep the site going if I am indeed alive 200 years from now. Watch this space.

I'm thinking we could replace body parts with organic, yet sturdier parts...that are modelled on our actual parts...consider it replacing stock parts with suped up parts on a car.

I imagine by then we'd have an accurate enough age for the universe to be able to count time as 'seconds from the big bang'.

Oh, and then there's the whole fact we'd likely no longer need to sleep.

Cybermen...?

Yeeees, Cyyyyybermen...

I actually sympathized for Lumic and thought the Doctor was a wanker making unsubstantiated claims about immortality being wrong.

Then again Lumic did take the whole concept a bit too far. As much as his idea for immortality was a good one, i think he went overboard on it,

He used technology far too primitive for them to really be called 'human.2' anyway.

More like human 0.0.0.1 combined with bionic limbs 3.0.