In 2003, scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Center made the first-ever detection of trace amounts of methane in Mars' atmosphere, a find which was confirmed a year later by the ESA's Mars Express orbiter. In December of 2014, the Curiosity rover detected a tenfold spike of methane at the base of the Gale Crater, and uncovered evidence that indicated that Mars has a seasonal methane cycle, where levels peak in the late northern summer.
The existence of methane gas on Mars has been long been held to be potential evidence for the existence of past or present life. So it was quite the downer last week (on Dec. 12th) when the science team behind one of the ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spectrometers announced that they had found no traces of methane in Mars' atmosphere.
Maybe the Martians are hiding.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 23 2018, @01:26PM (2 children)
That demonstrates the claim that the Sun is externally powered. (And a claim that Velikovsky didn't support the theory!) And here [holoscience.com]:
These aren't delicate phenomena. If you have "electric arcs burning the surface" of a comet, you have electric arcs that will arc to any spacecraft that travel near. If the Sun is externally powered via electromagnetism, then the power has to come from somewhere just as it goes somewhere. We have never seen this incoming power despite it being of similar strength as sunlight and the solar wind, and being electromagnetic in origin, which let us note, is both very well understood and very easy to observe. In the case of the Sun, this phenomena would be strong enough that it probably would warp the orbits of planets and kill life on Earth.
Electric Theory is not the theory that modern science is slightly off about the relative importance of electromagnetism or the surface of some comets. It makes concrete predictions which have already been shown false.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 23 2018, @03:12PM (1 child)
The electric arcs were (supposedly) something happening when the comets were created and other exceptional circumstances, not happening all the time. However, they due suggest that equipment failures could be more common near the comets since they basically build up negative charge at the far end of their journey.
I dont know much about their theory regarding the sun (only became interested due to the correct predictions regarding rosetta), but you dont seem to have read the comet theories very closely (and I would agree that much of the info is not very acessible, being "hidden" away in random blog/forum posts and rambling youtube videos).
The correct predictions regarding rosetta really dont require the rest to be correct as well, they basically just predict that comets are like asteroids because they arent unhealthily married to the dirty snowball idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 24 2018, @06:42AM
You keep saying that, but what is the point of reading the "comet theories" very closely when the theory doesn't fit evidence? And is deeply wrong in closely related areas?
Were those predictions actually made before the fact? And the dirty snowball idea hasn't actually been disproven. The comet's tail is coming from somewhere.