There is a huge 'monolith' on Phobos, one of Mars's moons | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge 'monolith' on Phobos, one of Mars's moons

bbc.com

76 pointscurtis23 comments

Who will be first to break it into microservices

But only if we break it with the savage might of atomic power!

And if it wasn't for some bad code and quality control, we could have a much better idea of what the monolith is[0]. Heck if the Fobos-Grunt mission was successful we could have up to 200 grams of phobos dirt back on Earth right now. This is such a large sample size, that demonstration of these techniques would arguably be an advance for asteroid mining.

But alas, space exploration is hard, so we can only hope that the Fobos-Grunt 2 mission happens.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt

Thank you for that link, I hadn't read up about that before.

It's a shame how science never gets funded properly. Yet we have money for weapons. Sigh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(Space_Odyssey)

This is a huge wake-up call for everyone here on Earth: if you still haven't either watched Kubrick's Odyssey or read the books, you're missing out.

My recommended order is, watch the movie, read the book, then watch the movie again.

I thought I was the only one who came to that conclusion! Reading the book in the middle leads to a bunch of "ohhhh... That makes more sense now" moments.

You can save a lot of time and get all the important bits of the story by watching this Lego adaptation https://youtu.be/Sz4aQ2YbN-E

According to the author's forward, the Apollo astronauts (yes, the book + movie are THAT old) considered reporting a large black monolith on the Moon.

"Sadly, greater wisdom prevailed" :P

tldr; With enough rocks thrown around, you'll get a few that look crafted.

Not just thrown around though—you can get crafted looking things through natural geothermal processes (which probably are no longer happening on Phobos); columnar basalt is one of my favorite examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Columnar_basalt (If you live in California, Devils Postpile is worth a side trip from Yosemite).

This might be true, however it's probably still worth at least trying to get some (unmanned) telemetry to better measure the location so that we can evaluate hypothesis or determine if additional study is warranted.

> it's probably still worth at least trying to get some (unmanned) telemetry

Of course. What I implied was that it wasn't worth losing sleep over, as these types of formations often do e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(region_of_Mars)

Just look at all the places named "Castle Rock"...

tldr; with enough random keystrokes you'll get something resembling "tldr; With enough rocks thrown around, you'll get a few that look crafted."

The comment was to save anyone speculating, based on the title, that it might be a mysterious discovery. It's not - it's a remnant of billions of years of collisions and geological activity.

I guess you didn't get my snark, but sure, it was a bit obtuse. :)

Don't you think you're a bit overly certain that it's caused by random geological activity? How do you know that?

> I guess you didn't get my snark

I get the point that with enough time the emanations of an internet gnome like me and my comment above could be reproduced by a simple program sampling every letter and character combination, thus making my original point seemingly contradictory because I am a sentient being and the comment was the result of intent. But...

> you're a bit overly certain that it's caused by random geological activity

The article explained why we think it's the process of geological activity/solar bombardment and I was saving any readers who were baited into thinking it might be something grander than that.

I'm totally open to the idea of intelligent space-faring life in the cosmos, in fact I hope it's the case, but I was preparing readers expectations for the content of the article.

Occam's razor?

The Phobos Anomaly? We should keep a close eye on that thing, look out for cacodemon activity...

Tardis? Coke vending machine?

Having had a closer look at the image, it looks like a ...... tall rock.

Who else checked the date ?

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