00:00Hey, Space fans, it's Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of Space.com.
00:04And on this week in space, we talked all about a weird rock that the Perseverance rover has found.
00:08And it might just look like a hat. Tune in and find out.
00:13Helmets on Mars. Because we love us some helmets on Mars.
00:17So a kind of weird hat-like rock formation has been spotted, an image is taken by the Perseverance rover.
00:23It has a pointed peak and nodular texture, not unlike medieval armor, or maybe the wishing hat from Harry Potter.
00:31The lumps appear to be water close.
00:33Okay, we've got to stop. We've got to stop.
00:35What?
00:35There is not a wishing hat in Harry Potter.
00:38It is the sorting hat.
00:40You put the hat on, and it sorts you into your house at Hogwarts.
00:46Okay. And it didn't look like this anyway.
00:48Calling this rock a hat is extremely generous.
00:52Yeah, but it is weird.
00:54It's weird looking, for sure.
00:55They think, geologists think that the lumps or water cause ferials, like we saw on the Mars Exploration rover missions,
01:03where we saw these little concretions that were...
01:07The blueberries.
01:07Magnetite.
01:08Magnetite?
01:09I thought they were hematite.
01:10Hematite, thank you.
01:11Which is formed in the presence of water.
01:14So this looks like, you know, the artifact from some standing body of water.
01:19But it is weird.
01:20Now, we've seen a lot of weird rocks on Mars, and they have been interpreted as everything from heavy artillery to, I kid you not, Bigfoot.
01:30Doors.
01:33Lizards.
01:33Spiders, lizards.
01:35Bunnies.
01:35You know, anything...
01:36Oh, well, the bunny was actually...
01:38The bunny was like a piece of parachute material.
01:40That was a piece of insulation, yeah.
01:41Yeah.
01:42But nonetheless, you know, people see this stuff, and of course, it's a natural human trait to interpret them as something familiar.
01:50And as I've gone on about way too long in the past, when I was up on Devon Island at Pascal Lee's base up there, where there are no human artifacts except for the tents we were living in, you do, you know, your brain starts getting hungry for seeing things that are familiar.
02:06But the people seeing this aren't on Mars.
02:08They're on Earth sitting in their living rooms, their Paris basements or wherever, and they're saying, look, something NASA's keeping a secret.
02:15What's going on?
02:16And I want truth and clarity.
02:18So, you know, it's not a hat.
02:19It's a really weird-looking rock.
02:21But, you know, I guess it'll hopefully get a little closer and find more of theirs.
02:26Yeah.
02:26There's our graphic up there that shows its very vague resemblance to a medieval battle helmet.
02:34I don't know.
02:35I'm trying to figure out what it actually does remind me of.
02:38It's like somebody took a bunch of tissue paper, soaked it an oatmeal, and stuck their fist in it or something.
02:44It reminds me of a horta.
02:45Remember the hortus from Star Trek?
02:47No kill eye.
02:49Yeah.
02:50Brain!
02:52Sorry.
02:53I'm giving away my age here.
02:54Yeah.
02:55I had a screensaver that had a horta that would eat holes into your screen.
02:59Oh.
02:59It was a Star Trek screensaver.
03:00That was almost as good as the Barney Blaster screensaver I had where you got a shotgun and you could shoot Barney over and over.
03:06I used to have that Star Trek screensaver.
03:08I paid $7 for it and it was on floppy disk.
03:11So that's how old it was.
03:15John Ashley has a very strange look on his face.
03:18I think the floppy disk.
03:20I'm looking at the hortus.
03:21Oh, that's the horta?
03:22Yeah, we should mention that hortus are like, they're silicone-based rock creatures that lived inside caves on an alien planet in the original series and they were like lumps of living rock.
03:35Or it was a stuntman under a carpet covered with latex, which is what it actually was, crawling back and forth.
03:42And apparently William Shatner, who was a practical joker back in the day, especially in the 60s, when Spock had to do his pain, pain scene where he touches the horta and channels his pain, there it is, looking like a bucket of snot.
03:56This looks exactly like this, Rockman, I tell you.
04:00Life on Mars.
04:00Sure thing.
04:01Confirmed.
04:01So anyway, as I was saying, so Shatner was up in the rafters.
04:05They had cleared the stage.
04:06This is the way the story goes anyway, because Nimoy didn't want a bunch of chuckling while he was doing it.
04:12And just as he was about to do the line, Shatner up in the rafters goes, pain, pain, is the only way that Shatner can.
04:18And apparently Nimoy was not thrilled by that.
04:21He was either up in the rafters or riding his bicycle.
04:23He loved to ride bicycles on stage, riding his bicycle.
04:26Anyway, not really a story worth spending a lot of time on.
04:29But, yeah, I think, I mean, the moment we're waiting for, and this was told to be by none other than the chief scientist on the Curiosity mission, John Gratzinger.
04:39He said, look, it's fun to look at this stuff.
04:42It's fun to come to conclusions.
04:45We welcome any publicity we can get.
04:47But we're all waiting for that dinosaur femur moment.
04:51Yeah.
04:51Because what happens to space budgets if you discover a big fossilized bone up on Mars?
04:57Now, in the current administration, I don't know what would happen.
05:00We'd probably, you know, have to figure out how to name it after somebody.
05:03But in general terms, suddenly you get a bunch of money and maybe even astronauts up there.
05:09So, yeah, let's find more.
05:12Can I, like, what if, if instead of an astronaut or an astronaut, a dinosaur bone, right, a Mars, a sore or whatever, they found, like, a tuft of grass, like, just like growing.
05:25Maybe it's, like, red grass or whatever because of the iron.
05:28How about a rose, a red, red rose?
05:30Like, they found, like, with the little prince on his little asteroid.
05:35What did you put your coffee this morning in your taster's choice?
05:40If they found that, like, would it have the same effect?
05:42I mean, for us it would, right?
05:44It's life on another planet.
05:45Yeah.
05:45We'd all be freaking out.
05:47But would there be a race to go get that grass?
05:50Would people really freak out?
05:52Back on April Fool's Day in, I think, 1993, America Online, which was at that time the premier online service, posted a story saying,
06:03life found an atmosphere of Jupiter.
06:06And I was over the moon.
06:08I was elated.
06:09I was 23 skidoo.
06:10I was like, oh, my God.
06:11It finally happened.
06:12They finally did it.
06:13And I thought, wait a minute.
06:14It's April 1st.
06:16And sure enough, the next day they said April Fool's joke.
06:18That was a Galileo.
06:19One of my very rare, angry letters to Steve Case saying that was not cool.
06:26But, you know, there was very little public reaction.
06:29And at that point, they were like a major news source for people.
06:33Yeah.
06:33By the way, RIP, America Online Dial-Up Connection, they shut the doors on it this month.
06:39That's the end of it.
06:40No.
06:40Yeah.
06:41And actually, a lot of us kind of went snicker, snicker.
06:44But I guess there was still a number of rural people, not a number, a bunch of rural people still using it.
06:49Because they don't have access to DSL.
06:50Like 0.1%, 0.1% of Internet users relied on that service.
06:55So hopefully, they'll be able to find some other way to get access to get whatever information they need.
07:01And PacBell took away my landline.
07:04Oh, no.
07:05Which I didn't really want.
07:07But a couple of radio stations I work with used to insist on you having a landline, primarily coast-to-coast AM.
07:13There's a show.
07:15And, you know, I called PacBell and I said, look, I can see the wires going from my house to the pole.
Be the first to comment