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.
00:37It 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...
01:06The 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
01:27to, I kid you not, Bigfoot.
01:30Doors.
01:32Lizards.
01:33No, spiders, lizards.
01:35Bunnies.
01:36You 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.
01:42But nonetheless, you know, people see this stuff.
01:45And, of course, it's a natural human trait to interpret them as something familiar.
01:51And as I've gone on about way too long in the past, when I was up on Devon Island at
01:56Pascal Lee's base up there, where there are no human artifacts except for the tents we were living in, you
02:02do, 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
02:14a secret.
02:14What's going on?
02:16And I want truth and clarity.
02:17So, 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.
02:26There'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
02:44something.
02:44It reminds me of a Horta.
02:45Remember the Horta's from Star Trek?
02:47No kill eye.
02:49Yeah.
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
03:05shoot 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.
03:19I'm looking at the Horta.
03:21Oh, that's the Horta?
03:22Yeah.
03:22We should mention that Horta's are like silicone-based rock creatures that lived inside caves on an alien planet in
03:31the original series.
03:32And 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
03:41forth.
03:41And apparently William Shatner, who was a practical joker back in the day, especially in the 60s, when Spock had
03:49to do his pain, pain scene where he touches the Horta and channels his pain, there it is, looking like
03:55a bucket of snot.
03:56This looks exactly like this rock, man, I tell you, life on Mars.
04:00Sure thing.
04:01Confirmed.
04:02So 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
04:11it.
04:11And just as he was about to do the line, Shatner up in the rafters goes, pain, pain, as only
04:17William Shatner can.
04:18And apparently Nimoy was not thrilled by that.
04:21Or he was either up in the rafters or riding his bicycle.
04:23He loved to ride bicycles on stage, riding his bicycle anyway.
04:27Not 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 me by none other
04:36than the chief scientist on the Curiosity mission, John Grassinger.
04:39He said, look, it's fun to look at this stuff.
04:42It's fun to come to conclusions.
04:44We welcome any publicity we can get.
04:47But we're all waiting for that dinosaur femur moment.
04:51Because what happens to space budgets if you discover a big fossilized bone up on Mars?
04:56Now, 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.
05:11Can I, like, what if, if instead of an astronaut or an astronaut, a dinosaur bone, right, a Mars, a
05:19sore 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.
05:34So, no.
05:36What did you put your coffee this morning?
05:38No, like, if 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,
06:01posted a story saying,
06:03life found an atmosphere of Jupiter.
06:05And I was over the moon.
06:08I was elated.
06:08I 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, it's April 1st.
06:16And sure enough, the next day they said, April Fool's joke.
06:18And I wrote one 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, but I guess there was still a number of
06:46rural people, not a number, a bunch of rural people still using it because they don't have access to the
06:50DSL.
06:50Like 0.1%, 0.1% of Internet users, like, 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 Pac Bell took away my landline.
07:04Oh, no.
07:05Which I didn't really want, but a couple of radio stations I work with used to insist on you having
07:10a landline, primarily coast-to-coast AM.
07:13There's a show.
07:15And, you know, I called Pac Bell and I said, look, I can see the wires going from my house
07:19to the pole.
07:20They said, yep, too bad.
07:21Not doing it.
07:21No.
07:23No.
07:24No.
07:26No.
07:26No.
07:28No.
07:28No.
07:28No.
07:28No.
07:28No.
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