Hi Eaol, Welcome. Pleased that you managed to see past the public image of Mars and space exploration in general and now you are actively interested in the photos we get from the agencies and governments. Yes, of course we welcome peoples ideas and help.
Like all forums we have to decide what kind of forum we are going to be and try to organise the posts so that they show that. I agree that we need to make the posts easy for research, but it appears to be quite difficult to keep people on-topic so that in itself makes research and searches of the forum difficult.
I have a love for art, biology, astronomy, physics, history, looking through conspiracy theories and figuring out which ones are bogus and which ones are not, psychology, and some basic information on "paranormal" material. I look at all ideas with an open mind, but still make logical deductions and inferences.
When I first came across Skipper's site, I thought it was some crack site owned by some mentally handicapped individual who was overly paranoid about everything Mars. So I thought of it as a joke or a very sad person's astronomy guide. However, that all changed when I decided to look at a few reports. When I saw what looked like an overhead view of a forest with lakes in it, I thought either the image must be fake or that it was from an Earth photo. So then I saw that he actually gave links to the material he got the evidence from. I checked with that, and came up with the same stuff he did. That, of course, didn't totally convince me yet, but it started me on trying to find out.
Up till now, I am totally convinced. It got me. Whatever scrutiny I can put it under, it always holds its own. It used to be "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Now we have actual people gathering real evidence and presenting it to go on its own merit at this forum. At this point, we have more evidence proving our point of view than NASA or JPL have "proving" theirs. This is what real science is all about. The people deserve to know this, and the people WILL know this. But it won't be easy.
We need to make a central knowledge source of the research we do, so that the information uncovered can be cataloged and categorized and easily looked at in the form of a wiki or something. Then, instead of sifting through hundreds of images, webpages, etcetera, we can actually get to the most up-to-date information on each subject.
I will try to contribute to this forum through some scientific knowledge, insight, etcetera. May not be much, but any help you can get is good, right?
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What if Pinnochio says that his nose will grow longer?
