I’m not a geologist but I’ve read up on it a fair bit.

This Mars photo appears to be sandstone.

On earth sandstone is usually associated with ancient rivers, lake shores, and sea shores. But also sand dune fields.

The thing with sandstone though, is it’s not just sand. Rather, it’s sand plus time plus pressure plus cementation.

Now, the time part is obvious. What’s sandstone now was sand a long ass time ago (usually).

Pressure? That’s a little harder to understand for me here. Has mars ever had tectonic stuff going on to bury it (and hence have pressure applied), followed by erosion and uplift? Or am I incorrect and pressure is not a necessary condition? Maybe sandstone without pressure is a thing it’s just weaker and/or less dense? Maybe layers of volcanic basalt or something could have a similar effect? I don’t know and would love to have someone more knowledgeable fill this part out.

Cementation? This part, I’m nearly certain, REQUIRES water. On earth anyway, this happens when ground water absorbs chemicals from other rock/stuff (for example carbonates from sea shells, but there’s lots of other chemicals that can do this), then flows through the beds of buried sand, and some of those chemicals are deposited along with magical chemistry stuff happening, and your sand becomes sand stone.

So I don’t 100% know that the short answer to your question is “yes”, but I’m leaning towards a solid “yeah, probably, but I’m not a real geologist and Mars isn’t a real Earth so I dunno”.

Depending on your threat model you’re almost certainly fine.

The catharsis is real!

I got 2.7k on a post, but I just got lucky.

I can try to explain, but there are people who know much more about this stuff than I do, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable steps in to check my work.

What does ‘random’ or ‘noise’ mean? In this context, random means that any given bit of information is equally as likely to be a 1 or a 0. Noise means a collection of information that is either random or unimportant/non-useful.

So, you say “Compression saves on redundant data”. Well, if we think that through, and consider the definitions I’ve given above, we will reason that ‘random noise’ either doesn’t have redundant information (due to the randomness), or that much of the information is not useful (due to its characteristic as noise).

I think that’s what the person is describing. Does that help?

I’m not an Information Theory guy, but I am aware that, regardless of how clever one might hope to be, there is a theoretical limit on how compressed any given set of information could possibly be; and this is particularly true for the lossless compression demanded by this challenge.

Quote from the article:

The skepticism is well-founded, said Karl Martin, chief technology officer of data science company Integrate.ai. Martin’s PhD thesis at the University of Toronto focused on data compression and security.

Neuralink’s brainwave signals are compressible at ratios of around 2 to 1 and up to 7 to 1, he said in an email. But 200 to 1 “is far beyond what we expect to be the fundamental limit of possibility.”

https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily

If you’re a programmer, or think you might want to be one, I highly recommend this channel. He’s a savant at all sorts of low level things, quite funny and entertaining, and does a fantastic job of explaining what’s going on.

It’s not just a fat or muscle thing. Those both contribute of course; fat insulates and muscle produces more heat. But the real player is the surface area to volume ratio.

A bigger person has a lot more volume than they have a bigger surface area, and since heat is lost through the skin this has a major impact.

I agree that, if the detection is accurate and correct, it could be produced through non-biological processes, but, on earth, the molecule in question is known to be produced solely by biological processes. So when you say “easily”, I must disagree.

This is very preliminary data, and we shouldn’t get overexcited about the possible implications of this discovery, but I think it’s fascinating.