science

I was looking at pictures of Mars' surface from Curiosity with my uncle who is a lunar landing and science denier. He said, "That could be taken at any desert on Earth." I was like NO SHIT! You mean to tell me that other planets have rocks too?!?! No fucking way! What do you expect it to look like?

You and your 6th grade reading level somehow outsmarted two generations of NASA scientists and their massive coverup and lies about space exploration? No, you fucking dunce.

It definitely reminds me of a cave.

There are barely visible tiny features that would have eroded away on Earth.

That said, they are barely visible and tiny. If somebody said it's just some weird concretion, I'd completely believe it.

When you think about it, that's kinda exactly what it is. Which is very cool :-D

Just a big random boulder in space amongst a whole solar system of random boulders, taken with a light for illumination because it's dark, yo

I mean, you're not wrong.

Except this specific boulder isn't stuck in earth's gravity well, it's got its own thing going on.

Except no weathering.

There's absolutely no sense of scale here.

What we see as rocks, could absolutely be boulders...

We'd tend to error of the side of 'small' but with no fluid (liquid or air) erosion, these could be massive.

I worked on Landsat 9 a few years ago, and when I got on-console for my first shift after it launched, I remembered seeing the telemetry come down and thinking, huh, doesn't look any different than when we simulated the data...how do I know we actually sent it up there?

Then something went wrong that i had to fix and I snapped back to reality.

Don't forget the endless abyss that was pictured too.

Yeah, and knowing the only reason you can see it is because of the lighting from the robot taking the photo. Otherwise it's just this thing shrouded in darkness flying through space at whatever ridiculously fast speed only to eventually run into something.

This image is ripe for an SCP to be written up based on it.

Imagine being one of the first humans to try to mine one of these, and you feel like you saw something moving in the corner of your eye, just where the light meets the shadow of one of the sharp lumps, but you can't be sure.

No, no, no. It actually isn't lifeless. It contains some small microbes that are virtually undetectable. Their only effect on the human psyche is to create paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and remove all traces of empathy.

It kind of reminds me of the comet from Outer Wilds, which was kinda spooky, in terms of having to land on this tiny object traveling very fast through space and navigate it

Have you ever thought about what it must be like in space? That shit is scary. We take for granted that we have an atmosphere to disperse light, as well as a ground for light to reflect off of. In space, some shit could be right in front of you and you would have no idea. If there were an asteroid between you and the sun, you wouldn’t realize until it was so close that there was a huge black spot covering the sun up.

Because of the soildier attempting to hide behind the rock (middle right)

My take on it is that it's a lot of fluffy stuff just collected together and eventually mashed down under its own worth, so you aren't far off

Someone forgot to bring banana

The asteroid is about 1 km thick, it seems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/162173_Ryugu

Now also imagine the view when you're there and you turn off the light.

Black will be really fucking black and you will only see some stars