After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  The Martians’ ultimate loss could be our gain. If the Martians were originally an extrasolar civilization that had colonized Mars (for whatever reasons), we may encounter vestiges of high technology buried beneath the frozen red sands. We may learn from the Martians’ environmental downfall so that we can take meaningful steps to avoid a similar catastrophe on Earth.

  Nagging evidence suggests that extinction-level events on Earth follow a recurring cycle. One explanation postulates the existence of a second star in the solar neighborhood (appropriately dubbed “Nemesis”) that periodically attracts cometary debris from the distant Oort Cloud and sends it on a collision course with Earth. Although evidence for Nemesis is purely circumstantial, repeated studies suggest that there is likely a tenth planet beyond Pluto. If so, then perhaps its gravitational influence is sufficient to sweep up intermittent swarms of rock and ice. These swarms would fall inward toward the Sun, smashing into any planets they encountered.

  Space exploration advocate and author Ben Bova, regarded as one of the most knowledgeable practitioners of “hard” science fiction, used this premise in his novel Return to Mars. In Bova’s story, ruins built by an indigenous Martian civilization (roughly technologically equivalent to the Anasazi of New Mexico) are discovered. Scientists conclude that the same comet swarm responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs on Earth obliterated the ancient Martians. The idea is simultaneously engrossing and cautionary; as comet hunters are fond of pointing out, Earth is overdue for another global killer.

  Bova’s scenario, like Hancock’s, is grounded in the certainty that Mars suffered a natural cataclysm. But the existence of intelligence, as evidenced by the features in Cydonia and elsewhere on Mars, introduces an unexpected—and alarming—variable:

  Perhaps the Martian apocalypse wasn’t entirely natural.

  If one considers the implications of Tom Van Flandern’s Exploded Planet Hypothesis, in which Mars was once the moon of an erstwhile gas giant, the aftermath of the planetary carnage now witnessed by Viking and Surveyor takes on truly horrific nuances.

  Van Flandern’s estimate places the Face on Mars’s original equator—another indication that the feature’s placement is far from random. Presumably, if denizens of the exploded planet looked closely enough at the moon dominating their sky, they would see the Face looking back at them, surrounded by the Cydonian sea.

  A structure intentionally designed for viewing from another world is unparalleled in terms of human megascale sculpture. If Van Flandern is correct, the Face’s highly conspicuous location may be utilitarian as well as aesthetic. When the Apollo astronauts went to the Moon, they left behind specially designed mirrors on the lifeless gray surface. Unlike the variety of discarded junk left by the Apollo missions, the mirrors were deliberate fixtures. Scientists on Earth used them to bounce laser beams from, providing highly accurate measurements of the Moon’s distance from Earth.

  A visiting alien might see our reflectors on the Moon and attribute them to creative indulgence. And in a sense, they’d be right; seemingly ancient structures used in the development of the atomic bomb and the launch pads of the Moon rockets are now viewed as postmodern sculpture, rusted and battered into caricatures of their original purpose.

  Deliberate Destruction?

  I suggest that Van Flandern’s Exploded Planet Hypothesis makes sense only if one is willing to entertain a nonnatural explanation. Of course, this is heretical on several levels, as the explanation must somehow encompass the presence of potential artifacts on Mars as well as a presumed high-tech culture on Mars’s erstwhile parent.

  Strangely, the revelatory climax from Eando Binder’s Puzzle of the Space Pyramids comes to mind. In Binder’s novel, the asteroid belt was formed by a focused gravity assault that harnessed the energy of the entire solar system. The pyramids of the title were essentially gravity generators used to manipulate space-time.

  Like Binder’s unlikely cast of aliens, humanity is on the threshold of utilizing potent new forms of energy. NASA has experimented with a novel form of antigravity in hopes of lowering the weight of Space Shuttle payloads. Other adventurers in cutting-edge physics hope to tap the “zero-point energy” entrapped in the very fabric of space.

  If it’s possible to manipulate space and time, it’s also possible to conceive of industrial accidents of literally world-shaking dimensions. Van Flandern’s exploded planet—once our neighbor—could have fallen victim to the very energy source that maintained its population. A planetary Chernobyl brought on by an inexhaustible energy source could have blasted the planet into pieces.

  This could have been perfectly inadvertent, or it could have been deliberate. After all, world-destroying technology is no longer science fantasy. In Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan muses on the future of space defense systems designed to shoot down threatening meteors, accurately noting that the very system intended to preserve life on Earth could easily be turned against it. Instead of lobbing nuclear warheads at incoming space debris, a space defense network, properly undermined, could be used as a doomsday weapon.

  As SETI pundits point out, the ability of a civilization to outgrow its technological adolescence is a critical factor in determining the number of advanced cultures in our galaxy. We would be wise not to be too smug in our control over potentially dangerous technology; only slightly more than a decade ago, the possibility that the Russian and American superpowers would effectively end civilization via nuclear war was considered a very real possibility.

  Although our media depict technologically advanced aliens as benevolent or even saintly, we are essentially projecting our own desires onto a blank screen. Alien civilizations, granted they exist, may prove to have the diplomatic prowess of angry wasps, unable or unwilling to outgrow territorial genetic imperatives.

  Exobiologists assure us that civilizations mature enough to travel between stars or take part in a radio-based “galactic Internet” would be friendly, if for no other reason than less sophisticated societies would pose no threat. Doubtless, in some cases, they’re correct. But the possible ruins of a once-inhabited world drifting disembodied in our own solar system conjure genuine fears. The apocalyptic spectacle of Mars reminds us that we would be wise to heed them.

  The idea of sudden catastrophic change, as opposed to gradual change over periods of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, strikes an apocalyptic nerve in scientists of all persuasions.

  The discipline of science, as a system of fact management, works best when applied to vast spans of time and distance. Thus, mainstream planetary geologists juggle innumerable theories that attempt to render Mars’s apocalypse into a gradual series of events separated by gulfs of geological time. By the same token, exobiologists chat openly about the possible chemical, biological, and psychological make-up of intelligent extraterrestrials—but subject their hypothetical aliens to an intellectual quarantine composed of uncrossable light-years.

  As far as we’ve come since the reign of geocentricism, we still pale in existential fright when forced to confront the immediacy of the cosmos. It seems science still needs a temporal buffer, if only to assuage fears of planetary extinction. As we enter into an era of genetic engineering, cheap access to nuclear technology and even cheaper bioweapons, our collective buffer seems almost necessary to keep us from entering a state of debilitating shock.

  To make matters worse, humans have yet to become a spacefaring species in any meaningful sense. Our industries are completely Earth-based. We’re content to leave the rigors of exploration to flimsy robots that frequently malfunction or crash. We have yet to transplant ourselves to any of our planetary neighbors; even our own moon is conspicuously vacant save for a few trifling mementoes.

  The Exploded Planet Hypothesis, seen in its Cydonian context, seems to imply a culture comfortable with space colonization. Maybe Mars’s parent planet was lifeless, and the Cydonia complex was constructed as an observatory from which to watch the world that must have dominated the sky. We tend to thin
k of moons as peripheral, uninteresting bodies. Our own moon, aside from serving as a geological Rosetta Stone, is sterile and unchanging. Likewise, Mars’s two moons are much too small to retain an atmosphere, and mainstream astronomers regard them as “junk” left over from the solar system’s formation.

  The more than sixty Jovian satellites reframe our perception of moons. The size of small planets, Europa, Callisto, Io, and Ganymede are dynamic worlds, not mere chunks of celestial shrapnel. And while scientists are hopeful that Europa harbors sophisticated life of some kind, very few consider Jupiter itself a candidate for life. Some liken Jupiter to a small star, and in a very real sense, the Jovian system is a miniature solar system neatly embedded within the gravitational clockwork of the larger solar system.

  Likewise, the EPH suggests a relationship between Mars and its counterpart that’s not unlike that between Jupiter and its moons. According to Van Flandern’s calculations, the exploded planet would have been up to nine times the size of Earth, in which case it was almost certainly a gas giant—although not as profoundly outsized as Jupiter. Life on (or, more accurately, within) a gas giant has long seemed an impossibility. The Jovian planets, which include Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, are vast spherical seas of hydrogen and assorted other elements. With no solid footing except for the planet’s unseen core, the chances for indigenous life are slim, although this hasn’t restrained speculation. Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke have both envisioned enormous organic balloons drifting in Jupiter’s upper cloud layers, pursued by semi-sentient aerial sharks. Nevertheless, the exobiological consensus is that Jupiter’s moons are much more likely to foster life than Jupiter itself.

  A similar situation might apply to Mars and its hypothetical parent. Rather than speaking in terms of moons and planets, Van Flandern’s revisionist model might be better understood as a binary planet, much like distant Pluto and its moon Charon. If our own moon was large enough to hold an atmosphere, it’s quite likely it would have developed indigenous life at some point, and we could have become an extraplanetary species by making a brief jaunt similar to that of the Apollo astronauts.

  In this alternate solar system, humans could have rapidly colonized their moon and been spared the enormous distances involved with manned flights to Mars or the outer planets. In this light, it may be naive to confine Van Flandern’s Face-builders to Mars, even if they originated there. The sheer proximity of the so-called parent planet would have been too tempting. If the Martians were sufficiently advanced, establishing a beachhead on the parent planet could have been accomplished with the equivalent of Apollo-era technology—shades of alternative archeologist Zechariah Sitchin’s oddly retro interplanetary gods.

  Or it could have been the other way around. Maybe the Face is a monument in the purest form of the word, announcing the visitors’ arrival. When American astronauts landed on the Moon after a decade of concerted Cold War effort, they hastily planted their national flag in the scorched gray regolith. Since the Moon lacks erosion, the flag will remain unmolested for millennia (barring unscrupulous lunar colonists attempts to sell it on some future eBay).

  Perhaps we expect too much from the Face. Perhaps it’s simply the interplanetary equivalent of a “We were here” marker, or a bit of alien graffitio constructed on Mars’s old equator in order to gaze down at the vanished tenth planet in all of its stern glory.

  But then there is the City, and the D&M Pyramid, and the strange, linear Cliff…

  What if intelligent life developed not just on one of the EPH’s binary planets, but both? The apparent structures in Cydonia might be an attempt to visually communicate with beings on the parent planet. Perhaps the Face was intended as a challenge—or maybe even a territorial warning.

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  A Lost World

  If there is anything more unsettling to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory than life on Mars, it is intelligent life on Mars. In a 2002 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, theoretical physicist Horace W. Crater and Jean Pierre Levasseur presented their investigation of anthropomorphic likenesses evidently etched into the Martian terrain. If any of their finds are real, then it would seem that Mars once harbored a global civilization of some kind. The Cydonia complex may simply be the best preserved.

  The ideogrammatic features analyzed by Crater, Levasseur, and later by astronomer Tom Van Flandern seem crude and one-dimensional compared to the Face in Cydonia, and more than a few seem to be the product of applying perceptual cookie cutters to the Martian landscape in such a way as to produce any number of fanciful shapes. This problem is exacerbated when the anomaly in question is a profile, as in the case of a strikingly Egyptian-looking “bust” noted in Levasseur and Crater’s paper. The Egyptian profile, playfully dubbed “Nefertiti,” appears to consist of dark material on the Martian surface that’s been deposited in a striking feminine likeness.

  A Martian “Zoo”

  Van Flandern devoted a 2000 press conference to this and similar “geoglyphs,” with mixed reactions from the Mars anomaly community. Although Van Flandern is a respected astronomer and a member of the staunchly academic Society for Planetary SETI Research, most of his examples of Martian landscape art were extremely dubious.

  On his website, Van Flandern presents wildly implausible “artistically reconstructed” images showing what he perceives as a giant “bird,” a few curved lines he construes as a megalithic portrait of a “child,” and a credibility-straining “sea-horse” sculpture created by viewing portions of a landform in convenient isolation. Van Flandern’s misperceptions are less the product of bad science than of a curious need to artistically embellish Mars’s surface.

  J. P. Levasseur’s study of a controversial landform with a facial likeness dubbed “Nefertiti.” Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/Malin Space Science Systems. Sketch by J. P. Lavasseur.

  This unforgivable technique, which Van Flandern relies on again and again, is best compared to taking a giant cookie cutter to the Martian surface in such a way as to produce any desired anomaly. There’s no wonder Van Flandern sees so many enigmatic shapes on Mars; armed with enough perceptual cookie cutters, it’s easy enough to populate Mars with just about anything. Many hoped that Van Flandern’s high visibility would help the “Mars anomaly community” achieve much-needed critical mass and pique the planetary science community’s interest in the prospect of discovering artifacts on Mars. Instead, his roster of proposed geoglyphs recall Mike Malin’s own “Smiley Face” crater, or the likeness of Kermit the Frog seen in a wash of meteorite ejecta.

  But the Face reminds us to not be too dismissive. As Levasseur has argued, Earth is littered with asymmetric facial likenesses designed for viewing from above, and anthropologists readily concede their artificiality. Why should artwork left by a non-terrestrial civilization necessarily be any different? While symmetry is useful when assessing a formation for artificiality, lack of symmetry doesn’t preclude a non-natural origin.

  When we examine Mars, we tend to assume that an extinct civilization would have provided obvious indications of its intelligence. This logic is akin to the debunking argument that proclaims that if UFOs are extraterrestrial craft, they would “land on the White House lawn.” It’s frankly disturbing to review the prominent scientists who have clung to this argument. One would think renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who offered the toothless “White House Lawn” quip to reporters when questioned about the likelihood of ET visitors, would have known better.

  Proving a given civilization’s existence to future archaeologists is seldom if ever a motivating factor behind that civilization’s architecture. Even timeless monuments like the Pyramids and Stonehenge served a selfish purpose as astronomical and religious devices; they were not designed for the benefit of twenty-first century scholars. Indeed, if the Giza Necropolis had been built for some arbitrary future generation, the Egyptians seem to have done a rather disappointing job of pinpointing themselves on the cul
tural timeline: the debate over who, precisely, built the Pyramids and Sphinx rages on.

  The discovery of remarkably geometric city-like grids on Mars has fueled speculation about hypothetical Martian civilizations. While many of the grids are most likely the work of erosion, others reveal a patterned consistency that recalls metropolitan infrastructure. If these are indeed the remains of cities, they appear far more terrestrial than the relatively megalithic architecture evidenced by Cydonian features such as the City Pyramid and Fort.

  It’s possible that Mars boasts ruins dating to multiple epochs, the exposed metropolitan grids corresponding to civilization before the cataclysm that scattered Mars’s atmosphere. In contrast, the individual features in Cydonia are large enough to have housed entire urban populations.

  Talk of ancient Martian cities is not confined to idle speculation. The Mars Odyssey is equipped with a Thermal Imaging System that can discern surface temperature and composition from orbit, providing a potential platform for archaeological surveys. Since it is expected that hollow or chambered underground (or partially underground) features will radiate daytime heat differently than natural topology, it’s possible to test candidate regions for thermal or compositional anomaly.

  The University of Arizona, proprietor of the THEMIS instrument suite, obligingly imaged the Cydonia region in the infrared spectrum. The online Mars anomaly community greeted the results with enormous interest. The Face is barely noticeable at all in the infrared; to some; this is evidence that the Face is unnaturally cooler than adjacent mesas—pointing to the possibility that it is hollow—while to others the data is inconclusive. But by no means has this stopped the flood of speculation about ancient Martian architects emanating from email lists and bulletin boards.