After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  Whether the Brookings Institution’s suggestions are policy or merely lofty speculation, they’re worth pursuing on the chance that we might find evidence of the report’s influence on NASA’s Mars exploration program. While radio SETI has an international protocol for disseminating news of extraterrestrial broadcasts, there are no known established rules governing the discovery of physical artifacts.

  The Brookings authors assumed, perhaps naively, that artifacts found elsewhere in the solar system would necessarily be far in advance of our own science. The notion that terrestrial scientists and engineers would lose their competitive edge when faced with a nonhuman science rings strangely hollow; in fact, many scientists have mused on the discovery of alien devices, whether in public conversation or in the pages of science fiction novels. The oddly xenophobic sentiment expressed in the Brookings report doesn’t appear to have any supporters; the consensus among working scientists is that alien technology of whatever kind would have a powerful invigorating effect on terrestrial science.

  For example, declassified U.S. Air Force documents dealing with the UFO enigma demonstrate that the military brass sincerely wished for recovery exhibits (crashed UFOs) so that the U.S. could learn the secrets behind their superior maneuverability. Access to superior technology was clearly viewed as immensely desirable. And if that was the case in the UFO arena (at a time in which it was by no means clear if UFOs represented a Soviet propulsion breakthrough or nonhuman visitors), there seems to be no compelling reason that would make the discovery of artifacts in space any different.

  But since the military-industrial complex rather than civilian researchers would presumably exploit findings of either sort, NASA’s role as an ostensibly civilian agency comes under question. Civilians exposed to extraterrestrial artifacts, willingly or accidentally, would almost certainly be asked to comply with military classification.

  Again, Clarke and Kubrick’s prescient 2001: A Space Odyssey shows a way in which just such a situation might be handled. Since the Monolith was discovered on a civilian lunar base, a cover story is concocted to prevent leaks. Back on Earth, friends and family of the base’s population are led to believe the ongoing communications blackout is due to an epidemic while, in secret, experts are assembled to decide what to do next.

  But in 2001 the discovery of the alien monolith was unexpected, whereas Cydonia is already a hotbed of public speculation. If an intelligence agency wanted to keep Cydonia a secret, the most it could do at this point is carefully monitor interested parties and direct the flow of potentially irrefutable satellite imagery to secure channels. And by fostering an academic community given to debunking and ridicule, as was successfully done to contain the UFO controversy despite the protests of credentialed scientists, a small elite could very capably dictate national security policy. Such a powerful and secret coup doesn’t require a totalitarian regime or massive funding: after all, Mars is a long way away.

  Interestingly, my Cydonia website has recorded a number of hits from military bases, which I attribute to base personnel surfing the Web on their lunch breaks. But I’ve also recorded at least one hit from the super-secret National Security Agency. While in all likelihood this doesn’t indicate a clandestine agenda, one must at least consider the possibility.

  If there is some sort of insider group debating how best to utilize Mars artifacts, one would assume it would have ties to the NSA. NASA and JPL are likely minor players. As shown, it’s within JPL’s best financial interests to deny evidence of extraterrestrial archaeology anyway. And it’s not as if the security establishment has to worry about freelancers making it to Mars without access to NASA hardware.

  Culture Shock

  The central reason the Brookings report shunned disclosure was social collapse. The argument was absurdly simple: United States citizens, upon learning that they weren’t alone in the vastness of space, would rebel against duly constituted authority. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of the discovery, the social fabric would lose cohesion. Religious institutions would disintegrate, hastening the collapse of civilization as we know it.

  The Brookings 1960s social predictions are both appallingly trite and vastly outdated. Polls indicate that the majority of Americans accept extraterrestrial intelligence; further, a large portion is convinced we are being visited now in the form of UFOs. And about half of this portion maintains that the U.S. government isn’t forthcoming with what it knows. Seen in this context, how would the discovery of ET ruins topple our social infrastructure?

  The Brookings authors seem to have drafted their report with secrecy as a foregone conclusion. Although Brookings is allegedly an independent think tank, the mercilessly cynical conclusion may have been the entire point. NASA may have simply desired the illusion of an objective opinion when in fact its disclosure policy was already determined.

  This isn’t to imply that society would go unchanged by the announcement of ET artifacts. Confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence would be the biggest blow dealt to anthropocentric thought since the Copernican revolution, presenting radical challenges to many fundamentalist religions and possibly displacing others. Religions such as Hinduism, which embrace a vast plurality of worlds and intelligences, would likely be unfazed.

  Conversely, biblical creationists of insufficient political savvy may adopt increasingly brittle coping systems. Moral Majority leader Pat Robertson has gone on record stating that believers in extraterrestrials should be stoned to death. Would Christian fundamentalists perceive extraterrestrial ruins as an ultimate test of faith, as many now perceive the fossil record as a simulacrum devised by God to test true believers? An extinct culture on Mars could steep the Religious Right in ideological warfare with the scientific world. But would the stoning be metaphorical or literal?

  Even from a scientific vantage, ruins on Mars are distinctly more threatening than the radio signals anticipated by many SETI purists. If the Face is real, then it seems likely—although by no means certain—that it refers to us in some unknown planetary context. In his technical book The Martian Enigmas, Mark Carlotto tentatively dates the Cydonia complex at thirty-thousand years old, approximately when modern humans began using tools. This leaves us with a nagging sense that there must be some sort of connection between Earth and Mars. While radio transmissions from distant suns are impersonal enough, as depicted by the bewilderingly mathematical message in Contact, humanoid faces on neighboring planets are another matter.

  The Brookings report is like a document unearthed from an X-Files script; its purported threats are knee-jerk reactions to the unknown and beg reassessment. Whether the document is an objective attempt to deal with extraterrestrial discovery or merely a sham instigated by the national security establishment, its arguments are hindrances to objective thought.

  The real problem arises when one attempts to challenge them. It’s unknown if the report’s recommendations are policy or simply speculative suggestions. If the report reflects actual policy, then the architecture for a cover-up is already in place, and repealing it would entail a governmental admission that NASA has indeed been prepared for the possibility (or eventuality?) of alien artifacts. As any student of government secrecy knows, such admissions are rarely, if ever, forthcoming. The Freedom of Information Act, designed to facilitate dialogue between the public and the federal government, has become an ungainly self-parody.

  Some might argue that too much importance is placed on the Brookings report. The document may be nothing more than a bit of Cold War esoterica granted ersatz urgency by the discovery of apparent structures on Mars. But its existence is nonetheless disturbing. If nothing else, it proves that the possibility of ET structures—not mere radio signals—was taken seriously by a qualified multidisciplinary team, and most likely by the government as well.

  SETI: A Naive Outlook?

  In the late 1990s, the University of Berkeley unveiled the SETI@home website, an unprecedented experiment in distributed computing. By taking advantage of “downtim
e” on home computers across the world, Berkeley effectively created a dedicated supercomputer designed to sift interstellar noise for extraterrestrial signals. The program was made available as a free, downloadable screen saver. Soon thousands had joined the search, supplying SETI astronomers with subjective centuries of processing time.

  SETI@home’s appeal gathered momentum. The user didn’t have to know anything about interstellar radio sources to help make a significant contribution to science. Urged on by the prospect of being the first to “detect a whisper from another civilization,” SETI@home’s membership had reached over three million in a few years.

  Longtime SETI@home users have amassed thousands of hours of computer time processing individual work units, which are relayed from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, routed to home computers via Berkeley’s server, and eventually sent back to Berkeley for analysis.

  What the mainstream science community doesn’t realize is that there are actually two SETI programs designed for home use: the official downloadable version and the equally vigorous, but unofficial, search for anomalies in Malin Space Science Systems’ online catalogue of high-resolution Mars images. With over twenty-thousand images of the Martian surface to peruse, anomalists have more than enough information to process in the search for intelligence. The net effect of Mars watchers scouring the Red Planet in search of artificial-looking structures is a grassroots distributed computing visual recognition effort.

  Unlike SETI@home, the MSSS process is far from automated. It involves hundreds of individuals painstakingly searching through thousands of NASA Mars images without computerized assistance. Subjective impressions result in innumerable false positives. But the search continues, informed by a growing understanding of the Martian environment and increasingly better images, ranging from narrow, black-and-white close-ups to wide-screen context maps. The Mars Odyssey’s multicolored spectral images reveal ancient shores where intelligent Martians may have built habitable structures. Craters and volcanoes are routinely targeted as sites for potential artificiality; some anomalists postulate that peaks such as Olympus Mons might betray evidence of mining or quarrying.

  The future of this spontaneous search for extraterrestrial artifacts is multiplex. On one hand, the hunt for unusual formations is worth doing for the sheer enjoyment of indulging oneself in the surreal and beautiful landscapes of an alien world. Those particularly driven view the quest for artificiality as a sort of competition and delight in naming unusual features to complement terrestrial mythology. Although it doesn’t appear on any official maps of the Red Planet, there is a “Giza” on Mars as well as an “Eden,” which features what looks surprisingly like a Mayan stepped pyramid.

  Trained scientists who take planetary SETI seriously have discussed bringing computer algorithms to bear on the task. Mark Carlotto’s fractal survey of Cydonia, which revealed the Face as the most unnatural-appearing formation in the region, demonstrates that a similar approach to the entire planet might yield possible archaeological sites. Computers can be programmed to recognize relatively rare phenomena such as right angles and bilateral symmetry—traits generally not found in naturally occurring formations. An automated search of this sort may help narrow down the number of candidate sites. At the same time, it should help to silence debunkers who insist that anomalies such as the Face are strange only because of subjective impressions.

  While a computer may never understand the aesthetics of landscape sculpture, it can be trained to detect unusual geometry. After a dedicated computerized search, any candidate formations could be flagged and passed on to geologists and engineers for analysis, inevitably reducing unknowns to a bare minimum. Eventually, a system not unlike SETI@home could go into operation, parceling out image files to computer users to be analyzed during downtime. With enough volunteers and enough imagery, a significant portion of the Martian surface could be subjected to objective, automatic study, leaving a core group of scientists to address any remaining oddities.

  A similar method has already been tested to reveal possible ruins on the Moon. As computing power grows, pattern recognition could become more subtle and tenacious, weeding out natural features and attempting to reconcile geological flukes with context terrain. A fully developed anomaly-detection system might even take theoretical cultural factors into consideration, cleverly cross-referencing elevation, climate, and other conditions.

  By that time, perhaps we will have already reached Mars in person, in which case the discovery of just one artifact would launch a planet-wide search, comparable in scope to an archaeological gold rush.

  Which brings the issue of archaeological protocol into clear focus. If a multinational expedition discovers artifacts, who owns them? Suppose an artifact promising a technological revolution is discovered; do the nations of earth share in its discovery, or will the military-industrial complex of a specific nation take control?

  The situation is comparable to the paranoid mentality that possessed the American and Soviet governments during the early years of the Cold War, in which both nations wondered how advanced its rival was. During the initial spell of UFO sightings in 1947, for instance, the United States Air Force was forced to consider the possibility that the Soviet Union had perfected a revolutionary disk-shaped flying platform capable of entering U.S. airspace with impunity.

  Rumors abound that the recovery of a downed otherworldly craft in Roswell, New Mexico, revealed the secrets of fiber optics, integrated circuit chips, and stealth technology. Shortly before his death, retired Army Colonel Philip J. Corso, former head of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s Foreign Technology desk, capitalized on this idea. In his book The Day After Roswell, he claimed to have secretly seeded American industry with technology harvested from the Roswell crash. While his story is dismissed as fiction even by Roswell sympathizers, Corso nevertheless raised extremely pertinent points. Although one could argue on philosophical grounds that nonhuman artifacts should belong to the people of Earth, the stark geopolitical perspective is that there are no “people of Earth”—only nations operating in selfish liaison with loose allies.

  Disturbingly, we have no known protocol for the discovery of extraterrestrial artifacts. Since planetary SETI is young, this is at least somewhat excusable. But radio SETI has an internationally approved protocol for open disclosure that planetary SETI would be wise to adopt.

  Discoveries of artifacts (whether on Mars or on the Moon) should be reported to the world science community. Global disclosure is imperative; it is surprising and depressing to witness the territorial Cold War-style politics of the archeological establishment, where finds are routinely hoarded and sites of interest banned from foreign exploration. The enigmatic truncated pyramids of China, which few Westerners realize even exist, are a prime example of hidden knowledge. Without access to China’s earthworks, our understanding of human history is necessarily incomplete, no matter how thoroughly we excavate Egyptian tombs or how deeply we delve into the abrupt rise of civilization in Sumeria.

  Similarly, only unconditional access to extraterrestrial artifacts will serve science. The problem arises if a codiscoverer perceives an artifact to represent a destabilizing technological advantage if exploited by a single nation. UFOs are, once again, a case in point. According to Corso’s account, the United States was eager to inject alien technology into the military-industrial sector in hopes of exceeding Soviet breakthroughs. For purposes of analogy, whether this really happened is irrelevant; as a consummate military thinker, Corso presented his cloak-and-dagger story in a logical national security framework. A similar paranoid mind-set arising over the technology rights to Martian artifacts is likely in the event of their discovery.

  From a cosmic perspective, such issues are so much bickering. The Cydonia enigma outweighs human politics by asking us uncomfortable questions. Do we dare confine Cydonia to merely human politics when our very definition as a species potentially hangs in the balance?

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  Memespa
ce

  There is another way an extraterrestrial civilization bent on posterity could achieve a kind of ersatz immortality. The new science of the “meme,” or the infectious idea, views information itself as a form of life. Like their carbon-based genetic counterparts, memes are constantly waging war for dominance, forming alliances with other memes (when necessary) and subject to mass extinction. Our environment is inundated with memes of all kinds, all struggling to survive.

  Advertising concepts, political catch phrases, outré ideas, and common knowledge alike are composed of an ever-changing tissue of memes. Words themselves can be memes. When William S. Burroughs stated that “language is a virus,” he probably didn’t realize how prescient he was.

  Inventions such as radio, television, and the Internet have given memes a Darwinian playing field without boundaries. Web surfers can easily find the informational grottos where rogue memes bide their time and insert themselves into new frameworks that promise longer life. You’re no longer surfing the Web; the Web is surfing you, scouring your mind for new and better footholds.

  Suppose the “alien ruins on Mars” meme is in danger of obsolescence. After all, it’s been ground through the microcultural mill since Richard Hoagland brought it to wide attention in the mid-eighties. It’s in dire need of a fresh substrate.