After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  UFO contactees and SETI academics alike are unwitting Martian prophets. While they may not refer to the bloodied Red Planet in their books and papers, the arid dunes and strangely empty seas of Mars foreshadow our own world’s demise—unless, of course, we upset the evolutionary rules by transcending the planet of our origin.

  But it’s unlikely armadas of flying saucers or accolades from deep space will greet our efforts. Our reward will be survival.

  Extraterrestrial Biotechnology

  Humans are the only intelligence we know. Whales and other cetaceans are doubtlessly intelligent, but their intelligence is uniquely adapted to their aquatic environment; thus, their communications remain the most profound linguistic mystery of our time. Are we arrogant enough to think that we can decipher an extraterrestrial broadcast when we can’t understand our fellow terrestrials?

  If the Cydonians were technologically literate, then the possibility of terrestrial visitation can’t be dismissed without a convincing reason. They might have visited Earth during their tenure on Mars, either in the flesh or via mechanical probe. But when? Solar alignments in Cydonia allow almost inconceivably ancient visits, predating not only recorded history but human life as we know it. It seems unlikely that evidence of such visitations could have survived until historical times.

  Arthur C. Clarke’s simian moon watcher in 2001: A Space Odyssey may have recognized the Monolith as something new and important, but he could hardly be expected to record the artifact’s inexplicable arrival for posterity. But Clarke offers a clever alternative. Instead of the Monolith persisting in the form of legend or historical record, the recipient species itself was changed from its fleeting contact—an elusive if permanent testament to its reality. The Monolith was more than a mute black totem; it was an evolutionary catalyst of incredible potency.

  Clarke’s prescience casts a novel speculative light on hypothetical encounters between human ancestors and Martians. Perhaps our own ongoing saga on Earth testifies to the reality of extraterrestrial intervention, and hunts for anachronistic artifacts are red herrings. Devotees of ancient astronaut theory have scoured the planet in search of alien launch pads and navigation beacons only to discover that our ancestors were far more clever and industrious than we usually lend them credit. But peering deeply into our own genetic history may be much more fruitful.

  The discovery of DNA helped reveal a strange aspect of the human experience: in a very real sense, we are delicate biological machines composed of trillions of intermeshed parts. DNA may not be able to encode an individual’s conscious identity, but its ability to compact somatic information into such tiny amounts of space is the envy of the electronics industry. DNA is a language, as versatile and necessary for biology as binary code is for computer programmers. The information storage capacity of the double helix is almost magically vast—and just waiting to be tapped. As microelectronics continue to grow smaller and faster, DNA-based computers have been proposed as a way to quickly and efficiently process immense amounts of data.

  Although human beings have been engineering life indirectly since the dawn of agriculture, we have only just started to touch it directly. Pondering the future of biotechnology is like staring directly into the Sun. While we are not yet blinded and giddy with the potential of biotech, we are certainly basking in the first rays of a technological dawn. Genetically modified plants and animals are casting their first shadows across the early twenty-first century zeitgeist. At the time of this writing, human clones may or may not exist (although some biotech insiders suspect that clones are already among us).

  But merely recreating an organism by cloning is a relatively simple trick. For truly advanced genetic engineers, the microcosmic world of DNA will be an abiding molecular canvas of near limitless potential. Custom-tailoring humans (and other species) will become essential to survival in the coming biotech economy. Today’s public and legislative bioethics debate will become embarrassingly obsolete as the demand for genetic engineering develops into a fleshed out consumer ecology in which people benefit in practical ways.

  In historical time, our newfound ability to manipulate the fabric of life on the most fundamental level is incredibly recent. Then again, so was our very abrupt rise from primitive nomadic shepherds to Sumerian urbanites. Revolutions don’t occur so much as simply explode, unexpected, onto the global stage, leaving the past behind like an outworn car in some endless scrap yard.

  It seems logical that a civilization more advanced than ours would have embraced genetic technology for the simple reason that it would seem to be a consummately practical endeavor, as necessary to advanced intelligence as food and shelter. Changing environmental conditions present two options: artificial restructuring of the environment itself by brute force, or accelerating evolution by taking genetic identity into one’s own hands. As anthropologist Richard Grossinger has aptly stated, genetic engineering is simply an intensely focused form of natural selection.

  Evolutionary Quantum Jumps

  While Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has endured admirably, it’s not without its share of mysteries. For example, the transitional forms expected by Darwinian natural selection simply don’t seem to exist in the expected quantity. It’s as if evolutionary progress from one species to another occurs in fitful bursts—a phenomenon that, to some, implies an intelligent designer.

  While I don’t think that life on Earth has been steered by an omnipotent deity (although extraterrestrial intervention shouldn’t be discounted), the lack of transitional specimens in the fossil record may be an important window into the mechanics of evolution. Rather than laboriously searching for missing links, perhaps scientists should concede, if only as a thought exercise, that there are no transitional specimens; perhaps life has found a way to circumvent awkward transitional forms, hastening the evolutionary process. It’s possible that DNA possesses its own collective intelligence, perhaps only loosely allied with its host species, resulting in morphological quantum jumps.

  The human lineage is by no means exempt. While contemporary humans share a common ancestry with apes, we have yet to find a transitional protohuman that would end the missing link controversy. But just maybe there wasn’t a missing link. Maybe protohuman genes, sensing some incipient change, launched a new version of humanity to increase their chances of survival.

  This sounds like an act of intelligence, but is it really? Temporarily setting aside the paradigm-smashing concept that living things are endowed with “morphogenetic fields,” an evolutionary leap might be purely reflexive. (Ants and wasps construct elaborate architecture, yet no one accuses them of intelligence. Similarly, viruses capably hijack cell nuclei, yet biologists hesitate to even consider them alive in anything but a rudimentary technical sense.)

  The implications of evolutionary quantum jumps are far-reaching—and disturbingly relevant. Humans have reworked the Earth’s biosphere in countless ways in just the last few hundred years, exceeding the influence of our ancestors at a rate that promises to exponentiate. We have added new ingredients to the fabric of our planetary chemistry, saturated the skies with electronic transmissions, shaken the earth with nuclear explosions, and unleashed a veritable zoo of psychoactive substances. We live in an environment increasingly besieged by information of all conceivable forms; consequently, we suffer from new maladies and addictions.

  Will these trends spur an abrupt genetic upgrade? Will Homo sapiens cease to exist within a handful of generations? Fossil hunters of the distant future, still seeking the worryingly absent links in the human continuum, may find the skeletons of contemporary humans suddenly superseded by a new, improved version.

  None of this is to say we shouldn’t take measures to deliberately hasten our evolution. We may be unique in being the first humans capable of making the transition to a higher form of our own volition—not an opportunity to be taken lightly.

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  Enduring Anomalies

  NASA’s Pathfinder lander returned the mo
st incredible close-up images of Mars to date, revealing the Red Planet in near-cinematic scope. Rocks of every conceivable form litter the landscape like figures in a demented rock garden, their surfaces alternately pitted and smooth, porous and sharp-edged.

  The Pathfinder site, where the Sojourner rover was dispatched to date rocks with its Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer, features shallow dunes, hulking boulders, and smaller fragments spread out in a shattered mosaic—the remnants of ancient floods that coursed above the blunt mountains visible on the horizon, named the “Twin Peaks” by Jet Propulsion Laboratory geologists in homage to film maker David Lynch, whose TV series of the same name featured a healthy dose of pre- X-Files paranoia as well as conniving nonhuman intelligences.

  Commentators, who watched the insect-like Sojourner rover on the Internet as it navigated the carpet of mud-colored rocks, couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, had occurred here when water was plentiful. Could artifacts be among the scattered rocks, hidden by a skin of dust? The prospect was not unreasonable. Sadly, some of the proposed artificial objects purported to have been discovered in enhanced close-ups of the Pathfinder terrain (including bits of machinery and dilapidated architecture) have proven less than fantastic upon close examination.

  But the region is not without its mysteries. In the Pathfinder’s landing charts is a third peak simply labeled “North Knob.” And while it is certainly knob-like in shape, its perimeter is inscribed by a perfect square. The effect is obvious and uncanny and doesn’t appear around the smaller Twin Peaks. North Knob, like the Twin Peaks, is situated on an extinct floodplain, so its square perimeter is doubly surprising; flood features on Mars are typically elliptical or teardrop-shaped, and one can easily tell the direction of the vanished flow by their alignment.

  The square perimeter may be due to a tough subterranean foundation; the irregular mass on top may be the remains of a structure of some kind that collapsed in the flood, scattering pieces of itself across the plain.

  Some researchers, notably Richard Hoagland, are convinced that the Twin Peaks themselves are ancient, water-worn structures. Hoagland’s website even features two large rock formations near the Pathfinder’s horizon line that Enterprise Mission researcher Mike Bara interprets as a crouching “sphinx” and adjacent “temples.”

  When Bara first introduced his interpretation, I was incredulous. If the flood was strong enough to have demolished the Twin Peaks, what were the chances that it would leave a relatively tiny, Giza-scale monument unscathed? The sphinx inquiry quickly became a small controversy. Bara produced orbital photographs of Martian floodplains that demonstrated that outcroppings served as dams, protecting smaller features from raging floodwaters. Kurt Jonach, a Silicon Valley electronic artist and proprietor of a weblog that frequently detours into Martian mysteries, subsequently attempted to locate the alleged sphinx from overhead using the Pathfinder’s landing map—but without success.

  While I can’t agree with Bara’s certainty that the sphinx is what he claims it is, the sphinx remains a vague yet tantalizing shard of the Mars enigma. That there is something near the base of the Twin Peaks is irrefutable. Hopefully, future images taken at improved resolution will show us exactly what it is.

  Structures on the Moon?

  As if the presence of architecture on Mars was not enough, the Moon is home to many documented oddities that resist natural explanation. The presence of lunar anomalies such as the “Blair Cuspids,” apparent geometrically aligned steeples, and assorted lunar transient phenomena, usually taking the form of strange glows on the lunar surface, throw the legacy of the Apollo Moon landings into the conspiratorial limelight.

  Internet mythology holds that American astronauts were warned off the Moon by an unexpected alien presence. A famous alleged transcript between Neil Armstrong and Mission Control refers to ominous alien spacecraft observing the Apollo crew as it set about its excursion on the Moon’s surface. Of course, the provenance of the transcript is dubious and the likelihood of it being anything other than fiction is exceedingly slim.

  But if Apollo inadvertently discovered nonnatural features, the basic concept advocated behind the hoaxed transcript becomes tenable, especially when the Brookings report is taken into account. Historians of the space race are unanimous that the demise of the Apollo program marked the effective end of a human presence in space. While we have continued with ventures such as the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, the overriding sentiment is that the heady, exploratory phase of the Apollo program has been lost, perhaps irretrievably.

  Conventional wisdom has it that Moon exploration owed its demise, in large part, to the Nixon administration, whose anti-Kennedy bias manifested in a radical paring-down of NASA. Like post-Soviet Russians dismantling Lenin’s statue in the wake of the Cold War, unraveling JFK’s commitment to put men on the Moon had a certain political appeal. Moreover, Apollo’s real purpose—to demonstrate U.S. technological superiority to the space-savvy Soviet Union—had been served.

  While the Apollo missions had been dramatic enough, they had never been true voyages of discovery. The astronauts themselves largely reflected the pragmatism of G.I. Joe rather than the derring-do of Tom Corbett. An exception is Edgar Mitchell, whose experiences on the Moon helped lead to the founding of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which researches various “forbidden” subjects such as extrasensory perception.

  Nevertheless, photos of strange objects on the lunar surface certainly imply the existence of an ancient and technologically sophisticated civilization. Intriguingly, alien fixtures on the Moon are specifically mentioned in the Brookings report. A spacefaring culture building on the Moon would be spared the constant erosive properties of Earth (and, to a lesser extent, Mars). But without a protective atmosphere, exposed structures on the Moon would be vulnerable to meteoric sleet; given enough time, they could be beaten down into flattened vestiges regardless of the lack of liquid water or plate tectonics.

  Not surprisingly, Richard Hoagland mounted a public awareness campaign devoted to lunar architecture, which he attempted to link with the formations in Cydonia. While many of his examples are exceptionally flimsy—for example, he claimed that the Apollo astronauts had landed within the desiccated remains of lunar superstructures without their being aware of it—other claims appear to be substantiated by NASA photos taken from lunar orbit.

  If there are nonnatural structures on the Moon, then this alters the context in which we perceive the anomalies in Cydonia. Unlike Mars, the Moon was never habitable. If there are artifacts there, they were left by a civilization capable of traveling between planets and possibly even between stars. It’s tempting to consider the lunar structures evidence of the same civilization that made its mark on Mars. In this case, the Martians were indeed high-tech, implying that they came from elsewhere in the galaxy or else emerged relatively early in Mars’s ecological history. Of course, the alleged lunar structures could have been left by another civilization entirely—or even by multiple civilizations arriving in phases of exploration.

  Such speculation is perfectly consistent with Sagan’s “once every twenty-thousand years” estimate. Extraterrestrials may have colonized our portion of the galactic disk in the distant past, passing through the solar system on many occasions. Earth, with its promise of advanced life, might have attracted a great deal of interest, and successive missions to the solar system could have maintained observation over the course of many thousands (if not millions) of years.

  “Where are they now?” is a frequently asked question among those who entertain the prospect of alien engineering. Could a civilization advanced enough to carry on a prolonged observation of Earth’s emerging biosphere have been primitive or ignorant enough to have destroyed itself? Science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov have indulged in the concept of far-flung galactic empires that descend into barbarism. But the chances of a sufficiently fortified civilization collapsing seem low. Perhaps once a sort of critical mass is reached, a g
alaxy-spanning civilization becomes an essential fixture of the cosmos. Given enough time to develop, its workings may eventually be perceived by lesser civilizations as natural law.

  Additional Martian “Faces”?

  The Face in Cydonia is not the only controversial facial likeness on Mars. Perhaps the second most compelling, if unconvincing, is the “Crowned Face” publicized by Tom Van Flandern. The Crowned Face appears to be a human-like visage gazing out from the wall of a Martian cliff. Unlike other surface anomalies investigated by Van Flandern, the so-called Crowned Face is not seen in profile, making it both easier for nonbiased viewers to see, and—possibly—easier for planetary SETI to investigate. But deciding which Martian “faces” are worth investigation and which aren’t unleashes an epistemological nightmare. Who are any of us to judge the archaeological merits of a given Martian face? After all, we’re all terrestrially biased, whether we want to admit it or not. We know essentially nothing about the “Martian” civilization that built the structures under investigation (assuming, of course, that they were built).

  Presumably the hypothetical Martians were constrained by the same laws of physics experienced on Earth. But venturing much farther than this plunges the planetary SETI question into increasingly nebulous (albeit ultimately falsifiable) theories that are easily scoffed away as wishful thinking or the Jungian urge to project our collective desires onto the surface of another world.

  The Crowned Face features a few candidate signs of possible artificial origin. The facial dimensions, for example, seem accurate. The “nose” appears to be an actual nose-shaped protuberance with possible suggestions of “nostrils” (although these appear somewhat lop sided). There are no eyes per se, but the “brow” features reasonably symmetrical arches where “eye sockets” can be easily inferred. The “mouth,” if it is indeed a mouth, is a mere suggestion—but nevertheless consistent with the hypothesis that the Crowned Face is a highly eroded, inconceivably ancient ruin.