Lost Civilization

Percival Lowell's view of the Solis Lacus region of Mars, c. 1896

Telescopic view of the same region from 2005 by D. Peach, Bucks, UK
Note: At just about the limit of visibility, many people will see straight lines
on the surface of the telescopic images that strongly evoke the Lowellian canals.
It's not an optical illusion, as these lines are visible in all three telescopic images.
What they actually are and what causes them to appear is a mystery.

Like many youths, I was something of a science fiction fan during those awkward pre-teen and early-teen years, but I particularly enjoyed science fiction movies and television shows from the 1950s and early 60s both for their utter cheesiness and for their often very strong message of civilization's self-destruction. Who can forget "Science Fiction Theater," "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," (on ViewMaster no less!) and the early "Twilight Zone?" There was much more than that.

Science fiction at the time could almost always be relied on to be a bracing counterpoint to the kind of hyper-American patriotism young people were being indoctrinated into every day of their lives.

I've mentioned Disneyland a few times in reference to my youth and the more recent events in Anaheim. I was a pretty frequent visitor from soon after the park opened until we left Southern California in 1959. Two of my favorite attractions were the Rocket to the Moon and the House of the Future both in Tomorrowland. The notion of a Future of Unlimited Possibilities was the American cultural counterpoint to the constant drumbeat of nuclear holocaust -- a holocaust that would destroy any hope of "civilization" forever.

Mars figured heavily in the science fiction of the era, as it had for generations, at least since the advent of the Martian Canals that later observers would insist were nothing but illusions -- as they pointed to spacecraft images of the surface of the planet that showed.... something like canals. Forbidden Planet -- a take-off on Shakespeare's The Tempest -- was set on a planet that resembled Mars, Angry Red Planet, Flight to Mars, Red Planet Mars, were just some of the pictures released in the 1950's that dealt with the Mars of imagination, sometimes touching on the fundamental Lowellian notion of a "Dying Civilization."

Of course Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury, among many other authors, would pick up on and elaborate the themes of rough going civilizations facing extinction, many of which were set on Mars or on a planet like Mars, but perhaps the most influential take on the Dying Civilization of Mars trope was that of H. G. Wells' brilliant "War of the Worlds," from 1898. 

Of course I saw the 1953 movie. In the theater. I was too young to understand it, but still it made a tremendous impression on me, especially the scenes of the destruction of Los Angeles. Given the constantly whipped up fear of Soviet attack during the era, such scenes were terrifying and too true to life.

Many years would pass before I read the novel and comprehended what Wells was getting at by positing the invasion of London by Martians and their essentially casual destruction of everything the British held dear. It was an allegory of the British Imperial behavior toward Natives everywhere, but at the time particularly in Africa. They arrived, they destroyed. It was quite the counterpoint -- and in some ways a complement -- to Kipling.

Be that as it may, the notion that Mars either has hosted or currently hosts an alien civilization -- whether dying or not -- is strong among the Planetary Anomalist community. It remained strong even after the the iconic Face on Mars was rather cruelly debunked. I say "cruelly" because there are so many claimed artifacts on Mars and supposed evidence of Civilization, some of which is faked, but there are so many real anomalies as well. The Face, while perhaps not being carved into the landscape by Martian artisans, is most definitely worth further study -- as is the case with the rest of the mesas and buttes in the Cydonia region -- because how it formed is not understood at all, and how the rest of the formations in Cydonia came to be the way they are is a mystery.

Planetary scientists do not know very much about how Mars "works" -- or if they do, they're not saying.

Interestingly, after 36 years of rigorous official denials that Viking Landers found evidence of biology at the surface in 1976, there have been some recent studies that suggest the early denials were in error. Yes, well, that would be typical of Mars study. Error is the rule in Mars study, no matter who is doing it, nor how rigorously they deny their own error! (Lowell comes to mind as setting the standard for that behavior.)

Given the way Mars has been studied, especially since the early space craft exploration era, it would be almost impossible to recognize the presence of a Lost Civilization on Mars if it ever existed. After decades of exploration and investigation, after all, there still no definitive conclusion regarding the presence -- or absence -- of biology on Mars. Many of the investigations that might support or refute hypotheses about biology on Mars are not done. It's as if, perhaps, the planetary science community doesn't want to know one way or another but only wants to extend the study indefinitely.

Some of the Anomalists -- and a few planetary scientists such as Gil Levin -- claim cover-up and worse, but I suspect it's not that. Science, especially the planetary sciences, often works on the Big Man principle, and progress in understanding is often a matter of the prominence and position of those who hypothesize and theorize, not necessarily a matter of skilled and insightful observation and coherent presentation. It's human nature, especially in institutional settings. Politics, in other words, always plays an important role in "what we know." Who is making a claim and in what venue matters.

It's Civilized!

The fact that the study continues, now in Gale Crater with Curiosity, but it cannot be conclusive about Martian biology -- if there is or was any -- or anything else for that matter, is no doubt deliberate, but not necessarily conscious. Gale is thought to have been a lake at one time,  just as Gusev was (the site of the Spirit Rover landing not far away). At the present time, however, Gale is dessicated and dry -- just as Gusev is -- and there is unlikely to be any evidence of recent water or other fluid on the surface; there is unlikely to be any evidence of biology either, at least none that could be recognized without endless dispute. The Opportunity Lander possibly imaged fossils at its landing site in Meridiani, but those images have never been accepted as definitive nor could they be because of the nature of the study itself.

Landing at a site known to be dessicated and dry -- such as anywhere near the Mars equator -- will be unlikely to show any evidence of recent fluid flow or biological activity. On the other hand, a few years ago, a lander plopped down at the margin of the northern polar region, landing on a patch of ice no less, and it appears that fluid droplets were promptly imaged on the landing struts. They remained for many days, but in most of the images released by the Phoenix Mission, the presence of those droplets was either ignored or consciously cut out.

Mars Water -- droplets deposited on Phoenix lander strut, 2008

It became something of a running gag among lay observers that the evidence of water at the surface of Mars that for so long had been sought so eagerly was right there in front of the investigators but it was being ignored. The problem was actually more complex. The droplets were on a landing strut that there was no way to get to for experimental purposes, just as the ice upon which the Phoenix landed could not be directly probed because there was no equipment that could reach it.

A problem with the drops on the Phoenix lander also theoretical. For decades, it has been conventional wisdom that there cannot be liquid water on the surface of Mars, period. Any liquid water at the surface would almost immediately freeze or sublimate/evaporate, because temperatures and atmospheric pressures are too low to sustain liquid water at the surface. This conventional wisdom has been challenged for years, but it has been treated as Iron Law in the planetary science community because -- as Carl Sagan was often wont to say -- "calculations show" that liquid water can't exist at the surface of Mars for more than a few minutes, which was extended to mean that it can't exist at all.

The droplets which you see in the pictures above are not only obviously there, they lasted for many days, and from those three images, it's clear that they are growing, moving and changing over the course of several days. This is, according to the Iron Law of Conventional Wisdom "unpossible." It can't be happening. (At the same time, of course, NASA and JPL and Malin Space Science Systems have routinely announced evidence of current surface water flows when presenting images of recent gullies.)

The article that's linked, however, describes means and mechanisms that make such an "unpossible" thing not only possible but likely, indeed certain to have occurred.

IMNSHO, biology is possible on Mars, and evidence for its active presence was likely found by the Viking Landers in 1976. That evidence was misinterpreted, I suspect to some extent maliciously. There has never been any follow up to the hypotheses that were presented to explain the conflicting results from the Vikings -- which is one of the reasons why I suspect that those involved in the furor actually understood the data to indicate biology rather than "exotic chemistry."

There is most certainly fluid at the surface of Mars, and there is much fluid underground, but how much of it is "water" in the sense we would understand it is an open question. I suspect there is very little pure liquid water anywhere on Mars.  More than likely, almost all liquid water on Mars is in the form of very salty brines, or -- as I came to realize Opportunity Mission in Meridiani -- actually dilute (in some cases concentrated) sulfuric acid. I suspect there has never been an actual "water regime" on Mars, and the images of an Ancient Watery Mars we sometimes see are as much fantasy as any Lost Civilization idea from science fiction literature.

It is highly unlikely that there has ever been any kind of civilization on Mars, not so much because it is "unpossible" as it is because the emerging understanding of the history of Mars will demonstrate there's never been an opportunity for a civilization to develop or become established, in part because of the continuing chaos of the Martian environment.

Despite terrestrial tribulations nowadays, the Earth has been a calm refuge by comparison.

If I continue with this Mars series, I may get into some of that "emerging understanding of the history of Mars.

Barsoom

Hubble Space Telescope image of the Acidalium hemisphere of Mars, 1995

I mentioned in a comment on the Megaupload post that I opened one of my old websites the other day, one I first created some time in 1997 or 98, I'm not sure, haven't updated since 2001, and which I hadn't even looked at for years.

It was a site about Mars, the Red Planet, the Mimic Planet as I came to call it, "Barsoom" as known by its inhabitants in Edgar Rice Burroughs's novels, which was being heavily featured in space science communities at the time because of the unprecedented images of the surface being returned from the Mars Orbital Camera.

These were stunning pictures that show things that in many cases are still unexplained. Which doesn't mean they are necessarily the work of Aliens, but only that the surface of Mars is telling us things we have yet to understand, and part of our failure to understand is due to the paradigms we use when observing. If we aren't thinking openly, we can't see clearly.

In the case of Mars, the problems of observation are long-standing, going back at least to Schiaparelli, but compounded by Lowell, and made even worse over time by the planetary science community which has its own set of biases and peculiarities, and is subject to a kind of authoritarian belief system that disallows innovative perspectives.

Telescopic observation of Mars is still quite interesting -- I find it fascinating myself, even with the relatively primitive telescopes I've used. But the orbital cameras and the landers of the space program have provided a startlingly different view of the surface than can be had from any telescope on Earth, and an honest assessment of that view shows that Lowell may have interpreted in error (as do we all about many things) but his vision -- if you will -- strikingly parallels what's actually there on the surface, but at a completely different scale than he saw it.

I've been to the Lowell Observatory and seen some of his primary materials and have come to understand somewhat better how he could believe what he did about what he was seeing through the telescope. Yes, he saw a surface that showed distinct linear patterns, dotted with circular spots here and there, and he saw darkenings and lightenings and other things that he interpreted erroneously. Yet closer to the surface, much closer, the orbital cameras showed that many of the things he thought he saw at a telescopic distance (but which are not visible -- at least to most people -- at that scale) are actually there -- or things that look like what he saw are there, though at a much smaller scale. So is much else besides, things that he never dreamed of.

Interpretations of the surface of Mars have been complicated since Lowell's time by the debate over the presence or absence of liquid water. Lowell claimed that he saw linear features on the surface that he interpreted as canals and that most likely water flowed in those canals to enable irrigation of parts of the surface. Other astronomers vehemently disagreed. They asserted there was no water so there was no point in canals, and the whole thing was just stupid, nyah, nyah. Unfortunately, this is the way some scientists are, and because Lowell was an outsider, a Boston Brahmin, and a writer, not a scientist at all, he was treated with a certain level of contempt by a portion of the planetary science community of his day, and his work was constantly being denounced -- as well as popularly accepted, in part because he was a good writer.

It had been obvious since the days of the Mariner 9 in 1971 that the surface of Mars had been heavily shaped by flowing water; dry riverbeds seemed to be everywhere. Yet there was no visible water at the surface now, and many of the features that were assumed to have been carved by water didn't quite "look right." There was something going on that didn't quite scan, but nobody quite knew what it was.

It was long assumed that the polar caps were mostly carbon dioxide -- and very thin at that -- but that was found not to be true. The caps were found to be quite thick and finely layered, and they were mostly water ice, with an annual carbon dioxide deposit that came and went with temperature. The permanent caps are nearly entirely water ice. The behavior of the CO2 caps was and is remarkable. The surface near the poles, especially in the south, can become very active with geysers blowing dark sand and CO2 gas into the atmosphere in startling displays, one of which I believed -- and believe -- was captured in action by the orbital camera but was misinterpreted at the time and still is, though the activity I say it depicts is now widely accepted within the planetary science community as real and frequent. They will not accept that the image actually shows the geysering taking place, however, due to the technical details of the capture of the image.

This is the image that I cropped from a larger one and colorized and showed as possible evidence of geysering near the south pole. This was well before it was widely accepted that such geysering does indeed take place.



From this crop, it looks pretty obvious (at least to me) what is going on, but many of those who have seen the image strenuously deny it shows what it seems to show, claiming that the apparent appearance of geysers in action is merely an optical illusion (they are so common on Mars; remember the canals!). In fact, say the skeptics, according to the image data, the picture was taken from almost directly overhead, not at a glancing angle close to 30° which would have been necessary for the appearance of actual geysers geysering. Thus, what we actually see here is the surface appearance seen from directly overhead, after two separate incidents of outgassing (or some other process) which occurred at different times under different wind regimes. There are many other images which show similar patterns of dark deposits at almost right angles to one another.

Of course, I being stubborn continue to insist that I am right and the skeptics are wrong; for the emission angle of the image doesn't necessarily reflect how the image is processed, since many images taken at relatively low angles were processed to look as if they had been taken from directly overhead. The data that appears on the image record doesn't necessarily reflect what happened from the time the image was captured until it was released. Etc. Etc.

This is a futile argument, however, and these days, since the geysering phenomenon is now widely accepted -- but not widely known of outside the planetary science community -- what this picture actually shows is essentially moot. Yes, it is an image that looks to show what is widely accepted as taking place on the surface, though skeptics say it doesn't actually show it. Got that?

Many other issues like that were being batted around back in the day: was there evidence of glaciers on the surface today? Was water being released at the surface? Could water even exist at the surface? And so on.

There were so many opposing camps, and the arguments were more on a political plane than a scientific or even straightforward observational one.

The political positions about Mars came to dominate all other considerations, and this seemed to me to go back to the Lowellian era of telescopic observation and popular culture. There was a time, for example, when Gil Levin (project scientist on the Viking Mission who asserts that evidence of life on Mars was found by the Vikings) questioned the color manipulation being done by the image processors at JPL, manipulations that eventually produced some of the oddest sky and surface colors imaginable for Mars, and almost always obscured the actual sky and surface colors. Levin began to speak out about it from early on in the Viking mission and he became more strident as time went on because he felt that the manipulation was a deliberate (if pious) fraud intentionally done to disguise actual findings -- such as what he believed was evidence of biology on the surface of Mars.

The official defenses of the color manipulations -- some of which were patently absurd -- revealed the political basis of many of the pronouncements about Mars; science -- or even simple and accurate observations -- had to take a back seat to Mars science politics. And that has always been about who is doing the asserting and interpreting and what their position is in the pecking order.

To this day, Gil Levin's arguments in favor of a biological interpretation of the Viking findings are largely suppressed and unknown outside a circle of enthusiasts. He broke with the consensus of his peers, and doing that is perhaps the surest way to perdition known to mankind, especially in the sciences.

All that aside, it eventually dawned on me that probably everyone was wrong about Mars, and that what we were seeing and sensing remotely with our spacecraft was probably not at all what we thought it was. Interpretations relied on "water" -- and I came to realize that that was probably the key error.

Water there is in abundance on Mars in the form of ice and vapor, but the fluid that has flowed and ponded at the surface of Mars has probably never been "water" as we would understand it, that is pure or somewhat salty. No, it's more likely that much of the evidence of flowing water on the surface of Mars is actually evidence of flowing aqueous solutions of sulfuric acid, and that changes everything.

First of all, sulfuric acid can remain liquid under Martian conditions far longer than pure or salty water can. The mythology has long been that "liquid water can't exist" on the surface of Mars, which is something of a falsehood, because liquid water can and does exist on the surface to this day and landers have from time to time produced images of it, most startlingly the drops of water that clung to the legs of the Phoenix Polar Lander after it landed on a patch of ice.

Of course, there are those who dispute any such thing ever happened, pshaw. So it goes.

My own view now is that though there can be liquid water at the surface of Mars, and it can persist for some time in a liquid state without freezing or evaporating/subliming "instantly" as the Mars Myths insist must occur, it doesn't matter that much because liquid water is and has always been rather rare at the surface of Mars. An aqueous solution of sulfuric acid has been far more common and is probably the volatile that has carved most of the evidence of "flowing water" on the surface.

Almost all of this flow, of course, has come from the interior. It is probably still in a liquid state fairly near the surface, primarily in and near the vast Northern Lowlands. These lowlands may have once been an open ocean but not of liquid water. As a sulfuric acid ocean, it would appear similar to an ocean of water, but it would behave very differently.

For one thing, it would neither freeze nor sublime under typical Martian conditions. It would instead remain liquid, though it might become more viscous at low temperatures and pressures, neither a slush nor a gel, but somewhat similar to them, thick and slow-moving. A cold sulfuric acid lake or ocean would be very placid compared to an ocean or lake of water.

There are many craters that show evidence of repeated flooding from below. There are remnant deposits in some of these craters (they are often referred to as "White Rock" deposits) that show hundreds of layers, all of which are approximately the same thickness (a few meters or less). These formations were long mysterious and enigmatic.

Then the Opportunity craft landed in a crater in Meridiani Planum that showed "white rock" around its rim.

Studies were undertaken.

The "White Rock" -- in Meridiani at least -- turned out not to be "rock" at all. It was a sulfate deposit. A layered sulfate deposit. Within which and all around which there were little blue balls of an iron precipitate called hematite. Oh. My. Goodness. What the hell?

This spectacular finding was cited by a very excited project scientist Steve Squyres as proof positive that the landing site and all around it had been "soaked in liquid water." Meridiani had to have been formed in a liquid which Squyres initially insisted was water; there was no other way.

Well, except... Actually formation of what we see would imply that the liquid was actually a fairly saturated solution of sulfuric acid, not water as we would commonly understand it at all. In order to get those kinds of precipitates, especially in those quantities, the solution would have to have been close to super-saturated, but even a mild saturation would imply that the "water" was no longer water at all, but was instead the equivalent of battery acid, and adding even distilled water would still leave you with an aqueous solution of sulfuric acid.

That understanding changes everything. If much or most of the "water" that has ever been at the surface of Mars was actually a strong sulfuric acid solution, what does that say about the possibility of biology on Mars? Is it even conceivable? I'm not saying it isn't, by the way. What I'm suggesting is that the question needs be explored more fully. If sulfuric acid is and has been the predominant volatile liquid on the Martian surface then the implications for biology and evolution are quite different than if the volatile has been water.

Ultimately, Squyres himself came around to the view that "water" as such was unlikely as the volatile agent at the surface of Mars, that it was probably sulfuric acid at considerable concentration. But I've seen very little followup to the implications and consequences of a sulfuric acid as opposed to a water regime on Mars.

I stepped back from the Mars questions when it seemed that the discoveries being made were confounding expectations too much for a clear understanding to materialize. Mars is a planet of deception and illusion and what we may think we see there is... really something else.

A new lander called "Curiosity" is expected to land in Gale Crater in August. Given the nature of the site, I don't doubt there will be surprises.

The Face on Mars is still there after all, still staring into space, still wondering...

OT: Random Notes

I don't get into "Who Shot Kennedy?" and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and whatnot for a very simple reason: While the speculation is all very interesting, it is pure and unresolvable speculation in my view, argument, in essence, for it's own sake, that cannot lead us forward, back, or anywhere at all. I enjoy the speculation -- for its own sake -- but I don't believe the arguments put forth are the answer or even necessarily true.

For example, almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, websites went up -- I remember one in particular in France -- that proposed that what we were being told was not what really happened at all (yes, well, that's fairly obvious, isn't it?) and that this conspiracy website had the real story. I immediately suspected a Black Op from one of the shadowy Black Budget operations our government (and other governments) so eagerly fund to... obscure the Truth, if there is any, and spread lies and propaganda all the while. Soon enough, all kinds of conspiratorial cornpone arose over the question of "What Really Happened" (including a website called WhatReallyHappened.org) on 9/11 and at every other time the inexplicable transpires. Truth? Well, there's probably some in there... yup. Sure. But we have a tough enough time decoding our Pravdas on the Potomac and on the Hudson (let alone wading through the contemptuous vomit and shit of the teevee "news") to pick out bits and fragments of Truth that show up on Conspiracy Day "news" sites.

As for 9/11, I know what I saw with my own eyes on the teevee and within the Federal employee working environment I was part of then. I know what I saw, felt, and did. Beyond that? Not a lot. I know I don't believe the Official Story, but who in their right mind would? The question is not whether the Government lies -- of course they do -- it's a question of whether there even is a Real Truth, beyond the lies, that is discoverable by you or by me. Maybe there is. But more than likely, you and I are just going down a Rabbit Hole. If that's your bliss, by all means, be my guest. Please report back! But don't expect me to go with you.

Conspiratism -- is that what it's called? -- reminds me a little bit of the British passion for such esoterica as "Ley Lines" on the landscape of Britian and the apparent geometric alignments of various things on Mars and other exotic places. The best known aspect of this sometimes obsessive interest in that which is not understood is the Face on Mars, about which a number of people were able to make lucrative careers for years.

Back in the day, one of the early websites I put up, even before Blogger came on the scene, was about Mars, and it included extensive speculation by scientists and laypeople about what might be transpiring there now, and what sort of history might have occurred in the past.

The Face figured, but not prominently. My interest lay more in the whole area around the Face, and in the nature of the landscape and Martian geology itself. Acidalia Planitia is not like anyplace you would find on Earth, and it was my position, regardless of the Face, that it should be explored and explained for its own sake.

Unfortunately, that has never happened to any great extent. I am little better informed about the nature of the landscape and highly evocative and curious geology of Acidalia Planitia on Mars today than I was 30 years ago. The obsessive interest in the Face and the various associated Cities and Forts and Alignments and whatnot and what they were and what weren't -- but not so much in what they are -- is part of the reason why.

In other words, these obsessions are distractions -- sometimes deliberately put before us, sometimes not -- that serve to obscure the truth.

Apparently the Distraction Formula is being applied with a vengeance with regard to the numerous uprisings and revolts taking place in North Africa and the Middle East as well as the Middle West of our own country, right along with all sorts of Conspiracy Theories. It really does seem to be a Formula for Dismissal of Popular Protest that every authoritarian/autocratic government and its minions engage in.

We saw it in stark operation in Egypt, during its recent revolt against the Mubarak Regime. And we see the same sort of denial and distraction and assertions of Conspiracies of All Kinds in Libya today.

But we also see it in Scott Walker's Wisconsin. He's distracting and asserting Conspiracies Most Foul by Outside Agitators, just like Mubarak and Gaddafi have done. The parallels are remarkable. That's why I say it is a Formula. But then, Walker's opponents have adopted some of the same Formula in attributing so much power over events in Wisconsin to the Koch Brothers -- Who Are Most Foul and Evil.

Almost immediately, we fall into a situation where there is no resolution because we are caught up almost entirely in minutiae. It isn't really about Scott Walker or the Koch Brothers, it's about what kind of nation we want and what we have to do to get there.

It's not about them in other words, it's about us.

All right, I've said my piece about that. Carry on.