Elysium

"No, no, no. This isn't science fiction. This is now. This is today." -- Neil Blomkamp, writer-director, "Elysium"

I'm still kind of laid up due to a sciatic condition which makes it hard for me to get around. Yesterday, though, we did a test to see where my limitations were. We went shopping for food for our guest and household supplies -- which meant that I would drive to several locations and hobble around some relatively large stores as well as I could.

Welp, driving wasn't a problem, though I doubt I could do it for more than a half hour or so at a time. Walking was OK -- with a cane -- for what I thought was a good length of time and a fair distance, though it wasn't in the end long enough or far enough. I was fine for a while, then really bad pains started rising in my left leg, the one affected by sciatica, pains from the knee on down, pain that was so intense I couldn't walk any farther without taking a break. Luckily there were some chairs to sit on, so it wasn't a crisis by any means. After a few minutes rest, I was able to continue on for a while, and then had to take a break again. The length of the break became longer, and the length of time I could walk relatively well became shorter. So experiment finally had to end, but not before we had gotten nearly everything we needed for the rest of our friend's stay and had picked up some necessary supplies as well.

One of the things we got was a DVD of Elysium. We had planned to see it in the theatre, but something came up and we weren't able to go before the local run ended. Seeing it on DVD was not the same of course, but it was fine for our purposes.

Oh my.

Well, while watching the movie, I kept thinking that "Elysium" was something like Neil Blomkamp's District 9 on steroids. This man, Neil Blomkamp, is really quite a remarkable young filmmaker, as he showed in the frighteningly truthful and original "District 9" from 2009. Part of what appeals to me in his films is his sense of justice, and his highly idiosyncratic and unusual (at least in contemporary filmdom) story-telling. He's very straightforward,  yet nuanced; his characters and situations ring very true, neither all good nor all evil, though the dystopian science fiction realm in which he's set both "District 9" and "Elysium" is fantasy. There's something youthful and honest about his approach. His perspective is distinctly South African, obviously based on what he knows from his life there. It's not a pretty picture at all. And yet parts of it -- especially in "Elysium" -- are spectacularly pretty. And pretty as they are, they are ultimately empty and even evil. And though we may think of South Africa as a very different place than the United States, in many ways the resemblances between the two countries, or at least parts of them, are shocking.

Elysium is set in 2154, not that far in the future. The Earth is pretty well used up by then, and the teeming multitudes who in habit its apparently global township-slums are barely able to get by, and those who do, do so on the sufferance of their betters, who live far above them... literally.

The movie deals with the issue of class and class divisions in a near-future world, based on the way things have been for Earthlings for generations, as starkly as any film I've seen -- except for "District 9" which deals with those divisions in even starker terms.

Of course, the central fact of life in South Africa now almost as much as in the past is the starkest of class divisions -- divisions that were once based entirely on race, but now depend on wealth accumulation more than race.

Much the same has happened in the United States.

Blomkamp's proposition is that as conditions become more dire on Earth -- due to pollution, rapine and global warming, among other things -- the High and the Mighty build for themselves a whirling wheel in space where they re-create idyllic terrestrial conditions and neighborhoods of mansions (much like those in Bel Air and Beverly Hills come to think of it)  and they call it Elysium. From this whirling wheel in space, the High and the Mighty rule their relatively docile vassals living (if you want to call it that) on the teeming wreckage of civilization below. Earth has become the barrio, the ghetto, the township.

The Rulers control the population through their all-knowing surveillance, brutal police robots, drones and hired killers who roam among the people with malice and cruel intent. Those who are lucky -- and behave themselves -- can work for the Rulers under conditions of servitude, danger and contempt. Not all that unlike conditions many billions of people face today.

The setting on Earth is mostly among the hovels and ruins of Los Angeles where millions live in penury and fear. Max Da Costa, played by Matt Damon, is a parolee, whose job -- such as it is -- is building robot police for Armadyne Corp, headed by CEO John Carlyle. Anyone who's been following corporate-government fusion over these last few decades will get a mordant chuckle or two out of the names chosen by Blomkamp. I'm sure he laughed a bit himself.

The story, as it builds from a relatively dour opening, is anything but a laugh. In fact, the film fairly well keeps one on the edge of one's seat, especially after Max is ordered into the radiation chamber to clear a jam where he receives a lethal dose of radiation. The conceit is that Max has five days to live and the only way to save his life is to get him to Elysium, where household Med-Bays apparently cure anything.

The only way to get Max to Elysium is through a coyote named Spider who sends injured and dying "illegals" on risky 19 minute trips to Elysium for the chance of cure, Most are shot out of Elysium's airspace -- under the sure direction of Jodie Foster as Defense Secretary Delacorte. Since she wants to be president and believes she can accomplish her aims by digital coup so long as she can get access to the appropriate reboot codes through Carlyle.

Confused yet? Well, it makes sense in the context of the story.

There are many complications and not a few gory-looking fire- and physical fights before matters are settled. How they are settled is something of a wonder, for in the end, the overriding program of Elysium is rebooted in such a way that the former regime is completely eliminated and the resources being horded by Elysium are released for the benefit of the people on Earth, particularly the resources that will enable Earth residents to be healed of their diseases and injuries.

Though there are elements from many previous science fiction thriller action movies in "Elysium," and the story is not as unique as that of "District 9," the picture is surprisingly moving and satisfying. Matt Damon and Jodie Foster are stellar in their roles, Jodie so severe she's practically chewing other character's limbs off. Sharlto Copely (from the cast of "District 9") as the mercenary Kruger is something of a standard model villain, but under the circumstances, it's little wonder he'd become what he is and do what he does.

The rest of the cast is fine -- almost an ensemble -- and the production values are at typical high-priced Hollywood standards. This is a strong movie, about us, about now, re-imagined in the future, a time-honored tactic in the genre.

 "Elysium" was more than worth the time, and we were sorry we hadn't seen it sooner.

What's It All About -- The Vortex Visonary "Controversy"

I was over at Bad Astronomy checking up on the comet I haven't been able to see due to storm clouds in our area, and I stumbled upon one of the classic "scientific debunkings" of our time.

At issue: a YouTube video. Well, two of them, actually. One showed the video artist's rendering of his interpretation of the motion of the sun and planets in the solar system -- a helical motion or a vortex, he said, not the stately clockwork of Copernicus, et al; the other depicted the motion of the helical solar system in orbit around the galactic center.

My, the Scientific Outrage!!!™

Over a couple of videos? Really? What was going on?

Well, it appears these videos have been seen by plenty many people. 700,000 and change in the case of the Solar System video; 150,000 in the case of the galaxy video. They are darned nice. Very well done, by someone who clearly has high caliber video animations skills.

And these videos have led to questioning the Standard Model of the Solar System, the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Newton and the rest, who, after long cogitation on the mighty problem of the motion of the spheres came to the startling conclusion that the Sun must reside at the center of the Solar System and the planets must make stately progress around the Sun year by year.  Like clockwork.

Indeed, the clockwork model of the Solar System is still with us, though long ago rejected in the planetary sciences, because we always see the Solar System depicted thus:

The Wikipedia solar system diagram at several scales

In the Standard Diagram, the sun is stationary at the center of the planetary system, the planets "circle" the sun in a counter clockwise direction, and the whole is enveloped in spherical ball of comets called the Oort Cloud.

The video artist attempted to demonstrate that essentially none of this is true or factual. First of all, the Solar System is not horizontal like a dinner plate with reference to the galactic plane, it is tilted at a severe angle -- which he depicts at ninety degrees in the solar system video, sixty degrees in the galaxy video. The sun is not stationary but is moving quite rapidly in orbit around the galactic center, and thus the planets cannot and do not orbit in neat (and ever-so-tight) little ellipses, very nearly circular, as is always depicted in Solar System diagrams. Their orbital motion is helical around a moving target, if you will. All of which has long been known to planetary science, but it is rarely depicted, partly because diagramming it is difficult (though Sky and Telescope Magazine somehow manages to do so every month in its sky charts)  and partly because doing so can mess with people's innate understanding or what they've been taught about the way things are.

The dinner plate/clockwork diagram has sufficed for hundreds of years, anyway, so why upset the apple cart? We're just getting past the notion that the interiors of the Outer Planets are "icy," after all.

Where the video artist commits heresy, however, (at least as stated by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy) is in his depiction of the sun leading the planets in their helical journey through space, and in his outrageous claim that heliocentrism is itself in error.

Heresy! Burn him!

How many people, after all, went to the stake because they believed in heliocentrism? Well, at least one.

So clearly, anyone who would dispute this fundamental of planetary science after such sacrifice should go to the stake himself. Burn him!!!

This tendency for scientists to become overwrought when their supposed fundamental beliefs are challenged, especially by untrained and probably unwashed people outside the field, has long been one of the least appealing behaviors of those in scientific practice. It suggests a violent streak on the one hand, and very tightly closed minds on the other, both of which, unfortunately, strongly resemble the mindsets of deeply religious and even cultic Believers.

As he explains in his blogpost responding to his Bad Astronomy thrashing, what he calls "heliocentrism" is the Standard Diagram, which literally everyone learns is the way the Solar System works, and it's wrong. Simply wrong.

That is not the way the Solar System works. True enough. Every planetary scientist will acknowledge as much. Well, they would, except many of them won't in this case, not because they don't know the difference between the Diagram and the reality, but because an upstart outsider has made point -- rather stunningly and beautifully, too -- that they themselves feel little or no obligation to bother with from their own scientific perspective.

As many commenters say to the debunkers, "If the artist's rendering of the actual motion of the Solar System is so very 'wrong,' why don't you depict it correctly?" This they will not do, no way, no how. Not their job. Their rejoinder is, "Why doesn't the artist get it right in the first place? Harrumph!" As they flounce off to their enervating projects -- not necessarily what they want to do, but what they have to do to maintain standing in the field. Harrumph! Indeed.

How dare he?!

That's the basic attitude on display. It's highly evocative of the attitude of Ptolemyists  toward Galileans back in the day. "Everyone knew" the geocentric model proposed by Ptolemy was correct, and these snotty upstarts putting the sun in the center were simply out of touch and out of their league. How dare they?! 

In this case, though, the issue is a relatively minor one of definition of terms and accuracy of animation,  not "fundamentals."

So the big deal that is being made of it is somewhat, shall we say, manufactured?

DjSadhu is objecting to the diagram of the Solar System that everyone learns. He is calling it "heliocentric" -- which it is -- and is objecting to "heliocentrism" as depicted in the diagram. His alternative vision, as illustrated in his animations, are far closer to the reality than the heliocentric diagram is, but they are still not quite right according to findings of scientists -- oh, and good luck finding those findings, given the difficulty of public access to scientific papers thanks to the lock JSTOR still has on so much of it.

The main objection to DjSadhu's animations that Phil Plait brings up at Bad Astronomy (once you figure out what he's really objecting to) is the fact that some of Sadhu's insight about what the real motions of the sun and planets are and what it really looks like comes from the work of Pallathadka Keshava Bhat. Bhat was less a scientist than he was a spiritualist, and that is anathema among real scientists. Obviously, the man knew nothing.

Therefore, DjSadhu's animations are teh suxor. Even though they are gorgeous, and even though they more accurately depict the motions of the sun and planets than the Standard Dinner Plate Diagram, they suck and cannot be redeemed for they are based on the ravings of a heretical madman.

Unfortunately that is the way too many arrogant and egotistical scientists approach challenges from "outside."

On the whole, I thought Phil Plait's debunking of DjSadhu's animations was pretty hilarious and typical. His objections were least of all on substance, because for the most part Sadhu got the (helical motion) substance pretty much right. Plait's objections revolve mostly on matters of definition of terms, perceived insults and lack of decorum, and minor adjustments to his helical models of motion (which he inflates into massive errors). There is no basic objection to the helical model itself. The objection is mostly over who is proposing and describing it.

DjSadhu is objecting to the dinner plate model of the solar system and its motions and he is illustrating an alternative model -- which is more accurate, despite its errors. Neither Plait nor any of his supporters acknowledge that the dinner plate model is fundamentally wrong, though they do acknowledge that a helix is a more accurate description of planetary motion.

What would be useful at this point would be for planetary scientists to work with computer animators to illustrate what they believe is the correct understanding of the helical motion of the planets and solar system. 

But I won't hold my breath.

Change of Pace: Memory Jogging At The Movies. "Kronos" (1957)

Kronos, ready to stomp Los Angeles to smithereens while sucking up all the energy in creation

While tooling around the YouTubes over the weekend, I stumbled on this little SciFi effort from 1957, and after some Other Important Matters were tended to, I was able to watch it, mostly without interruption.

It was quite a trip. Deja vu all over again. I'd seen the picture before, and I was pretty sure I knew where and when: At the Saturday kiddie matinee at the Covina Theater in the summer of 1957. I went every Saturday from about 1954 to 1959, and that's where I saw most of the SciFi pictures released during the era. Also lots of Warner Brothers and Walter Lantz cartoons.

I was pretty sure I had not seen "Kronos: Ravager of Planets" since then, either. It's a very, very strange sensation to watch a movie that you haven't seen for more than 50 years and to recognize the scenes, and to even be able to anticipate the dialogue and what would come next.

It's hard to describe the effect this movie had on my young self, but I seem to carry a body-memory of it. It was frightening and energizing and intriguing all at the same time. Many of the sensations I must have felt while watching the movie all those years ago, the feeling of being in the theater, even the smells of the place (let alone the noise of the children who were there every Saturday like I was) all came back, almost as if no time had passed. It was very strange.

The theater was in downtown Covina, California, out in the far eastern part of the San Gabriel Valley; it was in an old building, but the theater had been fairly recently remodeled and brought up to MidCentury Modern Movie House standards. I paid a quarter at the box office to get in, bought a popcorn, a small Coke, and a box of Jujubes at the counter (maybe another 35 cents) and went in to what seemed to me to be a very large auditorium, but I doubt it was really that large. It had a stage, though, and a balcony. And I think it had a red velvet or possibly damask curtain. I should remember, but I can't be sure. I went to movies at many different theaters all my young life, and I can't recall for certain the details of the decor of any of them.

Science fiction was by far my favorite genre after I got over my cowboy phase -- which was at about the age of four or five.

I saw many turgid melodramas and thrillers at the movies when I went with my mother to see the regular programs in the evenings, but on Saturday afternoons, I was on my own. I would be dropped off at the theater a few minutes before the start of the kiddie matinee and would be picked up a few minutes after the program ended. Typically there would be several cartoons, an episode of a serial, a game or contest or prize promotion from the stage, then the feature presentation, and sometimes there would be another cartoon after the feature. Usually my head would be reeling from so much stimulation. Now and then, I won a prize offered by one of the sponsors of the matinee. I looked forward to the science fiction pictures. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was a favorite.

"Kronos" wasn't far behind, and because I was older when I saw it, I understood it better and identified with the characters somewhat more. I could enjoy "Invasion" for the scare. It was very much a character piece, but "Kronos" was an accessible story for young people and a feast of visuals that I really got into.

I noticed right off when the YouTube version began that I had seen it before -- when I was a child -- because I recognized the very distinctive and unique flying saucer that would be seen repeatedly in the early sequences. "Labcentral" was a familiar destination, too:

Labcentral, whereat SUSIE computated

Of course the special effects were primitive even by the standards of the time, but that didn't matter so much. The story was gripping, especially after the appearance of the Kronos Machine on the beach in Mexico.

The Machine I saw on YouTube was very familiar, and I recalled how intrigued and horrified I was with it when I saw it stomping its way up the coast toward Los Angeles and the area of my home at the time. Science fiction set in or near Los Angeles naturally had an immediate appeal that stories set far away did not. And the more plausible the story was -- at least to a kid-mind -- the better the picture. And this story, for whatever reason was highly plausible to my kid mind, so much so that this movie became the basis for a fantasy-game that my friends and I played in the schoolyard at recess and after school.

We were playing with notions of "what could be" if the aliens landed one day and took over one of our bodies (this was a popular theme in the SciFi genre of the time.) And we were trying to imagine what the Future -- or what advanced alien civilizations -- would look like. The helicopter and B-47 seen in the picture were the latest things. The B-47 is, to my way of looking at it, the most elegant bomber ever built. The Kronos Machine, too, was extraordinarily spare and sleek, and it was visually striking because it completely eschewed both streamlining and the "googie" look of the era.  We knew from "googie." It was everywhere anything new was, and out in the far eastern suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950's most things were new, and a lot of it was quite fanciful.

The idea of aliens coming to Earth to extract energy -- including the energy of the hydrogen bomb -- was really an interesting notion in that it carried an underlying assumption that Earthlings were producing and using a shit-ton of energy via electric power and nuclear weapons that some other civilization "out there" noted -- and wanted. We didn't have much of a conception in those days of how very tiny the Earth is compared to almost anything else in space, and how practically unnoticeable (and probably uninteresting) the Earth would be to actual aliens searching for energy resources. No, we saw the Earth as large and important and central to our lives -- and therefore of primary and central interest to the aliens, too.

"War of the Worlds" was perhaps the most thematically similar movie of the genre, but it was a blockbuster compared to the modesty of "Kronos" -- and frightening as hell to my young self (I wouldn't have been much more than five or six when I first saw it). Of course watching a model of Los Angeles get destroyed in the movie was deeply disturbing to me. The scenes of destruction of Los Angeles in "Kronos" were not so scary -- because they didn't look anything like Los Angeles. As far as I could tell from the YouTube version, they looked like they were from the 1935 movie of "The Last Days of Pompeii." But maybe it was some other movie that featured the destruction of Pompeii. There were a lot of them.

In order to save what was left of Los Angeles and the lives of those who survived, the science team at Labcentral has to figure out how to reverse the insight that brought forth the atom and hydrogen bombs. It's pointed out that while "we" know how to make energy from matter, the aliens use energy to make matter. By reversing the polarity of the Machine, they will be able to turn it into energy and thus destroy it. It will "eat itself alive." This is perhaps the most intriguing notion in the film.

What would happen if E=MC² were reversed thus: M=E/C²? Would matter spontaneously appear from the background energy if the velocity of energy were somehow reduced?

In the film, "omega particles" -- whatever they are -- are sprinkled (by a bomb, of course) between the electrodes of the Machine, and behold, the polarity is reversed and the thing commences to consume itself until there is nothing left but a heap of smouldering rubble. Yay! Close call, but we survived.

There's much to like and to ponder in this somewhat silly low-budget SciFi picture, and I was delighted to see it again after so many years. I wonder what else I'll stumble across I haven't seen in all these many years.

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.

Maintaining Stability in the Midst of Chaos

This post is mostly about Mars but no doubt will ramble all over the place as is my wont from time to time.

Three views of Mars from the Hubble Space telescope, March 10, 1997

There are so many images from the past few days, of the memorials for the new dead, of the Mars landing, of people just trying to hang on for dear life, of a planet incinerating, of despair, hope, grief and joy, that anyone's head would be spinning.

First to Mars for the thrill of adventure. For someone like me, this is really big-time exciting, though not quite as thrilling as earlier missions. They've become almost commonplace.

What we know of Mars today is nothing at all like the fantabulous Mars of Percival Lowell and Ray Bradbury; but neither is it much like the Mars of the 1972 revelations from Mariner 9.

Chesley Bonestell's vision of Mars, c. 1950

Portion of Noctis Labyrinthus from Mariner 9, 1972

Elysium "Pyramids" from Mariner 9, 1972,
used as an illustration in Carl Sagan's 1980 edition of "Cosmos"

Those images are burnt into my memory. They are the first to clearly show the presence of fluid-carved features on the surface, the first to delineate the Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the Solar System, and the first to clearly show the giant volcanoes of the Tharsis Ridge, particularly the one known then as "Nix Olympica," (Snows of Olympus) but now known as "Olympus Mons" (Mount Olympus), the largest volcano known in the Solar System, and on and on.

Mariner 9 had been preceded by Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969, and they had shown some of the same features, relatively clearly too (in some cases, the Mariner 6 and 7 images are higher quality than those of Mariner 9) but interpretation failed. For example Nix Olympica and the Valles Marineris are shown on the following full-planetary images from Mariner 7:

Mariner 7 (1969) images of Mars from 200,000 miles away

The circular feature in the upper center is the giant volcano; the squiggly business below it is part of what's known as Noctis Labyrinthus, highly fractured uplift area, and to the right of Noctis Labyrinthus is a dark feature with several dark spots around it which is the Valles Marineris feature together with associated canyons  and craters. Just barely visible are the tops of two of the three aligned Tharsis volcanoes which form a diagonal line at a 45 degree angle to Nix Olympica. The white patch at the bottom of the images is the extended South Polar cap.

All of these features and more are visible from Earth with the use of almost any fairly decent telescope, and they had all been reported and drawn -- though not necessarily photographed -- in great detail decades prior to the Mariner and later missions to Mars. These features are actually easily seen in Earth based telescopes; I've seen some of them myself.

The problem was -- and is -- one of interpretation. For example, "Nix Olympica." The name "Snows of Olympus" implies the presence of a significant mountain, which was how the feature was interpreted when initially identified and named; but the interpretation of the feature seen in the images above was that "Nix Olympica" was in fact a crater not a mountain at all. And the "snows" were clouds. Well, yes, there are clouds seen in this image, and Martian clouds were well known before space-craft explorations, but the original interpretation of a mountain is correct; the crater interpretation based at least in part on the Mariner 4 images which showed a heavily cratered Martian surface more like the Moon than the illustrations of a canal crossed smooth sand desert that had formed the basis of understanding the Martian surface prior to the arrival of Mariner 4 to take the first close-up pictures of the surface of Mars in 1965.

Mariner 4 image of the surface of Mars, 1965

But even here, where craters are obvious, interpretation is risky, and things in the image may not be quite what they appear to be. This is not a lunar surface, not even a lunar-like surface, but because there are craters at all, it was interpreted as lunar. You'll note in the lower left corner there is a straight line angled at about 30 degrees that extends about half way across the image; under certain conditions, it can appear to cross the entire frame. If this feature were visible from Earth (apparently it cannot be seen telescopically, however) it might well be interpreted as a canal. The formation is apparently a crack in the surface, of which there are very many over the entire globe, some of which are much longer than this one, and many of which evoke the "canals of Mars" as detailed by Percival Lowell.

According to standard interpretations, all of these features are associated with vulcanism and uplift. They do not form patterns of intersecting lines -- except when they do. And none of them are telescopically visible from Earth. According to standard interpretations, all of the "canals" so carefully delineated by Percival Lowell and testified to by other astronomers were optical illusions.

And yet the surface of Mars is crossed by literally thousands of linear depressions, some of them thousands of kilometers long, some of them roughly corresponding with the locations of Lowellian "canals."

How drole. Well, it would be if these linear features were acknowledged, but they are not. Few of them are even noted, though they be glaringly obvious in Mariner and Viking images especially. They are not "canals" in the sense that Lowell meant the term, but they are most definitely "canali" in the sense of "channels" as declared by Giovanni Schiaparelli. And there are thousands of them. Yet in standard Mars interpretation, there is essentially no mention of the abundance of cracks in the Martian surface, some of which indubitably mimic Lowellian canals.

Telescopic observers had also seen and recorded many craters on the surface of Mars well before any space-craft explored the surface, but these early records of craters on Mars tended to be ignored, not because the observations were necessarily in error (though they were definitely enigmatic) but because the dominant planetary paradigm was Uniformitarianism, and that implied that no planet with an erosive atmosphere (such as Mars) would preserve craters at the surface over the eons. Erosion would have long ago erased any evidence of abundant cratering, much as was believed to be the case with the Earth.

The following image from Mariner 4 shows another enigmatic linear feature that has defied interpretation for almost 50 years:

Mariner 4 Image of Craters in Atlantis region of Mars, 1965; linear feature at right edge of largest crater

What is it? It has not been located in later pictures of the area, or if it has, I haven't seen any announcement. From what limited scale information is available, it appears to be about 2.5 kilometers long, and .5 kilometer high, perfectly straight and perhaps 100 meters or so wide.

While this particular feature has not been located or identified in subsequent mapping and imaging of the area [see note below], there are many other enigmatic linear, circular and arcuate features on the Martian surface that defy ready explanation, so many in fact that there's a cottage industry of amateurs whose interpretations of these features as "buildings" of a Lost Martian Civilization are believed by many.

[Note: Now that I'm back doing vicarious Mars exploration again, I've made another "discovery." The Mariner 4 images above are of the same region; the upper Mariner 4 image is rotated 1/4 turn left and it has much lower contrast than the lower image. It appears they were taken at different times of day, but that's not possible as the Mariner 4 mission was a fly-by, not an orbiting mission. The upper image reference number is PIAO2979 while the lower image reference number is PIA02980, suggesting they were acquired one after another. The images were acquired with a miniature television camera most likely using different filters. For example, the upper image may have been taken through a green filter while the lower one was possibly acquired through a red filter. Interestingly, in the catalogues of Mariner 4 images, the first image is the only one that is referenced. The second one is not referenced in the catalogues and is almost never referenced at all. The crack that appears in the upper image is almost always referred to as a "ridge" -- as that was how it was described at the time the image was first released. The crack is part of the Sirenum Fossae ("fossae" means "fractures" or "ditches" not ridges.) The crack also appears in the lower image (just barely visible from the lower right corner rising at a 60+ degree angle toward the upper center.) The small linear feature noted in the lower image is barely visible in the upper image, but it is not linear. It appears to be more oval. A comparison was posted at Malin Space Science Systems in 2007 which shows the 1965 image together with a 1978 Viking Orbiter image of the same region at approximately the same scale:

Mariner Crater, Mars, as imaged by the Viking Orbiter, 1978

Mariner 4 crater image rotated.

The crack is clearly visible, extending straight through the bottom of the crater. A peninsula and a small ovoid hummock is visible on the lower rim of the crater that roughly corresponds to the oval feature in the upper Mariner image and to the location of the linear feature in the lower Mariner image. There is no sign of a linear feature in that location in the Viking image. It may be an imaging artifact. Or... ?]

The signs are that there has never been a civilization on Mars, "Lost" or otherwise, nor is it particularly likely there could be one, at least not one we would recognize. The surface of Mars is apparently extremely hazardous and potentially lethal to living things such as our own sweet selves and presumably to any potential aliens, let to alone bugs and microbes and such like. Not only are temperatures and atmospheric pressures typically too low for comfort (! to say the least), there are no ready resources -- at the surface at any rate -- to support biology on any but the simplest scale, and even then, there are many factors that argue against even the most modest biosphere on Mars.

That doesn't mean there is no biology on Mars. If biology on Earth can adapt to the most severe circumstances, there's no reason it couldn't do so on Mars. So the biology question should remain open until there is actual evidence one way or another as opposed to elaborate interpretations of ambiguous data. In fact, it has been suspected for some time that if biology is ever proven to exist on Mars, it will likely be in the form of microbes that were brought to Mars as contaminants on spacecraft launched from Earth!

Be that as it may, it has long been the practice in the planetary science community -- at least since Lowell -- to make broad and expansive interpretations of very limited and ambiguous data, and for those interpretations to stand for many years despite conflicting data. I've often called Mars "The Mimic Planet," and "The Planet of Deception." Much of what we see on the Martian surface mimics what we might see in terrestrial deserts, and yet, it's not really the same at all. Some of what we see mimics other features, whether canals or something else, and that mimicry can easily lead to erroneous interpretations, such as that of Nix Olympica as a crater rather than a mountain. There are many circular features on the surface of Mars that quite likely aren't impact craters but are interpreted as such because it is customary to interpret circular features on Mars as impact craters even if there are indications the feature formed through other means (such as undermining and collapse from below).

Geysers of some sort are not a newly theorized or even newly discovered phenomenon on Mars, but their broad acceptance by the planetary community seems to date only from 2006, whereas I and others were seeking them out as early as 1996 when the Mars Global Surveyor/Mars Orbital Camera images started being returned. It seemed natural that there would be surface geysers on Mars under certain circumstances. The surprise was that when geysers were found, they were in abundance, near the south pole, and were "sand geysers" rather than fluid geysers, caused by pressure release from below a layer of clear carbon dioxide ice warmed by the springtime sun.

Greg Orme is an Australian amateur Mars enthusiast whose tireless inspection of MOC images has resulted in numerous discoveries over the years. He was dogged and determined and I wouldn't doubt he's inspected every one of the hundreds of thousands of images returned by the MOC and other orbiting cameras. He's found hundreds if not thousands of "spiders," and these spiders are often seen as the remnants of the geysers that occur every Martian spring.

r1001457f

Above is one of my crops of the defrosting Inca City region near the south pole showing some of the spiders and some of the evidence of geysering (there don't appear to be any active geysers in this view.)

Note: Inca City is an enigmatic formation discovered in 1972 by Mariner 9 near the south pole. This is an image of it from the Mars Orbital Camera:

Inca City, Mars

It's considered to be a remnant of a buried crater due to its somewhat circular appearance, but it is not certain what caused the rectilinear features. Ice is suspected, but how the formation occurred is deeply mysterious. There are many somewhat similar features in many places on the surface, some of which resemble what a turbulent fluid might look like if it suddenly froze.

The geysering phenomenon got a good deal of coverage in 2006 when planetary scientists broadly accepted it. This Wikipedia article covers most of the story pretty well. This Mars Anomaly Research article from 2005 is quite complete, and it seems to be based in part on my original discovery of active geysering (c. 2001) as well as later images. Finally, this Mars Enigmas article from 2006, while somewhat confused and confusing, gives a pretty good overview of the phenomenon both from a popular and a scientific point of view.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with the Mars Curiosity's explorations in Gale Crater going on now. Gale shows evidence of once hosting a lake. The idea of ancient standing liquid water is far more exciting to planetary scientists than is the notion of presently active sand geysers bursting through a crust of solid CO2 (how boring.)

A sand geyser is probably not the most likely place to find present or past biology on Mars. Since the phenomenon is apparently both extensive and energetic, it's probably wise to stay out of the immediate vicinity of eruptions in any case. After going to all the trouble to land on Mars (and the Curiosity landing was spectacular), it wouldn't do to have the craft promptly blasted to smithereens by the nearby eruption of a sand geyser! We may never send landing craft close to an erupting geyser field.

There is enough chaos in our environment as it is.

On the other hand, Gale Crater, somewhat south of the equator, is bound to be calm and stable, much like Spirit''s stable location in Gusev Crater not all that far away (also thought once to have been a lake).

There will be discoveries no doubt, but more than likely, they will perpetuate rather than solve the biology enigma, and they will no doubt fuel more speculation about the poorly understood nature of the Martian surface.

I look forward to results!

Full resolution Curiosity heat shield on the way down. Courtesy NASA

Wheee!
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A note on how Mars images get manipulated.

The first image is from Viking 2, Mars winter 1976, altered fairly recently to resemble surface images from Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity.

Viking 2 lander image, 1976 altered to resemble more recent images from the surface of Mars

The second image is more or less what the picture looked like until it was layered with a sort of reddish "dust" which is widely believed to make the sky more or less pink more or less all the time, and thus make the surface appear quite red.

Viking 2 lander image, 1976, "dust" layer removed

The sky is pale blue, the ground ruddy but not particularly red, the rocks are multicolored, and white frost is clearly visible on the ground.

There are whole websites devoted to NASA'S  endless manipulations of the colors of Mars. At one time, there was wide circulation of an image from Viking 1 with a green sky and very red surface. The green sky picture is now only available with permission. That picture was recalibrated before the Pathfinder landing to look like this:

Viking 1 lander picture of Big Joe
Still a little bilious if you ask me.

Better

Under the Seas

Just a note:

It's truly fascinating to watch the live feeds of operations under the sea to attempt to gain control of the runaway oil well that is causing so much pollution and destruction. It is very much like watching something in outer space or a science fiction movie.

Just wish what's going on wasn't so awful.

The picture above is a screengrab of something being sawed by the robots.