The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [23]
The most common image is the Man in the Moon. Of course, it doesn’t really look like a man. Its features are lopsided, warped, drooping. There’s a beefsteak or something over the left eye. And what expression does that mouth convey? An ‘O’ of surprise? A hint of sadness, even lamentation? Doleful recognition of the travails of life on Earth? Certainly the face is too round. The ears are missing. 1 guess he’s bald on top. Nevertheless, every time I look at it, I see a human face.
World folklore depicts the Moon as something prosaic. In the pre-Apollo generation, children were told that the Moon was made of green (that is, smelly) cheese, and for some reason this was thought not marvellous but hilarious. In children’s books and editorial cartoons, the Man in the Moon is often drawn simply as a face set in a circle, not too different from the bland ‘happy face’ of a pair of dots and an upturned arc. Benignly, he looks down on the nocturnal frolics of animals and children, of the knife and the spoon.
Consider again the two categories of terrain we recognize when we examine the Moon with the naked eye: the brighter forehead, cheeks and chin, and the darker eyes and mouth. Through a telescope, the bright features are revealed to be ancient cratered highlands, dating back, we now know (from the radioactive dating of samples returned by the Apollo astronauts), to almost 4.5 billion years ago. The dark features are somewhat younger flows of basaltic lava called maria (singular, mare - both from the Latin word for ocean, although the Moon, we now know, is dry as a bone). The maria welled up in the first few hundred million years of lunar history, partly induced by the high-speed impact of enormous asteroids and comets. The right eye is Mare Imbrium, the beefsteak drooping over the left eye is the combination of Mare Serenitatis and Mare Tranquilitatis (where Apollo 11 landed), and the off-centre open mouth is Mare Humorum. (No craters can be made out by ordinary, unaided human vision.)
The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes, most of which took place before humans, before mammals, before vertebrates, before multicelled organisms, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.
Humans, like other primates, are a gregarious lot. We enjoy one another’s company. We’re mammals and parental care of the young is essential for the continuance of the hereditary lines. The parent smiles at the child, the child smiles back, and a bond is forged or strengthened. As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face and to respond with a goony grin.
As an inadvertent side effect, the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples.
Sometimes it’s a geological formation, such as the Old Man of the Mountain at Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. We recognize