The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [25]
Michell shows us a photograph of the Sun taken in X-ray light which looks vaguely like a face and informs us that ‘followers of Gurdjieff see the face of their Master’ in the solar corona. Innumerable faces in trees, mountains and boulders all over the world are inferred to be the product of ancient wisdom. Perhaps some are: it’s a good practical joke, as well as a tempting religious symbol, to pile stones so from afar they look like a giant face.
The view that most of these forms are patterns natural to rock-forming processes and the bilateral symmetry of plants and animals, plus a little natural selection - all processed through the human-biased filter of our perception - Michell describes as ‘materialism’ and a ‘nineteenth-century delusion’. ‘Conditioned by rationalist beliefs, our view of the world is duller and more confined than nature intended.’ By what process he has plumbed the intentions of Nature is not revealed.
Of the images he presents, Michell concludes that
their mystery remains essentially untouched, a constant source of wonder, delight and speculation. All we know for sure is that nature created them and at the same time gave us the apparatus to perceive them and minds to appreciate their endless fascination. For the greatest profit and enjoyment they should be viewed as nature intended, with the eye of innocence, unclouded by theories and preconceptions, with the manifold vision, innate in all of us, that enriches and dignifies human life, rather than with the cultivated single vision of the dull and opinionated.
Perhaps the most famous spurious claim of a portentous pattern involves the canals of Mars. First observed in 1877, they were seemingly confirmed by a succession of dedicated professional astronomers peering through large telescopes all over the world. A network of single and double straight lines was reported, crisscrossing the Martian surface and with such uncanny geometrical regularity that they could only be of intelligent origin. Evocative conclusions were drawn about a parched and dying planet populated by an older and wiser technical civilization dedicated to conservation of water resources. Hundreds of canals were mapped and named. But, oddly, they avoided showing up on photographs. The human eye, it was suggested, could remember the brief instants of perfect atmospheric transparency, while the undiscriminating photographic plate averaged the few clear with the many blurry moments. Some astronomers saw the canals. Many did not. Perhaps certain observers were more skilled at seeing canals. Or perhaps the whole business was some kind of perceptual delusion. Much of the idea of Mars as an abode of life, as well as the prevalence of ‘Martians’ in popular fiction, derives from the canals. I myself grew up steeped in this literature, and when I found myself an experimenter on the Manner 9 mission to Mars -the first spacecraft to orbit the red planet - naturally I was interested to see what the real circumstances were. With Mariner 9 and with Viking, we were able to map the planet pole-to-pole, detecting features hundreds of times smaller than the best that could be seen from Earth. I found, not altogether to my surprise, not a trace of canals. There were a few more or less linear features that had been made out through the telescope - for example, a 5,000-kilometre-long rift valley that would have been hard to miss. But the hundreds of ‘classical’ canals carrying water from the polar caps through the arid deserts to the parched equatorial cities simply did not exist.