The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [26]
Even a succession of professional scientists - including famous astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed and now justly celebrated - can make serious, even profound errors in pattern recognition. Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. The Martian canal myth constitutes an important cautionary tale.
For the canals, spacecraft missions provided the means of correcting our misapprehensions. But it is also true that some of the most haunting claims of unexpected patterns emerge from spacecraft exploration. In the early 1960s, I urged that we be attentive to the possibility of finding the artefacts of ancient civilizations, either those indigenous to a given worlds or those constructed by visitors from elsewhere. I didn’t imagine that this would be easy or probable, and I certainly did not suggest that, on so important a matter, anything short of iron-clad evidence would be worth considering.
Beginning with John Glenn’s evocative report of ‘fireflies’ surrounding his space capsule, every time an astronaut reported seeing something not immediately understood, there were those who deduced ‘aliens’. Prosaic explanations - specks of paint flecking off the ship in the space environment, say - were dismissed with contempt. The lure of the marvellous blunts our critical faculties. (As if a man become a moon is not marvel enough.)
Around the time of the Apollo lunar landings, many nonexperts - owners of small telescopes, flying saucer zealots, writers for aerospace magazines - pored over the returned photographs seeking anomalies that NASA scientists and astronauts had overlooked. Soon there were reports of gigantic Latin letters and Arabic numerals inscribed on the lunar surface, pyramids, highways, crosses, glowing UFOs. Bridges were reported on the Moon, radio antennas, the tracks of enormous crawling vehicles, and the devastation left by machines able to slice craters in two. Every one of these claims, though, turns out to be a natural lunar geological formation misjudged by amateur analysts, internal reflections in the optics of the astronauts’ Hasselblad cameras, and the like. Some enthusiasts discerned the long shadows of ballistic missiles - Soviet missiles, it was ominously confided, aimed at America. The rockets, also described as ‘spires’, turn out to be low hills casting long shadows when the Sun is near the lunar horizon. A little trigonometry dispels the mirage.
These experiences also provide fair warning: for a complex terrain sculpted by unfamiliar processes, amateurs (and sometimes even professionals) examining photographs, especially near the limit of resolution, may get into trouble. Their hopes and fears, the excitement of possible discoveries of great import, may overwhelm the usual sceptical and cautious approach of science.
If we examine available surface images of Venus, occasionally a peculiar landform swims into view - as, for example, a rough portrait of Joseph Stalin discovered by American geologists analysing Soviet orbital radar imagery. No one maintains, I gather, that unreconstructed Stalinists had doctored the magnetic tapes, or that the former Soviets were engaged in engineering activities of unprecedented and hitherto unrevealed scale on the surface of Venus - where every spacecraft to land has been fried in an hour or two. The odds are overwhelming that this feature, whatever it is, is due to geology. The same is true of what seems to be a portrait of the cartoon character Bugs Bunny on the Uranian moon Ariel. A Hubble space telescope image of Titan in the near-infrared shows clouds roughly configured to make a world-sized smiling face. Every planetary scientist has a favourite example.
The astronomy of the Milky Way also is replete with imagined likenesses - for example, the Horsehead, Eskimo, Owl,