The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [27]
Mars is much more clement than Venus, although the Viking landers provided no compelling evidence for life. Its terrain is extremely heterogeneous and diverse. With 100,000 or so close-up photographs available, it is not surprising that claims have been made over the years about something unusual on Mars. There is, for example, a cheerful ‘happy face’ sitting inside a Martian impact crater 8 kilometres (5 miles) across, with a set of radial splash marks outside, making it look like the conventional representation of a smiling Sun. But no one claims that this has been engineered by an advanced (and excessively genial) Martian civilization, perhaps to attract our attention. We recognize that, with objects of all sizes falling out of the sky, with the surface rebounding, slumping and reconfiguring itself after each impact, and with ancient water and mudflows and modern windborne sand sculpting the surface, a wide variety of landforms must be generated. If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it’s not surprising that occasionally we’ll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn’t find one here and there.
A few small mountains on Mars resemble pyramids. In the Elysium high plateau, there is a cluster of them - the biggest a few kilometres across at the base - all oriented in the same direction. There is something a little eerie about these pyramids in the desert, so reminiscent of the Gizeh plateau in Egypt, and I would love to examine them more closely. Is it reasonable, though, to deduce Martian pharaohs?
Similar features are also known on Earth in miniature, especially in Antarctica. Some of them would come up to your knees. If we knew nothing else about them, would it be fair to conclude that they’ve been manufactured by scale-model Egyptians living in the Antarctic wasteland? (The hypothesis loosely fits the observations, but much else we know about the polar environment and the physiology of humans speaks against it.) They are, in fact, generated by wind erosion - the splatter of fine particles picked up by strong winds blowing mainly in the same direction and, over the years, sculpting what once were irregular hummocks into nicely symmetrical pyramids. They’re called dreikanters, from a German word meaning three sides. This is order generated out of chaos by natural processes - something we see over and over again throughout the Universe (in rotating spiral galaxies, for instance). Each time it happens we’re tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker.
On Mars, there is evidence of winds much fiercer than any ever experienced on Earth, ranging up to half the speed of sound. Planet-wide duststorms are common, carrying fine grains of sand. A steady pitter-patter of particles moving much faster than in the fiercest gales of Earth should, over ages of geological time, work profound changes in rock faces and landforms. It would not be too surprising if a few features - even very large ones - were sculpted by aeolian processes into the pyramidal forms we see.
There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, where a great stone face a kilometre across stares unblinkingly up at the sky. It is an unfriendly face, but one that seems recognizably human. In some representations, it could have been sculpted by Praxiteles. It lies in a landscape where many low hills have been moulded into odd forms, perhaps by some mixture of ancient