The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [29]
Put aside the improbability that such a revelation would actually lead to ‘world panic’. For anyone who has witnessed a portentous scientific finding in the making - the July 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter comes to mind - it will be clear that scientists tend to be effervescent and uncontainable. They have an indomitable compulsion to share new data. Only through prior agreement, not ex post facto, do scientists abide military secrecy. I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative and communicative.
If we restrict ourselves to what is actually known, and ignore the tabloid industry that manufactures epochal discoveries out of thin air, where are we? When we know only a little about the Face, it raises goosebumps. When we know a little more, the mystery quickly shallows.
Mars has a surface area of almost 150 million square kilometres. Is it so astonishing that one (comparatively) postage-stamp-sized patch in 150 million should look artificial - especially given our penchant, since infancy, for finding faces? When we examine the neighbouring jumble of hillocks, mesas and other complex surface forms, we recognize that the feature is akin to many that do not at all resemble a human face. Why this resemblance? Would the ancient Martian engineers rework only this mesa (well, maybe a few others) and leave all others unimproved by monumental sculpture? Or shall we conclude that other blocky mesas are also sculpted into the form of faces, but weirder faces, unfamiliar to us on Earth?
If we study the original image more carefully, we find that a strategically placed ‘nostril’ - one that adds much to the impression of a face - is in fact a black dot corresponding to lost data in the radio transmission from Mars to Earth. The best picture of the Face shows one side lit by the Sun, the other in deep shadow. Using the original digital data, we can severely enhance the contrast in the shadows. When we do, we find something rather unfacelike there. The Face is at best half a face. Despite our shortness of breath and the beating of our hearts, the Martian sphinx looks natural - not artificial, not a dead ringer for a human face. It was probably sculpted by slow geological process over millions of years.
But I might be wrong. It’s hard to be sure about a world we’ve seen so little of in extreme close-up. These features merit closer attention with higher resolution. Much more detailed photos of the Face would surely settle issues of symmetry and help resolve the debate between geology and monumental sculpture. Small impact craters found on or near the Face can settle the question of its age. In the case (most unlikely in my view) that the nearby structures were really once a city, that fact should also be obvious on closer examination. Are there broken streets? Crenellations in the ‘fort’? Ziggurats, towers, columned temples, monumental statuary, immense frescoes? Or just rocks?
Even if these claims are extremely improbable - as I think they are - they are worth examining. Unlike the UFO phenomenon, we have here the opportunity for a definitive experiment. This kind of hypothesis is falsifiable, a property that brings it well into the scientific arena. I hope that forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars, especially orbiters with high-resolution television cameras, will make a special effort - among hundreds of other scientific questions - to look much more closely at the pyramids and what some people call the Face and the city.
Even if it becomes plain to everyone that these Martian features are geological and not artificial, monumental faces