So what's up with Mars?

17:46.25 - Monday 2nd February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

All this talk about finding rocks and dust and suchlike on the surface of Mars is hardly the Best Thing Ever in my opinion. I find it hard to get excited when I see press releases telling us about 'a rock', 'another rock' and 'some dust' and how it's all terribly exciting, when I can see pretty much the same scenery by looking at the muck down the back of my garage. Granted, there was a flicker of interest when we first got the pictures from a whole other planet, but it gets pretty repetitive when there's nothing new happening.

I stumbled upon The Enterprise Mission following a link from The Register and spent a good ten minutes trying desperately to see half of the so-called 'mechanical' 'rocks' that they've decided they can see in the masses of blurred imagery. And what's with this hoo-ha about the colour in the photos? Who cares if it needs to be adjusted and wotnot?

But looking at the photos on TEM, what if there had been a civilisation that had reached the industrial age, say? Would those in the know actually tell us about it and leave us to ponder what had happened to this whole other race? Would we eventually step onto Mars and explore for traces of this past civilisation? Were they more advanced than us or just a few years behind? Did they abandon Mars when it because obvious that the planet could no longer sustain life, and head inwards, so the slightly-warmer Earth?

The possibility that there was an intelligent, developed race on Mars excites me more than anything the boffins at NASA have some up with to date. If it turns out to be true, it opens up other questions: If two planets in the same system supported advanced life, why not others, elsewhere? How long ago did they die out? At what technological level did they die out? Where's the next inhabited planet?

There's no reason why life on Mars should be further technologically advanced than our own. The conspiracy theorists that inhabit TEM spend hours trying to see various industrial, mechanical shapes in the photos sent back and, admittedly, one or two are intriguing, but you have to wonder why there are no structures if such a race ever existed - expecially when the Mars Rovers happen to set down in what must, assuming the TEM folks are correct, have been in the vacinity of something... constructed.

I reckon it's going to turn out to be empty save for a few microbes, and perhaps there may be something as advanced as the Martian equivalent of a trilobite fossil buried under the ice somewhere. I'll be terribly disappointed is NASA finds nothing there.