After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  If the feline interpretation of the Face is correct, how did humanoid and feline forms come to be on Mars? Is the Face evidence that our evolution was observed or even orchestrated by others? Is Homo sapiens the trophy in some bizarre interplanetary pantheon?

  These are questions best dealt with in the arena of cultural anthropology. Until our definition of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is expanded to include the study of possible artifacts on our solar system, answers will remain forever elusive.

  [2]

  Disintegrating Assumptions

  The carbonated sea crashes against the seawall on the east end of the City, hissing and foaming as huge, rusted hatches open, letting the seawater spill into subterranean reservoirs. Thin cloud obscures the salmon sky and a fine reddish ash descends, leaving a scabrous film on the waters.

  Mars is cooling, its atmosphere leaking into space, its remaining seas condensing to ice and dissolving in the diminished air pressure. The City is a refuge, the blunt peaks of its enclosures rising out of the fizzing water, shrugging away the rain of meteorites that cast their pale warmth in the night sky.

  Miles distant, the Face stares sternly at the overcast, lips parted as if in disapproval. The dying Cydonian sea clasps its elliptical base, leaving a scum of tenacious blue-green sea life clinging to its edges. Already, the Face looks impossibly old, its gaze somehow frightened.

  Rain and dust mingle in the dark air, slapping against the pocked, rocky facets of the Fort and City Pyramid. As night falls, ice collects around the island dwellings in cracked, filthy skirts, clogging the reservoirs and disabling the remaining barges. The sun dips below the horizon, seemingly swallowed by the petrified Face. The rain turns to a vaporous sleet, wreathing the City in bitter cloud.

  Meteors rake the sky like yellow needles, taking many seconds to disintegrate in the thin air. Their reflections play across the freezing sea as the storm dissolves as quickly as it materialized, leaving Mars to its dying.

  Suddenly the sky splits, bisected by a glowing yellow contrail. A second line appears; moments later, the dopplared roar of the first line sweeps across the landscape, shaking the branches of trees and sending complex vibrations across the surface of shallow lakes. Within seconds the sky is an eye-scalding blur of infalling debris. The horizon visibly quivers, tossing up curtains of billowing gray dirt.

  The sun vanishes behind a pall of sterilizing white light as the downpour increases. The shards falling through the sky are larger now, sculpted into near-circular missiles by their heated progress through the atmosphere. Many of them can be seen breaking up as they race toward the ground, raining bright yellow fragments that leave the air illuminated by a steady, unbearable glow.

  Already, the smoking pits of impact craters have deformed the landscape. Molten rock sloshes about their rims. The terrain bursts into massive fractures that are swiftly buried in charred soil. Directly overhead, the sky has been sealed shut by a lid of uprooted dust; the only light is that of the endless volley of meteors. As the planet’s crust is perforated and tousled, it takes on a strange and uncertain consistency, emitting a chalky light as the last of the lakes dissolve into snarls of steam and vanish like frightened ghosts.

  The boundary between sky and ground blurs as more and more matter is lofted upward, forming a blanket of incessant violence. Flames devour what’s left of the horizon. There is no more air. The thin layer of ozone was one of the attack’s first casualties. Now atmospheric nitrogen is burning; from space, the planet can be seen discharging its stock of breathable air in a writhing, stunted plume that casts ugly shadows across the darkening overcast. A reddish glow emerges from beneath the clouds, spreading like an infestation.

  Local space is filled with debris: wandering chunks of rock the size of cities. Some are far larger; occasionally one of the biggest will cross paths with the stricken planet and a massive bubble of flame and superheated rock will emerge from the ragged skin of atmosphere, lingering longer than any normal explosion has a right to.

  A faint halo of displaced air and frozen water has begun to form above the center of the strike. It flashes and glints as it’s pierced by additional meteors. Soon most of the planet’s vulnerable hemisphere is gushing steam and soil. Shockwaves traverse the globe, converging on the opposite hemisphere and blasting the crust into fissured anarchy.

  The ground swells and trembles; hurricane winds scour away all but the most tenacious forms of life, ripping the top-soil into sheets and exposing the secret world within. The planet has begun to donate pieces of itself to the maelstrom of space-borne rock, like desperate offerings to a merciless god. Debris plunges toward the solar system’s core.

  For all of the devastation, the scene is eerily silent. The vacuum of space somehow diminishes the event’s sheer, incandescent enormity. On the surface of the planet, the bombardment continues unchecked. And it never ends, not exactly. The silent barrage continues its interrupted migration through space like a school of deadly fish.

  Eventually, it will return, captured in a net of celestial mechanics.

  Viewing Mars from

  the Twenty-first Century

  Star systems form from the gradual accretion of interstellar dust, forming protoplanetary disks. Gasses condense at the center, gathering mass until gravity forces the nucleus to undergo fusion reactions, resulting in a new star. Planets form from the remaining matter, with heavy elements condensing into what eventually become terrestrial planets.

  In our solar system, Mercury, Venus, and Mars form the Sun’s immediate celestial neighborhood. Mercury, closest to the Sun, is considered uninhabitable, sterilized by the Sun’s sky-filling glare. Venus is more Earth-like, and was once thought to harbor marshes and seas, complete with exotic fauna. But appearances are deceptive. Beneath Venus’s planet-wide cloud cover is a tortured landscape hot enough to melt metal, doused with sulphuric acid rain.

  Russian probes that landed on Venus were quickly lost after photographing a forbidding vista of flattened rock. Planetologists attribute Venus’ hellish environment to a runaway greenhouse effect. Ominously, a similar climate could eventually overtake Earth if global warming continues unrestrained, rendering our home planet uninhabitable.

  Mars is the most Earth-like of the solar system’s worlds, with polar caps, deserts, canyons and a climate prone to global dust storms. Although cold, Mars is not without oases. Deep within the trenches of Valles Marineris, atmospheric pressure allows liquid water to exist for short periods. And dark liquid “seeps” hint at a dynamic subsurface environment potentially teeming with microbes.

  A catch phrase among exobiologists is that “where there is water, there is life.” Although harsh, Mars seems more than capable of harboring life of some sort, and chances are we will find it if we try. Nevertheless, there is no denying that Mars is a harsh, desiccated planet.

  When confronted with the mystery of Mars’s demise, most astronomers speak in reassuring tones, insisting that Mars died a slow death relatively early in the history of the solar system. Some planetary geologists have suggested that Mars lost its seas and atmosphere to the planet’s low gravity, leaking into space over a period of millions of years. Others hypothesize that Mars lost the bulk of its biosphere to chemical bonding with the soil. But as we begin to realize that we inhabit a universe in which cosmic collisions and planet-killing pyrotechnics are relatively commonplace, Mars seems less of a museum piece and more of a dramatic warning. The current phase of Mars exploration has redefined existing models of the planet, upsetting cherished notions and dismantling a century of assumptions. Mars isn’t the Moon-like wasteland suggested by the Mariner probes of the 1960s, nor is it the forbidding, oxidized hell as seen through the cameras of the Viking landers of the 1970s.

  Astronomers have long maintained that Mars must have had water at some point: its surface is riddled with floodplains, channels and fossil seas. But the burning question— where did the water go?— wasn’t answered until the Mars Odyssey spacecraft cond
ucted a planet-wide spectroscopic analysis in 2002. The results are staggering in their implications: Mars is brimming with water, located only meters under its deceptive desert surface in the form of ice.

  NASA’s opposition to the prospect of water on Mars was particularly intense before the Odyssey discovery. Some scientists clung to the exotic possibility that Mars’s ancient rivers and tributaries had been carved by liquid carbon dioxide—a contention that perturbed independent researchers who interpreted NASA’s stance as deliberately hostile to the prospect of past or present Martian life.

  They had every reason to be wary.

  Mars image subcontractor Malin Space Science Systems’ voluminous online catalogue of Mars imagery has done much to democratize Mars surface analysis, but independent commentators have been forced to view Mars from the overriding perspective of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which controls the agency’s robotic presence on Mars.

  As noted by plasma physicist John Brandenburg and Lan Fleming, who is presently subcontracted to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as a digital image processor, JPL has a vested interest in keeping Mars “dead,” an echo of the inhospitable world glimpsed by Mariner and, to a lesser extent, Viking, which incorporated NASA’s self-stated but still-controversial “search for life.”

  The potential of life on Mars has always been central to our collective fascination with our neighbor planet, from the hotly debated canals studied by Percival Lowell in the early twentieth century to Orson Welles’s famous retelling of The War of the Worlds. But Mars’s current scientific “landlords” are geologists with little or no apparent interest in discovering life.

  Michael C. Malin, chief operator of the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard the Surveyor spacecraft, has devoted his career to the study of Mars’s geological history. Likewise, the team that landed Pathfinder on Mars in 1997 had zero expectation of detecting life, dead or otherwise; the Sojourner rover that trundled out of the Pathfinder lander was designed solely for on-site geological analysis, wielding instruments for dating rocks but lacking the biological experiments used to justify the Viking landers.

  JPL’s continued presence on Mars hinges on viewing the Red Planet as a lifeless—if interesting—piece of celestial real-estate. If something extraordinary was discovered, whether plant life or extraterrestrial architecture, control of the Mars exploration program would likely be transferred to NASA’s manned space-flight program. A once comfortably academic exercise would be effectively usurped by the desire to personally investigate, violently disturbing the status quo.

  That NASA considers the Face and other anomalies to be naturally occurring landforms almost goes without saying, despite the singularly disturbing fact that NASA has yet to perform any sort of dedicated scientific study that would bear out this position. NASA has offered the much-disputed theory of “differential erosion” to account for the geology of the Cydonia region, but has not been willing to entertain the possibility of artifacts, let alone mount an objective investigation. The 2001 overhead image of the Face was written off as natural because, according to one space agency employee, it “reminds” him of a natural formation here on Earth. To say that this pronouncement mocks scientific method is probably an understatement.

  But while a spectator can see how the presence of possible monumental architecture might weigh too heavily on existing paradigms to be taken seriously by officialdom, pointedly ignoring possible Martian plant life is more difficult to understand. Curiously, it was NASA itself that in 1996 proudly sported Martian meteorite ALH 84001 as evidence of past life on Mars, never mind the fact that the British had potentially life-indicating Martian meteorites catalogued and filed a decade previously. In hindsight, NASA’s eager presentation of possible microfossils seems less scientific than political. Predictably, NASA’s claim to have discovered ancient life on Mars is roundly disputed, while museums around the world fill with Martian rocks awaiting proper analysis.

  Although NASA has been less than honest in its handling of the Cydonia issue, much of the conspiracy alluded to on countless websites seems rooted in the space agency’s schizophrenic management structure, with individual NASA centers sparring for research grants.

  As long as JPL can dictate the public’s perception of Mars without interference, there will be no manned missions (agency lip service notwithstanding). Rather, each telerobotic mission will serve to justify the next, up to and including the 2005 Sample Return Mission, in which a bucket of Martian soil is returned to Earth orbit to be retrieved by the International Space Station, ostensibly to test for Martian microbes.

  Not surprisingly, JPL has studiously avoided calling attention to oddities that would support the feasibility of Martian life. By clinging to a politically prudent but scientifically porous model of a lifeless Mars, JPL has allowed a host of important findings to fall through its sieve. Contrary to official press releases, signs of life have been detected both in the form of apparent large plants and possible eroded “buildings” similar to the anomalies in Cydonia.

  Noted science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke has publicly expressed his exasperation at NASA’s unwillingness to examine what appears to be a forest of dark, tentacular bushes, bluntly admitting that he believes Mars is probably “teeming with life” and openly wondering if there is “intelligent life at NASA.”

  Other candidate life-forms include decidedly organic-looking “Dalmatian spots” and dark, ropy-looking thatches nestled in cracks in polar ice. The universally dark coloration of these anomalies suggests chlorophyll, the pigment that allows plants to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Indeed, Russian astronomers claim to have detected organic pigment in Mars’s atmosphere, presumably from a planetary ecology.

  Claims of life on Mars are given further weight by the presence of monster-sized “black spiders” spreading over the planet’s surface. Intrigued by the tentacular features, often seen bunched together like nerve ganglia or trees in a macabre forest, Mars enthusiast Greg Orme began a careful study of the many enticing features, amassing dozens of examples on his website. Intrigued, Arthur C. Clarke cited the spidery outcroppings as possible smoking-gun evidence of life, and acted as consultant when Orme coauthored a paper on the spiders for Mark Carlotto’s online journal New Frontiers in Science.

  Whatever the spiders are, they appear to have no earthly counterpart, raising the possibility of bizarre, uniquely Martian geology. As Orme notes, the spiders look overwhelmingly like living things. But looks can be deceiving, especially in black-and-white orbital photos. While most skeptics have been curiously silent on the subject, some have chosen to attack the messenger by insinuating that Clarke, famous for his prescient scientific predictions (including plantlife on Mars), is simply musing a bit too loudly in his old age.

  Along with the “banyan trees” advocated by Clarke, the spiders challenge conventional models of both Mars and life itself. If the spiders are enormous, ground-hugging trees, then exobiology must allow for relatively complex organisms on the Red Planet, drawing official science one grudging step closer to the prospect that Mars was habitable in the not-too-distant past. Such thinking, heretical by JPL’s standards, may loom on our horizon as NASA concocts new instruments to send to Mars to test for subsurface water.

  Highly unusual “banyan trees” near Mars’s south pole suggest large forms of life on Mars. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/Malin Space Science Systems.

  Eventually, the question of Martian plant life must be faced squarely. If the spiders are alive, how do they manage? The tangled “legs” responsible for their nickname (offered by NASA itself in evident befuddlement) seem to snake directly into the surface. Perhaps the spiders have adapted to the Martian cold by producing an enzyme that lets them thaw permafrost into life-sustaining water. On the other hand, Martian biochemistry may mock terrestrial analogy. It would be a marvelous discovery if Martian organisms avoided conventional photosynthesis altogether; we would be confronting truly ali
en extraterrestrial life. Given the biotech revolution, a discovery of this sort may even have practical benefits for humanity.

  Studying such specimens would ultimately force us to reconsider the prevalence of life in the galaxy and beyond. The spiders, if they are indeed organisms, may come to remind us that our preconceptions of what life can and cannot be are woefully narrow.

  The Martian “spiders” are organic-looking, ganglion-like anomalies that share many characteristics with terrestrial plants. Note branching “tentacles” or “roots,” typically much darker than the surrounding terrain. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/ Malin Space Science Systems.

  Even a jaded public finds the prospect of Martian life interesting and worthy of pursuit. NASA and JPL have simply capitalized on the implications of the idea to promote an endless convoy of geological survey craft. And so the so-called search for life goes on. And on.

  Indeed, the “Search for Life” has become NASA/JPL’s public relations catch phrase. Unfortunately, like most catch phrases, it rings hollow upon close examination. If anything is needed to catalyze planetary exploration—a field that stagnated with the demise of the Apollo program in the early ’70s—it is the discovery of life on Mars. But until science can muster the foresight and savvy necessary to exploit the strong possibility of Martian life, crewed missions to Mars will remain purely fanciful. Office politics must not be allowed to play a central role in the future of human Mars exploration.

  The prospect of life in the solar system has achieved considerable notoriety in the last decade, hastened by the discovery of microscopic “extremophiles” thriving deep below the Antarctic ice shelf. If simple organisms can live without sunlight at extreme temperatures, exobiologists argue, it’s reasonable to assume that our solar system is more hospitable than previously conjectured. Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example, hosts a global ocean encrusted with ice. The tidal stress of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system and almost a miniature Sun in its own right, has cracked the surface ice in a bewildering profusion of lines.