After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  Coincidentally, it was none other than Face on Mars advocate Richard Hoagland who helped advance the concept that Europa’s liquid ocean is due to geothermal vents deep below the moon’s icy varnish. Arthur C. Clarke seized on Hoagland’s scenario in his novel 2010: Odyssey Two, depicting mobile plant-like organisms teeming beneath the surface, warmed by vents in the moon’s crust, cousins of the “black smokers” found deep in Earth’s oceans.

  Many of the cracks that fracture the Europan landscape have a reddish cast, and some astronomers explain the unusual coloration as organic residue boiling up from the veiled waters below the ice. The unspoken assumption that life in the solar system, if present, will necessarily be microbial has begun to deteriorate. Indeed, many interpret the unmistakable green cast sometimes observed on the Martian surface as primitive vegetation.

  Science has conveniently forgotten that of the three tests for microscopic life sent to Mars aboard the Viking landers, two passed with positive results. JPL, startled by the results, downplayed the positive readings, and present-day science books are unanimous that the indications of life were the result instead of exotic soil chemistry. While this is certainly a valid theory, it is not the final word, and there is a vocal minority who dispute NASA’s interpretation. Exobiologist Robert Jastrow, director of the Mount Wilson Institute, for example, has remained highly critical of NASA’s consensus.

  The presence of life on Mars raises tantalizing issues regarding the Red Planet’s past. If Mars is in fact alive, what evolutionary route is responsible for the apparent “bushes”? Terrestrial extremophiles are minute, little more than unicellular chemical factories adapted to rigorous environmental conditions. Could extremophiles be more complex, explaining the bushes? Or is Mars not quite as dead as we generally assume?

  In early 2003, NASA took an abrupt interest in possible life on Venus. This was surprising, since Venus is far less hospitable than Mars, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, crushing atmospheric pressure, and deadly chemical rain. For an agency that goes to extremes to downplay the presence of life on Mars, entertaining Venusian life-forms seems almost comical. But seen as a political maneuver, it begins to make sense.

  Venus was last visited by the Magellan probe in the 1990s, which pierced the planet’s thick cloud cover with radar, revealing a torturous, volcanically active wasteland. Because of its sheer inaccessibility, Venus has never interested the planetary science community quite as much as Mars and the Jovian planets.

  By transferring the prospect of life to Venus, NASA skillfully transferred public interest in exobiology to a planet it has no immediate plans to investigate. Venusian life-forms are by no means excluded from the realm of possibility, but if they exist they would by nature be orders of magnitude tougher than hypothetical Martian life, probably eking out a tenuous existence by remaining airborne. In the meantime, Mars will most likely be depicted as a hostile, lifeless world with nothing to offer science except its breathtaking geology.

  Evidence that Mars is far friendlier to life than once thought comes in the form of liquid, flowing water. Independent researcher Efrain Palermo catalogued a vast number of unusual dark “stains” on Mars’s surface. While JPL initially wrote them off as dust slides, Palermo wasn’t as certain. With the assistance of Jill England, he eventually encountered a stain shortly after its formation, and promptly published the before and after images on his website.

  Palermo’s stains are typically dark tendrils branching from the sides of mountains, hills, ravines, and crater rims. Palermo’s stains fascinated Mars watchers wary of JPL’s insistence that all such features were attributable to “dry” processes.

  In addition to suggesting a wetter, more hospitable Mars than allowed in the sanitized NASA version, the seeps promised to be a boon to exobiologists, who have argued that life—however simple—can probably be found anywhere there is water. The dark, tar-like appearance of Palermo’s seeps suggests the presence of photosynthetic organisms. Subsurface Mars may be a vast evolutionary test bed, with only the most resilient strains of life managing to establish a presence on the ultraviolet-scoured surface.

  Palermo tested his theory that the seeps might be liquid water by plotting their appearance on a global map of Mars. Significantly, he found that they tended to cluster near the equator—precisely what one would expect from melting underground ice. Richard Hoagland applied Palermo’s research to his Mars Tidal Model, which suggested a dynamic subsurface Martian environment.

  Despite the evidence Palermo and England presented at a thoroughly mainstream Mars Society conference, NASA geologists accepted the conclusions grudgingly—if at all. Even now that the majority of planetary geologists regard the prior existence of liquid water on Mars as fact, the theory of liquid carbon dioxide still has its supporters, despite the discovery of abundant frozen water by the Thermal Emission Imaging System instrument suite.

  Advocates of the CO 2 hypothesis depict Mars as a most unearth-like world where chemistry as we know it is akin to distant planetary bodies, such as the cryogenic moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Supporters of the carbon dioxide theory industriously expel indications that Mars was once an Earth analogue with oceans and an earth-like atmosphere.

  Typical “stains” radiating from a hill. Note that some stains are markedly darker than others, implying a more recent origin. Research by Efrain Palermo and Jill England has demonstrated that at least some of these peculiar markings are due to liquid subsurface water, a contention verified by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/Malin Space Science Systems.

  Perhaps this is an example of our innate fear of planetary catastrophe; acknowledging that Mars owes its present compromised condition to a cataclysmic event invites doubt regarding the permanence of our own biosphere. Like the threat of biowarfare or nuclear weapons, such fears are easily removed from the present. In the case of planetary disasters, we prefer to consign extinction level events such as comet impacts to the outer solar system, where their effects can only be seen from the reassuringly distant eyes of far-flung spacecraft.

  For example, the Shoemaker-Levy collision with Jupiter, during which a strand of cometary debris impacted the gas giant’s swirling surface and caused upwellings on Jupiter the size of the Earth, was viewed with an ironic, detached calm, as if the gushing wounds on Jupiter’s surface were graphics in some morbid virtual reality. Nonetheless, the Comet Shoemaker-Levy event revealed cracks in our aloof certainty that the Earth is essentially safe and permanent.

  Planet-destroying impacts are not the stuff of statistical studies, or mere horror stories from our planet’s tumultuous formation: they actually occur. And thanks to advanced instrumentation, we can watch them occur in real time, forever removing them from the bland world of the theoretical.

  The stains that streak Mars’s surface are short-lived tears of remembrance. Mars and Earth were twins, separated at birth by a disaster of almost unthinkable dimensions. If the Face is artificial, then Cydonia is a choked scream, a celestial graveyard where cultural identity becomes an echo of a horrific past.

  Resistance to the theory of a catastrophic die-off on Mars is intense, and alternative theories have survived a series of incarnations despite the consensus view that Mars was once Earthlike. Perhaps surprisingly, many mainstream planetary geologists support the idea that Mars was once a habitable analogue of modern Earth, complete with simple forms of life. But an outspoken minority has resolved to extinguish speculation about habitability.

  According to one antilife contingent, Mars owes its dried rivers and seas not to a habitable period in the remote past, but to a brief “hot” period unleashed by meteor impacts. This theory deserves an audience, but it introduces its share of new mysteries. On Earth, the mechanism of nuclear winter is reasonably well understood. If Earth was struck by a large asteroid (or subjected to a massive nuclear exchange), the resulting spume of dust would linger in the skies, blocking sunlight and pro
ducing dramatic cooling. Most paleontologists agree that exactly such an event killed the dinosaurs.

  Would a sustained asteroid bombardment on Mars heat the planet sufficiently to create the rivers and seas we now see, thanks to visual and spectroscopic observation? It seems more likely that the dust lofted into the atmosphere by such an attack would chill the planet before sizeable seas could develop—unless, of course, there were many such attacks over an enormous period of time, each impact melting permafrost and instigating volcanism (although it bears noting that volcanoes, for all of their fireworks, would actually contribute to rapid cooling as they deposited ash in the atmosphere).

  At least the bombardment theory for Mars’s seas doesn’t share the ad hoc desperation of the “liquid carbon dioxide” theory, which continues to retain staunch advocates despite the upsetting fact that Mars’s “hidden” water supply has been found frozen just beneath the surface.

  Where We Stand

  NASA’s announcement that probable liquid water might periodically flow in the depths of Valles Marineris launched a small flurry of excitement in the science news media. This is, of course, exactly what NASA’s timed release was supposed to do. Still reeling from the loss of two Mars-bound probes, NASA’s revelation that liquid water—and quite possibly life—exists on the Red Planet has redeemed the space agency somewhat and provided added justification for missions in the near future, among them the costly and difficult Sample Return Mission.

  Water on Mars is hardly news in the sense that NASA has treated it. Of the agency’s admission, the indirect evidence upon which the water announcement was based came from images acquired by the Surveyor satellite in 1998. But evidence of water on Mars is far older, dating to the find of an apparent waterspout or steam geyser on Mars twenty years ago (since popularized by Vincent DiPietro in the Society for Planetary SETI Research’s [SPSR] book The Case for the Face). Why, one wonders, isn’t NASA enthusiastically pointing to DiPietro’s evidence as corroboration for their “new” findings?

  The answer might be that DiPietro is associated with that most unsavory crowd that has dared to entertain the possibility that certain features on Mars might be artificial. In fact, his name provides the “D” in the now-famous D&M Pyramid, the perplexing five-sided structure located provocatively close to the even more well-known Face. NASA has ignored other significant evidence provided by planetary SETI researchers, despite the fact that acknowledging it would raise the evidential urgency of the Valles Marineris find. In 1998, after photographing a portion of Cydonia including the Main City Pyramid, SPSR geologists quickly pointed out that at least one crater in the region appeared to have a flat, reflective base consistent with the presence of ice. Even the ultra-skeptical Malin Space Science Systems paid an unannounced return visit to the Main City Pyramid later that year, taking a remarkable high-resolution photo that confirms the probable existence of ice in Cydonia.

  It has been noted that the SPSR find is actually more compelling than NASA’s hypothesized water flows in that it is much more accessible to surface missions. Anyone familiar with the research of Robert Zubrin and his “Mars Direct” strategy will quickly understand why: ice can be cheaply separated into oxygen and hydrogen, both of which are key fuel elements for Mars-based exploration.

  While NASA appears characteristically reticent to give credit to independent researchers, the existence of ice and water on Mars, regardless of location, remains a stirring discovery.

  Eventually planetary geologists will be left to wrestle with the stark truth: Mars was once Earth-like, and its demise is intimately bound to Earth’s own continued existence.

  The Exploded Planet Hypothesis

  Beyond Mars is the asteroid belt, a diffuse ring of rocky debris that has captivated astronomers and planetologists. Like an impossibly scattered jigsaw puzzle, the myriad chunks that comprise the belt seem to be part of a whole. But is this attributable to a planet that never formed, or to a planet that managed to form but subsequently disintegrated?

  Astronomer Tom Van Flandern suggests that the asteroid belt was once a fully formed planet rather than an “unborn” planet kept from accreting by Jupiter’s tidal force. Van Flandern suspects that Mars was originally the moon of his hypothetical “exploded planet” and cites a wealth of celestial esoterica to support his outré theory, which is known simply as the “Exploded Planet Hypothesis” (EPH).

  The EPH is frightening and cinematic. True to its name, it posits that Mars was subjected to a massive extinction-level event when its supposed parent planet catastrophically disintegrated. This theory seems to account for myriad unexplained characteristics observed throughout the solar system, including the orbits of comets. For example, Van Flandern believes that the Oort Cloud—the vast shell of cometary material that encapsulates the solar system—is actually debris from the explosive event that left Mars permanently scarred. Since no known phenomenon can cause a planet to explode, EPH researchers have attempted to devise a natural means that can account for Van Flandern’s hypothesis.

  Modern astronomy is much more comfortable dealing with gradual changes than the kind of planetary pyrotechnics explored by Van Flandern; the idea of exploding planets and other cosmic cataclysms usually elicit scoffing comparisons to the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose book Worlds in Collision proposed that the solar system had taken form in historical times, and that episodic planetary disasters can be found by careful reading of the Bible and other texts.

  Was Mars really once the moon to an unknown world, destroyed in a moment of convulsive violence? And, more pressingly, is there any way to reconstruct such an event, assuming something like it happened? Until we are able to explore Mars and the asteroid belt in detail, it’s unlikely that vindication for this theory will come anytime soon. But circumstantial evidence lends support to Van Flandern. For example, the hemispheres on Mars reveal a startling incongruity: one side of the planet is riddled with craters while the other appears relatively unscathed. This is consistent with the EPH, in which the brunt of Van Flandern’s disintegrating planet would have collided with its smaller moon. The fact that only one of Mars’s hemispheres reveals extensive cratering is evidence that the source of the impacts was local. This puzzling duality is neatly explained by the EPH, since only one side of a planet could have faced the presumed explosion.

  Writing in The Mars Mystery, guerilla historian Graham Hancock suggests that Mars was destroyed by an extinction-level impact that punched holes in the planet’s atmosphere and resulted in a planetary shockwave. As evidence, he cites the Tharsis Bulge, a scattering of shield volcanoes that includes Olympus Mons, the largest such feature in the solar system. On the opposite side of the planet is the vast Hellas Planitia basin, an ancient crater that may prove to be the epicenter of Hancock’s alarming planetary extinction scenario.

  Hancock argues that the impact that gouged out the Hellas basin transferred an enormous amount of energy through the planet’s mantle, resulting in the Tharsis uplift. An event of this magnitude would have had profoundly destructive effects on the Martian environment. Mars’s ozone layer would have perished as impacting debris punched through the atmosphere, and the ensuing pall of dust would have steeped the Red Planet in a “nuclear winter,” desiccating the biosphere by depriving plants of sunlight. Hancock pulls no punches depicting this cratering event (even though he sides with an asteroid collision as opposed to Van Flandern’s EPH), likening Mars’s death to being shot point-blank with a shotgun.

  On an archaeological note, if Martian astronomers recorded the impact event that formed the Hellas basin, we should be able to trace any remaining space debris, lest it cross paths with Earth. Monuments such as Stonehenge demonstrate that astronomical data can be successfully relayed over millennia. We might expect a similar preoccupation with preserving astronomical records from the Martians—especially if their demise was directly linked to a celestial phenomenon.

  This revisionist perspective on planetary formation makes our own ti
nkering with nuclear weapons seem inconsequential. In the apocalyptic cosmology of Van Flandern and Hancock, worlds tremble and die like the pantheon of gods they were named after.

  Intriguingly, Van Flandern’s theories extend to extraterrestrial intelligence. Specifically, he thinks Cydonia may once have been a sort of alien theme park devoted to megalithic sculpture. While this theory will remain untestable until the region is visited by a manned expedition, it seems weirdly prescient. If Cydonia is an extraterrestrial necropolis, it may indeed one day become a tourist attraction—an otherworldly Disneyland of inconceivable antiquity. If humanity succeeds in becoming a spacefaring species, it’s inevitable that the Face and D&M Pyramid will become landmarks of the Martian frontier; indeed, NASA has already drafted a topographical “hiking map” for prospective Face climbers. While most presume this to be a continuation of NASA’s condescending campaign against Face believers, others think NASA’s elevation-derived map reflects actual plans to visit the Face in person.

  Van Flandern’s colorful theory is worth considering, even if it seems to conflict with prevailing interpretations. Surveyor photos suggest massive, protective living quarters; it’s doubtful that the Martian civilization had time for luxuries such as theme parks. But it’s possible that the Martians, taking refuge from a meteor-scoured surface existence, deliberately transplanted as much of their culture as possible, either for their own sake or simply for posterity.

  Thankfully, the human species has never been faced with such a grim conundrum: When faced with probable extinction, what do we choose to take with us? Would we opt for the pragmatism of a 1950s fallout shelter or would we stock our new subterranean environment with irreplaceable cultural objects, creating, in effect, vast live-in museums?