After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

Artifacts on Mars have even found their way into two major movies. Total Recall, based on the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, features a pyramidal mountain that contains an ancient atmosphere factory, to the surprise of the Martian government. The Martians in Total Recall are long gone; the most we see of them is a gnarled handprint on the console that activates the factory.

  In the film’s original screenplay, the Martians are depicted as ruthless galactic philanthropists who purposefully build dormant atmosphere factories within reach of budding intelligent species. The pyramid is a test of a species’ collective self-preservation: pushing the button ensures a spot in the “galactic club,” while failure to do so sets off an artificial nova that wipes the target species from existence.

  Given the billions of years in which intelligence could have saturated our galaxy—indeed, should have, according to physicist Enrico Fermi—one wonders if something like a cosmic censoring mechanism could be made to work, given an arbitrarily high technology. Civilizations who fail to pass the tests constructed for them by unbelievably ancient intelligences could thus be weeded out like so many roaches drawn into an unassuming trap.

  Could the Cydonians have fallen victim to a similar trap after failing some infinitely subtle cosmic indoctrination? In astronomical time, our niche of the galaxy may have entertained a vast number of extraterrestrial civilizations (or their emissaries), all flickering from star to star like moths to streetlights, leaving inexplicable Fortean residue in their wake. Mars and Earth may be bound by a heritage altogether harsher than anything yet imagined by Hollywood or science fiction writers.

  We may be so conditioned to the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence that we’re incapable of recognizing it as such, even when it’s staring us—quite literally—in the face. This would account for the so-called Fermi Paradox, which begins with the premise that the universe is favorable to intelligent life, and that intelligent life will make its presence known, either through direct visitation or by engineering works glimpsed from afar.

  In Brian DePalma’s movie Mission to Mars, which explicitly takes place in Cydonia, astronauts confront the Face itself, which imparts its secrets after responding to a radio transmission. They learn that a former Martian civilization was responsible for the Cambrian explosion on Earth and are given an unmistakable warning about the risk of extinction-level impacts.

  Total Recall was released before the Internet existed in recognizable form, and has received scant attention from conspiracy theorists. The Web was in full swing when Mission to Mars debuted, and the ensuing commentary in the online fringe community was a predictable, if irretrievably tangled, riot of paranoid speculation. Richard Hoagland led the movement, citing the established connection between Disney, the film’s producer, and the military-industrial complex.

  Presumably, Mission to Mars was yet another installment in the government’s covert acclimatization program. Drawing on a culture rife with extraterrestrial memes, Mission to Mars, with its commitment to the reality of the Face, was the most coherent statement about Cydonia offered outside of the online microculture. From the perspective of a psychologist engaged in a long-term conditioning process, the fact that the film was pure fiction would be immaterial. Memes eagerly take on lives of their own once out of laboratory custody.

  The Signature of Technological Progress

  Obvious erosion on the Face, City Pyramid, and Fort reveals that the Cydonia anomalies are essentially fragile. Therefore it’s doubtful they are the work of a super-science of the sort depicted in science fiction. (The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, is found to be indestructible, to the chagrin of the scientists attempting to analyze it.)

  It’s likely the Cydonia complex represents a technology not exceedingly out of synch with our own. Indeed, if the Face was sculpted by an indigenous culture, then it’s possible Cydonia was constructed using ancient Egyptian-level technology.

  Vast earthworks in Europe and North America remind us that scale was not a limiting factor to so-called primitive civilizations. The vast terrain-sculptures of the Mound Builders and artificial landforms of England, built without the assistance of flight, pose challenges even to contemporary engineers.

  The prospect of an alien culture threatens to overturn the relatively tidy technological progression noted on Earth. For example, is it possible for an essentially Egyptian culture to have space flight? With only terrestrial history with which to seek comparisons, we discover how alarmingly little we know about the phenomenon we blithely label “progress.” Anachronistic artifacts provide tantalizing evidence that the progression from primitive to high-tech wasn’t quite as seamless as has been accepted by mainstream archaeologists.

  It’s entirely possible, for instance, that the ancient Egyptians possessed some form of electric lighting, as suggested by both artwork and the curious lack of smoke stains on tomb ceilings. If true, this doesn’t redefine Egyptian culture, but it certainly loosens our conceptual framework. Perhaps technological anachronisms are the rule rather than the exception.

  Of course, it’s all too easy to indulge in a stew of alleged technological marvels á la Erich von Däniken (whose standards for evidence, never exactly high, degenerated upon publication of subsequent additions to his Chariots of the Gods series). But the numbing familiarity of such claims shouldn’t scare objective researchers from looking closer. Anomalous artifacts will almost certainly tell us nothing about ancient astronauts. But they will most definitely tell us about the technological arms race that is the human legacy.

  The bearing of this argument on potential Martian artifacts is clear: Cydonia offers an unprecedented opportunity to test our assumptions regarding technical literacy and progress. If seemingly anachronistic quantum jumps in technology are the rule, then to what extremes can this trend lead? Is it fallacious to try to attribute the Face on Mars to a terrestrially equivalent culture?

  Technological sophistication roughly corresponds to the necessities imposed by the local environment. If conditions on Mars were dire, then it’s plausible that the Martians responded with an appropriately high degree of technological might (given enough time to develop ideas into actuality). Cydonia may embody an unseemly fusion of low-tech with high-tech, a sort of “future primitive” milieu with no recognizable counterpart in Earth’s history.

  Coincidentally, just such a future primitive environment may be needed for long-term space voyages, in which plants are grown for food and oxygen. Colonists aboard a homeostatic space colony would lead a largely agrarian existence, all too aware of the delicate balance between nature and human survival. It’s no accident that designs for lunar and Martian research bases invariably include a greenhouse.

  The Martians, faced with a disintegrating environment, may have found themselves forced to take up a form of farming. This may seem anachronistic for a potentially space faring culture. But we know very little about the ecology of space flight: our interplanetary probes have all been unmanned, and our excursions to the Moon were short enough that the astronauts were able to carry food, water, and oxygen with them instead of having to extract them from the lunar soil.

  The International Space Station is another case in point. Consisting of a labyrinthine network of pressurized “cans,” the ISS must rely on steady life-support rations from Earth in order to operate. Growing plants for life-support purposes has never entered into our manned space program, as it seems to have little if any short-term relevance. But if humans are eventually forced to seek shelter from a nuclear strike or meteor impact (or other catastrophe), we will inevitably adapt to a future primitive dynamic. When there is no “home” to return to for supplies, a culture (just like a resourceful individual) must make do with whatever’s available.

  An alternative to retreating into self-sufficient habitats in the wake of a planetary disaster is to “terraform.” Long-term plans for the colonization of Mars involve melting the planet’s polar caps to thicken the atmo
sphere, increasing air pressure and the planet’s ability to retain heat. Genetically modified plants, strewn across the deserts, would hasten this process, converting carbon dioxide into oxygen and lowering the planet’s albedo so that less sunlight is reflected into space.

  After thousands (or perhaps merely hundreds) of years, Mars could be remade into a facsimile of its former self, with enough warmth and air pressure for running water. One wonders if the Martians flirted with terraforming. Perhaps various plant-like features such as the Dalmatian spots and banyan trees are the remains of an ambitious plan to rejuvenate Mars’s biosphere, if only for a relatively short while.

  Another tactic to “remake” Mars might be to populate it with robotic chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) factories. These factories would move from spot to spot, producing CFCs from Martian soil before moving on. Given enough time, this would warm Mars’s atmosphere. The mobile factories could even be programmed to reproduce themselves using native materials. An ever-growing number of atmosphere machines could produce the desired effect much more quickly.

  CFCs are discouraged on Earth, as they speed up global warming. But on Mars global warming is exactly what is desired. The trick would be to maintain a comfortable temperature without destroying the planet’s climate—and prospect for life—in the process.

  Yet another way to render Mars livable is to create highly localized “oases.” “Steering” a comet into the planet’s crust could produce a crater of sufficient depth to retain tenuous atmosphere. Building a dome over the crater rim would result in a crude but workable biosphere.

  Intriguingly, there is one Martian crater that appears to have been modified in a very similar manner. Sagging against the crater’s edge is a hemispherical mass with a strange, granulated texture. Dubbed “Epcot Center,” its hemisphere could be the partially deflated remains of a crater habitat. An opposing argument—that the curious hemispherical mass is simply accumulated sand—fails to explain its uniform, fine-scale surface detail.

  Synthetic perspective analysis suggests that the Martian Epcot is a genuine anomaly. Whether it’s the crumpled remains of a geodesic enclosure or a geological fluke is unknown—and will perhaps remain unknown until manned investigation.

  There are other craters on Mars with peculiar characteristics: some have square edges and unlikely extensions that recall mining operations. One is starkly heel-shaped, with multiple ascending tiers of differing texture. There is no crater rim in evidence and no clear center to the heel-shaped depression, which is covered in rectilinear formations. Another crater features an unusual trapezoidal platform left of center, although similar features on Earth suggest that this is a volcanic phenomenon.

  In Cydonia, there is a small crater with an apparent winding ramp leading to its lip. Nearby is one of the ubiquitous tubes, its rungs erupting from the ground like vertebrae in some gigantic spinal column. At the base of the tube is a small ellipse composed of equidistant bright spots; the superficial resemblance to Stonehenge is obvious and equally troublesome for a strict high-tech interpretation of the Cydonia complex. Stonehenge was a solstice marker built by a culture without the automated paraphernalia of modern observatories; if similar features exist on Mars, does this imply that the Martians who built them were necessarily primitive? This conjecture is belied by the telltale signs of structural detail in Cydonia, up to and including the radial matrix surrounding the eye on the Face.

  Engineers assure us that structures capable of withstanding thousands of years of erosion must be high-tech; even the Pyramids will ultimately weather away (barring renovation), fading into the desert until indistinguishable from natural features. That we are able to see anything at all unusual in Cydonia is circumstantial evidence that we are either seeing relatively recent artifacts—which, given what we know about Mars’s formation and life cycle, seems wildly improbable—or extremely well-made artifacts constructed from a very capable technology.

  The deeper we look, the less distinct the boundaries between low and high technology become. Perhaps truly sophisticated civilizations embrace critical aspects of both. If aliens ever visit us, a tour of the proverbial mothership may expose an elegant and unexpected mating of cultivated living forms and the industrial chrome finish depicted in so many science fiction movies.

  Richard Hoagland has discovered a strange surface formation he identifies as evidence of “organic technology.” The bizarre feature sports fibrous-looking “ribs” and a sort of pleated “shell,” reminiscent of a phantasmagoric giant beetle. While the impression is indeed fossil-like, attributing the bug-like mound to technology is an incredible leap. Still, the notion that a Martian civilization could have engineered such a monstrosity is inspiring. If the Martians were technically sophisticated, could they have unleashed biological “machines” to transform the frozen sands into breathable air? Hoagland’s example, whatever it is, provides a glimpse at Mars at its weirdest. At the very least, anomalists should be on the lookout for possible manufactured air vents and other facilities that could have been used to expedite terraforming.

  The Martians may have emerged from their Cydonian bunker in an ill-fated attempt to reconstruct their erstwhile biosphere. Their failure to do so may account for the rubble-strewn wastes revealed by Viking and Pathfinder.

  If Mars is to live again, the effort will likely be ours alone. The technologies to melt the planet’s polar ice caps and revitalize the parched soil are within reach. We face two primary opponents—the obstinate wastes of Mars itself, and the loud ticking of our own evolutionary clock.

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  The Martian Moons

  The enigma that is Mars has never been limited to anomalous surface formations. The planet’s moons, Phobos and Deimos, have played a controversial role of their own, exciting speculation that they were in fact large artificial satellites. As late as the 1960s, some astronomers seriously entertained the notion that Phobos and Deimos were hollow, based on their unusual orbital properties. For example, Phobos and Deimos are the only moons in the solar system that orbit their parent planet faster than the planet itself rotates.

  Details of Mars’s two moons first came to light in a most unexpected place—Jonathan Swift’s 1726 fictional work Gulliver’s Travels. In this book Swift demonstrates a keen foreknowledge of the moons’ orbital characteristics more than a hundred and fifty years before their discovery in 1877. Swift’s source, if any, has remained mysterious, although astronomers have offered plausible explanations for what seems to be inexplicable prophecy. With Mercury and Venus moon-less, and Earth with one moon, Swift may have naturally assumed that Mars would have two moons as a matter of course.

  Carl Sagan, who had vocally discussed the possibility of finding extraterrestrial artifacts in our solar system, revived interest in the Phobos/Deimos controversy prior to the Mariner missions of the 1960s. According to Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii in Intelligent Life in the Universe, “Conceivably, the capture and hollowing of a small asteroid may be technically more feasible than the construction in orbit of an artificial satellite with material brought from the surface.”

  Mariner, which photographed Phobos in unprecedented detail, showed that Phobos was a misshapen moonlet with no obvious artificial adornment. Since Phobos and its smaller companion moon looked natural enough, questions of possible artificiality were quietly discarded despite the moons’ unique characteristics. One wonders what Sagan and the Mariner team expected to find if in fact Phobos was an ancient alien relic.

  Natural or not, Phobos presents its share of mysteries. Its surface is covered with shallow grooves that seem to originate from Crater Stickney, an enormous impact caldera. In Cosmos, Sagan notes that if the meteor impact that resulted in Stickney had been much larger, Phobos would have disintegrated. Some have suggested that Stickney is not a crater, but an artificial opening. The grooves, rather than being the product of tidal stress or some other natural process, could be exactly what they look like—roadways of some kind, perhaps for excursions onto Phobos’ s
urface from the inhabited core.

  In the 1970s, Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier became the manifesto for the “L5” movement, which insisted that overpopulation could be cured by a vast human expansion into orbital colonies. O’Neill demonstrated that the colonization of space itself was more amenable to human survival and comfort than the colonization of planets such as Mars. Moreover, he showed in exacting detail just how the United States could begin the move off-planet, financing its expansion by beaming electricity back to Earth in the form of microwaves.

  Some of O’Neill’s designs for space colonies were superficially crude. In theory, a mineral and water-rich asteroid (hollowed out and equipped with a self-sustaining biosphere) could function as an ideal home in space—with the added benefit that using a novel technology known as “mass launching” could maneuver it. A conventional mass-launcher is essentially an electromagnetic runway. Electrical pulses are used to sling projectiles through a series of conductive hoops.

  O’Neill wasn’t the first to propose the use of mass launching in space. Arthur C. Clarke had proposed electromagnetically accelerated mass launching as a cheap way of hurling unmanned payloads from the lunar surface. Clarke favored the idea for translunar shipping because it was cheap; mass launchers are simple but effective and require none of the hulking launch infrastructure used by contemporary space-ports.

  But O’Neill was attracted to the mass launcher’s potential as a propulsion device: when applied to relatively small celestial bodies such as asteroids, mass launchers theoretically could not only fling “buckets” of manufactured goods to far-flung clients but push the asteroidal habitat through space. Each launch would impart a very minute burst of kinetic energy to the asteroidal mobile home. Enough launches, strategically phased, could be used to steer a space habitat through vacuum. And the “fuel” supply—the asteroid’s own mass—would be effectively inexhaustible from the perspective of a human crew.