Face on Mars 2 - The sequel

wccmarsface@msn.com · 2003-04-16 11:01:58

Shaun Barrett's 14 April entry is very interesting. While we can never be sure how any sort of "telltale" signs of "obvious" artificiality signatures might play out hundreds or several thousand millenia after the permanent end of our current global societal infrastructure here on very dynamic earth, there is one geophysical activity that has been going on repetitively over at least the last two million years and should repetitively continue for probably the next hundred million years: the Pleistocene ice ages. I say ice ages rather than "the Great Ice Age" because recent geological evidence has shown as many as 20 massive glacial advances and retreats during the Pleistocene. In the last glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago in North America, the "Great Wisconsinian Ice Sheet" covering much of the North American continent reached as far south as St.Louis, Missouri (at the same time most of Europe was ice-covered during the simultaneous Wurm III Glacial Maximum). Around 11,000 years ago the Wisconsin/Wurm III Glacial ended, after a duration of roughly 100,000 years, with the beginning of the present Holocene Interglacial, which is why our wonderful global cooperative flourishes so well. There is recent evidence to suggest that the transition between glacial to interglacial stages, and vice versa, occur far more rapidly than previously thought, leading to rapid glacial meltoff and the runoff resulting in massive continental flooding the likes of which we've never seen in current historical experience. The next glacial advance, which some observers think is due or perhaps even overdue, will literally pulverize a great many continental interior cities and towns, superhighways, dams and whatever else. The massive floodings of the following glacial retreat might, not only significantly raise global sea levels, but erode or otherwise obliterate whatever's left along continental coastal margins. We've been around as an emergent global society only over the last 250 years or so. Some distant future archeologist 300,000 years from now might not have much of anything to go on in regards as to the former existence of "some unknown previous technical civilization in distant antiquity" that could be construed as enough marginally conclusive evidence that might convince a general concensus. Very likely, Human Beings being what they are, some distant future general concensus would be busy endlessly debunking the anomalous physical or even chemical traces that might seriously pose not insignificant challenges to whatever might be their epistemological construct. Finally, regarding Richard Hoagland's suggestion of the 500,000 years ago timeframe for the "anomalous" landforms in Cydonia (or, isn't it now somewhat revised to 330,000 years in accordance to refinements in Hoagland's ancient martian obliquity studies?), perhaps much of the infrastructure has been severely degraded from possible cosmic scale catastrophic agencies to even being buried in a lot of windblown dust which could completely cover what highways or roadways there might have been. Why don't we just go to Mars with real people for a very detailed looksee? Real, honest, hard-working people, with no particular axes to grind, on the ground on Mars. People who are willing to do the science (and do it right) and are prepared to live with the results regardless of where the chips might fall! Regardless of however what we might find on a tantillizingly somewhat earthlike world of which we really know next to nothing about simply because we've never been there in person might affect the socio-political process back home. Whether Hoagland is right (it is not impossible that he might be!), or whether any of you fine people are: who cares! Let's go to Mars in person with real people at least just for a looksee! wccmarsface@msn.com

Shaun Barrett · 2003-04-16 20:22:33

Thanks for the interest in my April 14th post, Wccmarsface.

If Hoagland has moved the date of construction of the Cydonia 'buildings' forward to about 330,000 years ago, then it only makes it harder for me to understand their apparent isolation and degradation. Engineering on that scale, and the infrastructure one expects would have to accompany it, ought to be evident in a more obvious and less ambiguous way.

The roadworks I was talking about happen to be in Australia, in an area which has not been buried in ice for a very long time. I believe the remains of campfires 40,000 years old have been found here and there is disputed evidence of human occupation dating back maybe 60,000 years.
Without actually looking it up, I would guess that the ice sheets have advanced and retreated more than once in this time period (?). And yet, the relatively ephemeral evidence of an extremely low-tech society has left its unambiguous mark - though I admit it took people 'on the ground' to detect it because it would almost certainly be missed from an altitude.

Large areas of Earth's surface, now bearing the scars of enormous modern earthworks, have escaped glaciation these past millions of years and will probably escape it for millions more to come.
It still seems to me there must surely be indisputable and plainly obvious evidence of intelligent engineering in these areas a half million years hence. A probe sent by a Martian civilisation in AD 500,000, with the same resolution as the Mars Global Surveyor, would be able to prove intelligent life once flourished here without the need for Martian scientists to make the journey in person (though I'm sure they'd be keen to! )

Maybe if Hoagland had dated the Cydonia 'constructions' to half a billion years ago, instead of half a million, it would be easier to believe the dilapidated condition of these so-called monuments.
Then again, I suppose you can always come up with some good reason for the wear and tear - ancient warfare, extreme climatic change or asteroid bombardment for instance. However, the more 'ifs buts and maybes' you're obliged to introduce in order to patch up your hypothesis about anything, the less plausible that hypothesis becomes!

Not that I've dismissed the Face all together as a possible artificial structure! There are still a few aspects of its appearance which I find intriguing. In fact, if random erosion has created the Face it will be almost as amazing to me as if they find it to be intelligently designed!
:;):

Palomar · 2003-04-16 20:38:33

Not that I've dismissed the Face all together as a possible artificial structure! There are still a few aspects of its appearance which I find intriguing. In fact, if random erosion has created the Face it will be almost as amazing to me as if they find it to be intelligently designed!
:;):

*Yes. The aspect of "The Face" (the 1976 image) which struck me the most at the time (11 years old), and still draws my attention, is the ::symmetry:: of the "facial" features. I'm defining symmetry as "beauty or harmony of form based on a proportionate arrangement of parts" (online dictionary). It looks like a mask molded after the human face. It appears perfect. There didn't appear to be noticeable irregularities of form; again, it was so symmetrical. That's the aspect of "The Face" which still intrigues me.

The recent images aren't all that striking; however, Mars gets plenty of sandstorms and we know the abrasive nature of sand. Of course, I don't know if the features (whether natural or not) could be worn down by sand blast that quickly (i.e. from the image as it appeared in 1976 -- striking -- to the "fuzzier" appearance most recently).

I do admit to being intrigued by "The Face."

Could a natural process create such symmetry on as large a scale as that?

--Cindy

Shaun Barrett · 2003-04-18 01:48:09

Hi Cindy!
If I understand your post correctly, I think the smoother looking earlier images of the Face, which you describe, were only that way because the resolution was poorer.
In fact, the left side of the Face was in considerable shadow and there was much debate as to whether there was as much symmetry as some people thought there was. Before the more recent pictures were taken, the artificiality brigade were saying that when the symmetry was revealed, the case would be closed.
Hoagland and company, on the other hand, were predicting no symmetry at all! They maintained that the shadowed side of the Face would be leonine in appearance. The Face would, in other words, reflect the man/lion duality theme so common in human history.

You may want to check out the site I have linked below, if you haven't already done so, to see who turned out to be right. (You may have to scroll down at least 25% of the way to view the half-and-half facial pictures at their best.)
It looks like Hoagland was closer to the truth than the 'symmetricists'! The left side of the Face, when folded over to cover the more hominid-looking right side, does indeed look strikingly like an eroded lion's face - at least to me.

One of the ways to bolster a hypothesis, of course, is to use it to make a prediction and see if it predicts accurately. In this case at least, Hoagland succeeded brilliantly. His hypothesis gained strength in my eyes - though I still need more proof before I swallow the whole story!

If all this is 'old hat' to you because you've already seen all this stuff, I apologise. But, if you haven't, it makes you think a bit, doesn't it?!

THE LINK

dicktice · 2003-04-18 08:50:40

If Richard.C. Hoagland didn't exist, we'd have to invent him, if only to keep the Mars Odyssey "Themis latest image" pedantry being spoon-fed by Arizona State / JPL from boring us (the tax-paying Public) to death. But in my estimation he's pretty much a "Johnny-One-Note" (that's the title of an old popular song, kiddies) ... with no further claim-to-fame beyond analyzing "The Face" to death ... and castigating poor old NASA's batch of neophite mission engineers for ignoring the seemingly endless haraungues he puts out on The Enterprise....

wccmarsface@msn.com · 2003-05-14 01:35:35

If I may, the foregoing is something of an addendum to the discussion raised by Shaun Barrett's various entries re the marsface controversy....I have recently read the Mars Tidal theory paper by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara on the TEM website. What impressed me was their idea that Mars, at one time, was a natural satellite of a somewhat larger world that catastrophically broke apart for whatever reasons around 65 million years ago. Of course, I have heard of this before regarding the exploded planet hypothesis championed by one Dr. Thomas C. VanFlandern: both researchers believe that, for one thing, the puzzling hemispheric Mars datum dichotomy is best explained by what happens when a large natural satellite is liberally blasted when, again for reasons yet to be discovered, the parent world goes kaboom on an unimaginably cosmic scale! Irrespective of what might cause such a vast cosmic catastrophe, both VanFlandern and Hoagland appear to be very confident in the proposal that we have at hand ostensible ruins of a long extinct technical civilization scattered hither and yon about the martian surface. VanFlandern thinks the terminal event took place 3.2 million years ago whilst Hoagland and Bara suggest 65 million years, give or take a decade, before the 21st Century! All right? Well, if I am not totally mistaken, Hoagland believes the old relics littering Mars (my favorite planet, I'll have you know) were intrinsically the product of us, or, at least ancestors that could only be homo sapiens sapiens, albeit in very distant antiquity indeed. Query: are we missing something here re the established (terrestrial, of course!) evolution of anatomically modern humans? Could an alien species of primate, nonetheless a placental mammal, have independently evolved on the presumably exploded "twin" of earth right at the very end of the Cretaceous Period here on earth when the largest terrestrial placental mammal was no bigger than a housecat? If, for the sake of argument along such seemingly fantastical lines (at least in consideration of the sensibilities of most ostensibly rationally minded people), our race, though we really don't know for sure where and whence we came to be, especially since it could be argued, perhaps, that all the extinct terrestrial hominids could be examples of a kind of parallel evolution of an unrelated taxonomic lineage, might we have just somehow drifted upon the scene a few hundred thousand years ago (like by way of some kind of relativistic spacecraft [or several such] that might have fled the massively blown away original homeworld with just enough survivors that could take up permanent residence upon that veritable "twin" world that lies just a bit closer to the sun millions of years in their future; I suppose, if they had planned it in this way, they could have selected the future timeframe of 65 million years where-in they might feel confident enough that a robust and diverse mammalian evolutionary period has progressed sufficiently enough to ensure the continued survival of those who were lucky enough to escape the great cosmic cataclysm, and thus, in so doing, averting irreversible extinction? In the speculative consideration of the foregoing, could Hoagland have really hit on something when he asserts that human history may be enormously greater than most, by far, could even dare to imagine? If be this truth, however unlikely any one of us might be willing to step out that far on that cracked branch, as fascinating as this might be for people who can really imagine the veritably unimaginable, isn't all this just a wee bit spooky?! wccmarsface@msn.com

Shaun Barrett · 2003-05-14 05:45:40

Responding to wccmarsface, Hoagland's so-called 'Tidal Theory', which has Mars as an erstwhile satellite of a much larger planet which either exploded or was demolished by a cataclysmic impact, is so thoroughly speculative at this stage as to be hardly worth discussing.
There must be countless objections to such a scenario, the most obvious being the question of what forces could cause a large planet to explode. I believe the asteroid belt was once thought to be the debris of a planet which self-destructed but, even in today's nuclear age, no plausible mechanism can be suggested to explain such a destructive event.
Hoagland has placed the hypothetical demolition of planet X at 65 million years ago because that's when a 10 km asteroid is widely believed to have helped eliminate Earth's dinosaurs. But planet X's demise, either by way of a staggering explosion or impact, would surely have resulted in enormous numbers of huge fragments careering around the inner solar system - not just one or two 10 km specimens. Assuming the unlikely survival of any terrestrial lifeform more advanced than a bacterium, we would doubtless be observing the unmistakable evidence of a colossal celestial bombardment of both Earth and the Moon from that period in recent geological history. As far as I know, there is no such evidence.

As for homo sapiens sapiens being an import from somewhere else, there is today a major stumbling block for the adherents of that hoary old chestnut of a theory. It has been established that all life on Earth is based on the same 20 amino acids, including us. In fact, it is now established that we share most of our genome with other mammals .. at least 95% of it in the case of chimpanzees! (Some researchers place the figure at 98% or more - but this is only a minor difference of opinion.) Modern genetics also allows us to trace, quite accurately, the times at which various branches of the primate family parted company with each other - it really is that powerful a tool. And we fit into this scenario very neatly.
There seems to be absolutely no reason to think humans are anything but home grown!

Hoagland's Face on Mars is fascinating, at least to me, but so much else of what he proposes doesn't stand up to close examination.
The 'face' on the terminal building at Baghdad airport is just an embarrassment! How those aerial shots of Baghdad can be seriously associated with anything to do with Mars is totally preposterous and, in pretending otherwise, Hoagland plays havoc with his remaining credibility. (With many, of course, he has none anyway! )
Maybe the Face really is just a rock and maybe Hoagland really is just a nut!
But that Face .... ?! Hmmmm! :;):

wccmarsface@msn.com · 2003-05-15 10:17:39

Oh yes, Shaun, insofar as the commonality of the 20 amino acids as a baseline, but, if the late Sir Fred Hoyle is right about his panspermia idea, would it be likely, perhaps, that that 20 amino acids baseline could find itself upon a plethora of suitable worlds, where-in all life in a given solar system would trully be "kissing cousins?" As regards as to what could blow up a terrestrial type planet, what if a group of really hateful or otherwise evil personages had made the ultimate doomsday device like you see in science fiction, like maybe they made lots of anti-matter separated from matter by some sort of containment field whilst still enveloped in some big hollow cylinder? Shaun, do you think it is reasonably possible that we, sometime within our lifetimes, will witness at some level a 10,000 megaton global nuclear exchange that at least TTAPS was so worried about when their book "The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War," came out in the early eighties (of course, I had to have read that one which ended up keeping both myself and my beloved Brenda awake into the wee hours!)? In my view, I'm still hedging a bet within good reason (I fervently hope) that nuclear war will never happen, at least on such a global scale. However, Shaun, let us keep thinking and support the effort to send men, women, and equipment to Mars by at least 2015 (You've heard it here first: they will be bringing someone with some formal training in archeology!). wccmarsface@msn.com

Yang Liwei Rocket · 2004-03-05 08:15:14

This guy was on CNN.

yes, the photos of the face were great

but it has been proved to be false,
sorry no life on mars

Hoagland to Speak in Washington on Bush Decision to "Return to the Moon and back to Mars"!
Richard Hoagland appeared on CNN to promote his research into the "face on mars" mystery

in April 2004

another crack pot theory

Rxke · 2004-03-14 07:19:11

April 2004? I honestly thought it was a 1976 picture of Hoagland, judging from the hairdo...

Norden · 2004-03-23 05:07:37

Hi

As many do not beleive in the face on mars, it is their own decission. Nasa never actually researched long enough on the faces on mars (and even other strange objects)

There is not one specific face on mars, there are about twelve. Even near the face in the cydonia region there are pyramids, i've seen very clearly photographs, on it several pyramids together and other structures around it (even in formation!)
Walter Hain has been studying these objects allot, even the formations, the heights (by shadows) and seemed to stand in a mathematically correct formation. What i also would like to say is that they created a map of mars with laser equipment, the computer marked some of the subjects unnaturally.

The subject really touched me.

Even old cultures from our world have many connections with mars. Their gods all have connections with mars and most of them are all falling down on earth (space shuttles?)
as desciptioned.
The old cultures even knew about most of the planets in our solar system, planets that where discovered 100 years aggo with a telescope. It all has strange connections with mars.
The subject cannot be ignored.

I would not let the human observations take control (what is true for you and what's not)
Even if it all sounds impossible it still could be possible.

Marineris Sauce · 2004-03-24 22:00:29

No offense, but there is a book called, 'A Travellers guide to Mars' by William K. Hartmann. At Chapter 32, page #336 there is a marvellous narrative concerning the whole 'myth' of Cydonia and its infamous 'face'. Give it a read just for fun. There isn't enough space here for me to comment on what is said but suffice to say the controversy seems to be laid to rest, at least for most of the scientific community. I suppose though that will make little difference to the faithful.

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Re: Face on Mars 2 - The sequel

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Re: Face on Mars 2 - The sequel

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Re: Face on Mars 2 - The sequel

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