Lost Cities on Mars?

[palliard]

Well, let's get back to astronomy, more people seemed interested in that. Here's a topic we can all bicker about because it involves astronomy, politics, conspiracy theories, and internet crackpots.

I'm speaking of renowned "Face on Mars" guy Richard Hoagland, and his latest analysis of the pictures coming back from the Mars orbiters:

www.enterprisemission.com/LostCitiesofBarsoom.htm

If you don't know what a Barsoom is, skip down to the first coda.

Hoagland is a specialist at interpreting photos to support his theories, but one must admit, these things do look interesting. Are those building foundations? Doesn't nature abhor right angles? Hoagland builds an interesting case comparing satellite images of Mars and Earth.

Well, actually, nature doesn't really abhor right angles, it just avoids them where they're inconvenient. Beachrock is a good example of a substance that naturally fractures into cubes, it's common along the beaches of Australia and is the stuff the famous "Bimini Road" is made of.

Assuming these pictures are real (and I'm sure they are, Hoagland gets them from the same NASA sources that everyone else gets the same pictures from), what are we looking at?

Before you get too carried away with speculation, you should look at the Bad Astronomer's debunking of Hoagland:

www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/index.html

And particularly, as it applies to image analysis, have a look at the "Glass Worm":

www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/glassworm.html

Still and all, I must admit to being intrigued.

[coolc]

Wow that's pretty cool. I must admit, some of those do look curiously similar to actual ruins found on Earth, but the concept of Mars having life on it at some point, almost very probable due to all of the studies on water once being on the surface and it's position relative to the sun, is still very unbelievable. If they haven't already, they should to send a probe to scout those areas that look so much like ruins, we might be surprised at what we find.