The Mars Mystery, Page 2

  The same is also true for the D&M Pyramid (named after DiPietro and his associate Gregory Molenaar, who discovered it). This five-sided structure stands about ten miles from the Face and, like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, is aligned almost perfectly north-south—toward the spin axis of the planet. Its shortest side is a mile, its long axis extends to almost two miles, it is almost half a mile high, and it has been estimated to contain over a cubic mile of material.20

  Commenting on the proximity of the Face and the D&M Pyramid, former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland asks a pointed question: “What are the odds against two ‘terrestrial-like monuments’ on such an alien planet and in essentially the same location?”21

  Hoagland has made his own detailed study of frames 35A72 and 70A13 and has identified additional possibly artificial features. These include the so-called Fort, with its two distinctive straight edges, and the City, which he describes as “a remarkably rectilinear arrangement of massive structures interspersed with several smaller ‘pyramids’ (some at exact right angles to the larger structures) and even smaller conical-shaped ‘buildings.’”22 Hoagland also points out another striking fact about the City: it seems to have been purposefully sited in such a way that hypothetical inhabitants would have enjoyed a perfect, indeed almost ceremonial, view of the Face.23

  The impression of a great ritual center, shrouded under the dust of ages, is enhanced by other features of Cydonia, such as the Tholus, a massive mound similar to Britain’s Silbury Hill, and the City Square, a grouping of four mounds centered on a fifth, smaller mound. This configuration—suggestive of crosshairs—turns out to be located at the exact lateral center of the City.24

  In addition, a group of British researchers based in Glasgow have recently identified what looks like a massive four-sided pyramid, the so-called NK Pyramid, 25 miles west of the Face and on the same latitude (40.8 degrees north) as the D&M Pyramid. “Looking at the whole of Cydonia and at the way all these structures are sited,” says Chris O’Kane of the U.K. Mars Project, “my gut feeling is that they have to be artificial. I don’t see any way that such a complex system of alignments could have come about by chance.”25

  O’Kane’s hunch is strengthened by the fact that “many of the structures are non-fractal.” In plain English this means that their contours have been scanned and assessed as artificial (rather than natural) by highly sophisticated computers of the type normally used in modern warfare to pinpoint the locations of camouflaged tanks and artillery in aerial reconnaissance photographs.

  “What we have, therefore,” sums up Chris O’Kane, “is an improbable assortment of anomalies. They have what look like planned alignments, they’re found in distinctive groups, and they’re non-fractal. All in all, we have to say this is highly unusual.”26

  Nor are Cydonia and Elysium the only sites to have yielded photographic evidence of unusual and apparently artificial structures. Other Martian features that are decidedly non-fractal include a straight line more than three miles long defined by a row of small pyramids; a single pyramid poised on the edge of a gigantic crater; extensive rhomboidal enclosures in the south polar region; and a weird, castle-like edifice rising to a steeple more than 2,000 feet high.27

  GALLERY OF MYSTERIES

  In 1996, during the last year of his life, Carl Sagan made a curious comment about the Face on Mars. This structure, he said, was “probably sculpted by slow geological processes over millions of years.” Nevertheless he added:

  I could be wrong. It’s hard to be sure about a world we’ve seen so little of in extreme close-up.28

  Sagan urged that forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars should make special efforts “to look much more closely at the pyramids and at what some people call the Face and the City…. These features merit closer attention with higher resolution. More detailed photos of the Face would surely settle issues of symmetry and help resolve the debate between geology and monumental structure.”29

  We do not share Sagan’s confidence that high-resolution photographs will resolve the debate. Until astronauts land on Mars and explore Cydonia, even the best photographic images are likely to leave room for doubt—in both directions. Matters are further complicated by the fact that NASA’s policy statements concerning the pyramids and the Face have frequently been bizarre and contradictory. Smacking of a secretive or even dishonest agenda, these statements have inevitably provoked some observers to make mental links between the “monuments” of Mars and the UFO controversy (Roswell, Area 51, alleged abductions by aliens, etc.). The effect has been to fuel the paranoia—particularly rampant in the United States—that a massive government cover-up is under way.

  We will return to the pyramids and the Face of Mars in part 2 and investigate the allegations of conspiracy in part 3. Our immediate aim in part 1 is to explore the planet itself and to enter its gallery of mysteries.

  The greatest mystery of all is why Mars died.

  2

  Is There Life on Mars?

  AN astronomer received the following telegram from a newspaper editor: WIRE ONE HUNDRED WORDS COLLECT. IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? The astronomer wired back, NOBODY KNOWS, repeated fifty times.1

  That happened before the era of space exploration. Then, in July 1965, NASA’s first successful probe—Mariner 4—was maneuvered into a fly-by of Mars and sent back 22 black-and-white television pictures showing the mysterious planet to be formidably cratered and, apparently, as completely lifeless as the Moon. In subsequent years Mariner 6 and 7 also flew past Mars, and Mariner 9 orbited it, sending back 7,329 pictures (1971–1972). In 1976 Viking 1 and 2 went into long-term orbits during which they sent back more than 60,000 high-quality images and placed lander modules on the surface. Three Soviet probes also investigated Mars, two of them reaching its surface.2

  Up until early 1998, the question “Is there life on Mars?” could still only be answered, “Nobody knows.” With more data at their disposal, however, scientists have formed a range of opinions on the matter. Despite the planet’s devastated appearance, many now agree that extremely simple bacteria-like or virus-like microorganisms could have survived beneath the surface. Others feel there is no life at all there now, but do not rule out the possibility that Mars could have had a “flourishing biota” in some distant past epoch.

  A key element in the widening scientific debate, as we saw in chapter 1, is that a number of possible microfossils and chemical evidence for life processes have been detected in chunks of rock from Mars that have reached Earth as meteorites. This evidence must be set alongside the positive tests for life processes, also reviewed in chapter 1, that were carried out by the Viking landers.

  TESTING POSITIVE

  The story of the search for life on Mars has many puzzling elements. Among these is NASA’s published official conclusion that the 1976 Viking mission

  found no persuasive evidence for life on the surface of the planet.3

  Dr. Gilbert Levin, one of the principal scientists involved in Viking, cannot accept this. He carried out the labeled-release experiment described in chapter 1, which produced an unmistakably positive reading. He wished to announce it as such at the time, but other colleagues at NASA overruled him. “A number of explanations have been proposed to explain the results of my experiment,” commented Dr. Levin in 1996. “None of them are convincing. I believe that Mars has life today.”4

  It appears that Levin was overruled because his test contradicted negative results in other tests that had been devised by more senior colleagues—thus potentially calling the judgment of those colleagues into question. Particular weight was put on the fact that Vikings mass spectrometer had detected no organic molecules on Mars. Yet Levin has subsequently shown that the probe was equipped with a badly underpowered mass spectrometer. It had a minimum sensitivity of ten million biological cells in a sample, compared with sensitivities down to just fifty cells that can be achieved by other instruments.5

  Levin was encouraged to speak out only after NASA’s ann
ouncement in August 1996 that apparent traces of microfossils had been found in meteorite ALH84001. This evidence strongly supports Levin’s own view that there has been life on the Red Planet all along, despite the extremely harsh conditions that prevail there.

  Life is hardier than we had ever imagined. Microbes have been found in nuclear fuel rods inside reactors and in the depths of the ocean where there is no light.6

  Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary science at the U.K.’s Open University, agrees: “I passionately believe that conditions on Mars were once conducive to life,” he says. He too points out that certain life-forms can survive in the most inimical conditions: “Some can hibernate at temperatures well below zero and there is tentative evidence for life at 150 Celsius. How much more tenacious can you get?”7

  LIVING IN EXTREMES

  Mars is bitterly cold, with an average temperature across the planet of minus 23 C, plummeting to minus 137 C in some locations.8 There is an acute shortage of life-giving gases such as nitrogen and oxygen.9 In addition, atmospheric pressure is low. A person standing at “Mars datum,” an agreed elevation selected by scientists to serve as the equivalent of sea level on Earth, would experience an atmospheric pressure no stronger than the pressure exerted on Earth at 18 miles above sea level.10 Under these low pressures and temperatures there is and can be no liquid water on Mars.

  Scientists do not believe it is possible for life to emerge anywhere without the presence of liquid water. If this is true then evidence of past or present life on Mars must strongly imply that the planet was once endowed with large quantities of liquid water—something, as we shall see, for which there is overwhelming evidence. That the water has since been lost is not in doubt. However, this does not necessarily mean that no life could have survived. On the contrary, a number of recent scientific discoveries and experiments have demonstrated that, on Earth at least, life can flourish in just about any conditions.

  In 1996 British scientists drilling more than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, found “a thriving subterranean world of microscopic creatures…. [These] bacteria show it is possible for life to survive under extreme conditions where pressures are 400 times greater than at sea level and where temperatures can reach 170 degrees centigrade.”11

  Other researchers exploring active submarine volcanoes at depths of more than two miles have found animals from a phylum called Pogonophora grazing on colonies of bacteria that thrive in seething, mineral-rich plumes rising from the seabed. Normally only a few millimeters long, these wormlike creatures are here freakishly enlarged to huge sizes and seem to be mimicking the mythical salamander that was supposed to live in fire.

  The bacteria on which Pogonophora feast are almost equally outlandish. They do not rely on sunlight for energy, since none filters down to these depths, but use “the heat of near-boiling water bubbling up from below the crust.” They do not require organic detritus for nourishment but consume “minerals in the hot brines.”12 Referred to by zoologists under the general category of “extremophiles,” such creatures include autotrophs that eat basalt, use hydrogen gas for energy, and extract carbon from inorganic carbon dioxide.13 Other autotrophs

  have been found three kilometers below the surface, where the only source of heat is the heat of the rocks…. They have been found at temperatures of 113 C…. They have been found … in streams of acid; in toluene, benzene, cyclohexane, and kerosene; and at 11,000 meters down in the Marianas Trench.14

  Creatures of this kind might conceivably have survived on Mars, perhaps locked in the 10-meter deep layer of permafrost that is believed to underlie the planet’s surface,15 perhaps in suspended animation, for immense periods of time. On Earth, dormant microbes inside insects preserved in amber for tens of millions of years were successfully revived by scientists in California in 1995 and placed in a quarantined lab.16 Other viable microorganisms that have been isolated from salt crystals are more than 200 million years old.17 In laboratory experiments: “Bacterial spores have been heated to boiling point and cooled to −270 degrees C, which is the temperature of space between the stars. When things get better they come to life again.”18 Likewise there are viruses that “can be activated in cells even if they are inert outside such bio-organization.” In their inert state these frightening little entities—smaller than the wavelength of visible light—are almost literally immortal. On examination they are “extremely complicated having a genome composed of 1.5 × 104 nucleotides.”19

  As NASA continues its exploration of Mars, scientists believe that there is a very real possibility of cross-contamination. Indeed, cross-contamination could have occurred long before the epoch of spaceflight. Just as meteorites from the surface of Mars have reached Earth, it is considered highly probable that rocks “splashed off” Earths surface by asteroid impacts have reached Mars. It is conceivable that the spores of life itself could have been carried to Earth on meteorites from Mars—or, vice versa, that the spores of life could have been carried from Earth to Mars. Paul Davis, professor of natural philosophy at Adelaide University, points out that “Mars is not an especially hospitable planet for terrestrial-type life…. Nevertheless, some species of bacteria found on Earth might be able to survive there…. If life had become firmly established on Mars in the remote past it could have gradually adapted to the present harsher environment as conditions slowly deteriorated.”20

  HIGH-STAKES DEBATE

  Perhaps by coincidence, NASA chose a time when the implications of the survival of microorganisms in extreme environments were being widely discussed by scientists and in the media to announce the discovery of microfossils in meteorite ALH84001. According to Dr. David McKay, who led the team investigating the meteorite:

  There is not any one finding that leads us to believe that [there was] past life on Mars. Rather it is a combination of many things that we have found…. [These] include an apparently unique pattern of organic molecules, carbon compounds that are the basis of life. We also found several unusual mineral phases that are known products of primitive microorganisms on Earth. Structures that could be microscopic fossils seem to support this. The relationship of all of these things in terms of localization—within a few hundred thousands of an inch of one another—is the most compelling evidence.21

  Many scientists do not find McKay’s evidence so compelling. Among those who disagree are researchers at the University of Hawaii who argue that the alleged life-forms are not biological but mineral in nature and “must have formed from a hot, highly pressurized fluid that was squirted into fractures.”22 Dr. William Schopf, a world expert on ancient terrestrial microfossils, also believes that nonbiological processes were involved. He points out that NASA’s “Mars microbes” are 100 times smaller than any microbes found on Earth and bear no signs of cells or cavities, which would be crucial indications of life. Like the Hawaii researchers, he thinks the structures are more likely to be minerals.23 Ralph Harvey of Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, claims that detailed electron microscopic analysis of the alleged microbes “shows a crystal pattern uncharacteristic of life-forms.”24 And researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles have concluded that “the conditions the rock was formed in are not consistent with the theory of life.”25

  In the “pro-life” camp, the work of Professor Colin Pillinger is particularly notable. With his colleagues Dr. Monica Grady and Dr. Ian Wright of London’s Natural History Museum he was involved in the discovery of organic material in another Martian meteorite, EETA 79001, and published papers about it in the scientific journal Nature before NASA’s announcement of possible microfossils in ALH84001.26 The British researchers initially stopped short of saying that they had found evidence of life. But then in October 1996, they reported that the organic material in the meteorite “contains 4 percent more carbon-12 relative to carbon-13 than exists in neighboring samples of carbonate material. This suggests that the carbon was formed from methane produced by microbial activity.” Similar tests
on ALH84001 (a fragment of which had been provided by NASA to Pillinger and his colleagues) produced the same carbon isotope ratios.27

  Of particular interest was evidence that the carbonates in EETA 79001 were far younger than those in ALH84001—not billions of years old but perhaps just 600,000 years old.28 “Geologically speaking,” as one scientist has pointed out, “this is sufficiently recent for there to be a good chance that life may still exist in protected areas on our planetary neighbor.”29

  NASA’s Johnson Space Center continues to maintain that the evidence from the Martian meteorites could be “arguably the biggest discovery in the history of science.”30 In London the Times predicted that the discovery was the first step in a process “that will profoundly alter our perceptions of the universe and our place in it.”31 In the United States, John Gibbons, the White House Science adviser, commented, “Our notion that life is rare may be revised. Life may be pervasive in the universe.”32 NASA chief administrator Daniel Goldin agrees, stating: “We are on the doorstep to the heavens. We are now on the threshold of establishing, Is life unique to Earth?”33 The same thought was also clearly in the mind of President Bill Clinton. On the day that the discovery was announced he addressed the nation on television, observing in lyrical tones that confirmation of NASA’s findings, if and when it comes,

  will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our world that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and as awe-inspiring as can be imagined…. As it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses others even more fundamental.34

  We can easily understand why populist politicians might wish to identify themselves with the quest for life on Mars. As Colin Pillinger sums up: “This is what people care about. When I talk to them they only ever want to know if there was life on Mars.”35