Slashdot Mirror
Interesting Structures On Mars
fear writes: "Meta Research has just released a new report on what they call 'Artificial Structures on Mars. Much of it is obvious nonsense ('animal-like shapes,' for example) similar to seeing things in clouds, but some structures look interesting: spots, tubes 1, tubes 2, track, 'vegetation', 'trees', triangles, strange lines, T. Which geological and climatic processes cause the formation of such structures?" Though I see no trees or vegetation, these are still fascinating images of Mars, and Meta Research looks like an interesting, off-beat site to check back to.
Perhaps there is a lot of natural gas in that area? Given the size of the river in your picture, that photo was taken from pretty high up and covered a fairly large area (tens of miles in each direction as a rough estimate). There could be a lot of natural gas in that area in the form of smallish pockets (which is actually how it is normally found aparently) and you need a fairly large number of wells and pipes to really exploit an area.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why don't you think these are pipelines? They look just like the natural gas pipelines out by where I live. The pipelines themselves are buried, but a pipeline access road runs over top of the line. These lines are laid down straight as an arrow through whatever terrain might be in the way. Bicycling on these roads is lots of fun as they generally go over mountains instead of through them, sometimes going over *VERY* steep hills (the kind where you have to get off the bike and more or less just pull it up behind you). If the roads are graveled in, then they would show up bright like that against a relativly dark soil.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
To listeners of the Art Bell show and to readers of Aliens, Aliens, Aliens, reports of artificial constructs on Mars is old hat. Richard Hoagland has been arguing the case for Mars for years. What's sort of interesting are remarks made by Arthur C. Clarke about those "crystal tubes". Add that to former government workers coming forward en masse claiming that the US government has a lot more information on extraterrial life that old videos of "Close Encounters", things are getting pretty interesting for UFOlogists.
The "tubes" appear to be an optical illusion. Look especially in "Tubes 1". Look at the shadows on the crater in the upper right, then look at the shadows in the "tube". It appears to be a valley, not a tube. The "tiger-stripe" ridging is the result of the cliff edge slumping. Likewise, the "track" is a slumped cliff edge. The triangles are shadows in a dune field.
cb
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
It makes me wonder if these guys really get out much. I mean, I don't have any schooling in geology, but I've been to some national parks and seen some crazy natural formations. I'd believe that all those pictures were of natural phenomenon if they were taken on earth. Add in that they came from MARS, and who needs space aliens to explain stuff?
Seriously. I could probably make these guys cream their shorts by taking some blurry black and white photos at Yellowstone and telling them they were "unreleased NASA photos of Mars".
The enemies of Democracy are
Matter of debate? "It's made by martians!" "Huh?" "It looks like a face; it must be made by Martians!" "Um... And that cloud over there that looks like a bunny?" "Martians made that too!"
Look, it is a simple fact that our brains are wired to see faces in things. Any arrangement of three dots in a circle ends up looking like a face to us. "Strongly" in this case just means "also has a dot for the nose." It's also a simple fact that on a planet the size of Mars (or Earth) you're going to see a lot of crazy things in natural formations. Of all the mounds of dirt on Mars, one looks a lot like a face. Yawn.
Sure, it _might_ be aliens... but the face itself isn't _evidence_ that aliens did make it.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's obfuscation, all right, but not where you think...
Keeping the mystery alive about the 'face' does two things: keeps interest in Mars high, and keeps all the conspiracy theorists from spending their time looking for the real conspiracies.
It's like Area 51 -- The government being all cloak-and-dagger about it keeps every high-powered telescopic lense focused on _it_, rather that the _real_ top-secret anti-gravity alien-technology aircraft flight test center, which is probably somewhere north of Walla Walla, WA.
The enemies of Democracy are
Dude, those triangles are just sticky-up rocks with shadows falling from the sun positioned at the top of the picture. My guess would be that it was setting at the time...
Either that or they are ALIENS!
Posted from the wireless couch.
See "All your base are belong to us"
spelled in Martian rocks.
On a more serious note: erosion patterns
on earth are well-studied and characterised.
Not so on Mars. 100 years from now every
formation on Mars will have an explanation.
one of you techheads should program a random terrain generator linked to a webpage and have a voting system to see if a person sees anything in that picture.
Sorry, but terrain is not formed by "random forces". Craters f.ex have a special known form, depending on what formed them, they can look like a bowl (wolcanic) or various impact craters (asteroids). But none of them would actually be with almost vertical walls and a flat floor as this one looks like.
Same goes for riverbeds and only rarely does landscape actually form something that resembles a triangle.
The way we should interpret those images is just "wow, neat, but like most reports it doesn't prove anything"
--
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D727
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Here's an example of the tubes -- look at the high res version, lower left corner.
One thing to note when we look at stuff that's come back from mars is that the most of the planet has not been viewed with the narrow angle camera at all -- for example, go here, select a region, then look at the clickable map -- the little light blue tracks are the places where the narrow angle views are available.
Came across this while randomly looking at the MSSS gallery -- view the "full size image".
Notice some parts look like the "tubes" that people show from mars photos, but when you see them merging into large dune areas they appear to be just sand dunes?
The basis for that is much shorter than the "thin atmosphere" tale may explain. Besides I would remind you that today's thin atmosphere carries clear isotopic signs of not being the original one that Mars could carry in its early times.
As someone who had been directly studying some features, I would note a few things:
Geometries? Yes, there are geometries. There are lots of them. But I would stop far from claiming artificialities on them. They can be the cause of very natural phenomena, having enormous dimensions. Such things are, for example, very large impacts that produce a "rombic wallpaper" pattern for hundreds of even thousands of kilometers.
Mars has tons of water. The Hell with what NASA claims as they have shown no worser in lies as in facts. Yes, this water is far less than what we have on Earth but it still manages to create small underground lakes and ponds in such places like South Arabia Terra. In the past it covered all Northern Hemisphere and even such higher landscapes like Arabia Terra.
Mars suffered of some weird phenomena that wiped out most of its surface water in very short time. Near Mons Olympus and in some highlands on Acydalia, there are clear traces of megafloods that nearly caved a good piece of Mars crust. In geological terms people name these things scablands, as for a similar landscape in Washington State of the same name.
There is a very high chance that some biology existed in Mars. And some features are very suggestive that some of it survived and exists nowadays in Mars. Note that I believe on NASA results as much as I believe that the Face of Mars was built by an alien mind. In fact the study of several documents and the tragedy of Professor Wolf Vishniac lead me to conclude that there were people on Viking Project that falsified results and produced a scientific analysis with a very biased weight. In fact, there were people inside the project, like Professor Horowitz, who were not only aggressively opposed to the prospects of life in Mars, but also tried to undermine the work of some members of the team, and specially the work of Vishniac.
If there were lill green men on Mars, than 99% of their world will be impossible to be seen as this world was completely washed out.
The Face of Mars is probably the product of a living being but one as much as dumb as our trees, corals or liquens.
There is a goemetry on Cydonia. But it is hard to determine its nature. The most probable is the pure result of physical forces of natural or near natural origin. Anyway the probability of terraformation cannot be put fully aside.
The most terryfying in Mars are not "formations" or "geometries" or even "faces". The most scaring are craters. For nearly 5 years I have been studying them and came into one conclusion. In Mars craters are far from being interpreted only as a natural phenomena. In some places their distribution correlates with landscape formations that are completely independent in origin. There is even one hill that possesses a ring of more than 10 craters sorrounding nearly 90% of its cliffs. Much like if someone pointed straightly to the sides of this hill. Curiously they are nearly equal in diameter for a large part of the hill.
NASA lies. Yes it lies. But not only. It also shuts down the voices of those who dissent. Or helps to shut them down. Why? No its not an alien conspiracy. Just some people claiming for "Good Science" love to be "more popists than the Pope himself". And maybe some governmental short-mindness and underground politics is also in place.
As for Art Bell, I have heard pieces of his show when I get up to take my dog outside in the morning, and for the most part its just as valuable as this article.
Oh come on. Art Bell can be way more entertaining than Slashdot. "Antichrist Line", anyone?
Fuck ya if ya can't take a joke.
C-X C-S
After examination, I still think it's a load of crap. I've had to make this point on other fora recently; it's getting silly.
Pick up any issue of Fortean Times. Examine its 'simulacra' section. Therein you'll find examples of everyday objects that look like people, things, whatever.
If it's got a beard, it must be Jesus
If it's got a quiff, it must be Elvis
Why is the "okay, so cydonia wasn't really alien. But this is" considered a valid argument for these structures being anything other than natural?
The unfiltered picture still looks like a face to me. Enough to be intressting anyway...
n ia /asom/artifact_html/slide.asp?image=7
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydo
Is Richard Hoagland's http://www.enterprisemission.com. One page with a few pictures of these Mars structures is http://www.enterprisemission.com/sequel.htm and others are at Glass Tubes, and Cydonia Triangle. Another site with tons of Mars surface feature images is http://barsoom.msss.com/moc_gallery/index.html.
Take a look at Picture 18:
a /asom/artifact_html/slide.asp?image=18
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydoni
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
This paper seems to be the most in-depth analysis of the face on Mars that I've seen. And it has a lot of interesting information. Almost wants to make me believe in the face again. :)
Its a good read.
At that site, I saw this interesting slide called T&!, which obviously connected with me as a censored version of "T&A". What an interesting surprise it was. And I was looking forward to even more Martian pr0n.
It's my job to look at satellite imagery of the Earth every day. And looking at these Mars pictures, I don't see many structures that I haven't seen in earth geology. The tubes (dunes or ravines), triangles (dunes), and other formations are all things you'd see if you looked in the right places on Earth.
The only features that did seem a little strange were the 'trees' images. While they could be lava flows, lava is usually not that fractal or inhomogeneous. They do look more like natural vegetation, although without scale on the images it's impossible to tell. So I'd dismiss immediately any claims of intelligent artifacts on Mars, but there may be some tantalizing possibilities for primitive forms of life.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
What about the aliens who arranged the stars to look like a sea serpent, a bear, a hunter, or a virgin (obviously with a sense of humor -- it's amusing to conteplate the provocative pose she's taking).
They even signed (or at least initialed it. This is sometimes calle the coathanger cluster, but clearly it's a fancy letter "T").
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
http://www.psrw.com/~markc/Articles/May7pred/index .html
Doesn't look much like a face to me.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
We're going to keep on debunking proof of aliens until they've taken us over.
Then, we still won't really believe it. We'll have all passed it off as some government conspiracy.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
On a smaller scale for geometric regularities, think about the hexagonal features of the Giant's causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Not to mention the ability of non-sentient life to form these straight line and circular structures too.
As for your final point, you might enjoy reading "The Olympus Gambit" by William Rollo. It's hard to get, but a fun read about just that possibilty.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
I can't get through to the site as well ("slashdotted", see other posts), but since I see Cydonia in the URL I doubt to see something really new there.
:-)
t m
Cydonia is the region of the famous "mars face" (which doesn't look like a face anymore on pictures with higher resolutions---thanks to Mars Global Surveyor) and there have been plenty of reports about the mars face and the other "artifical" structures around ("city", "pyramid" and so on.)
See here for an example:
http://www.psrw.com/~markc/marshome.html
Here's a mirror in Germany (if that's slashdotted also
http://home.t-online.de/home/zimmert/marshpge.h
First, the mineral composition of Mars is different from earth. This means new kinds of dust that pile up differently than the earth dust.
Second, Mars has quite a lot of microscopic dust, while on earth all that dust is quickly blown by strong winds to oceans.
Third, the martian low-pressure atmosphere and very peacefully changing weather causes the soil to move in a way very different from earth. On Earth, the weather is much more chaotic.
Seeing unexpected order is nothing special, as it is routinely generated by the self-organization of matter in open thermodynamic systems (such as "weather"). We can see it in stars, we can see it on the Sun, we can see it in the sand desers of Earth. And Mars is nothing but a huge and geologically diverse desert.
...if the artists or civilization who produced them had contact with all of the different earth lifeforms (espcially the aquatic ones) in the "enhanced" pictures, not to mention the pharoahs of ancient egypt.
it is however more likely, that in any given set of thousands of pictures of desert, espcially ones which are heavily impacted by extra-planetary bodies (like mars or the moon; whos surfaces are both effected heavily by meteor showers), you will find a picture of a dolphin, a scorpian, and probable one with your social security number.
there are most likely going to be good explinations for all of these photographs, even the ones which appear as those they can not occur naturally (like perpendicular lines, which may have been the result of two seperate carbon dioxide flows).
Amazing "facts" I heard on Slashdot for 100, Bob...
We really need a "psuedo-science hogwash" category.
On earth, at least, these perfectly natural formations crop up in Hawaii, California, Australia (Queensland and Victoria), Madagascar, Mauritius and probably lots of other places. So why could they not occur on Mars?
All it would need is a volcano with the right geochemistry, a bit of a slope and copious basalt flows.
Dave Bunnells web site will show you: http://www.goodearthgraphics.com/virtual_tube/virt ube.html
The 'tubes' reminded me very strongly of WAVE ROCK in Australia. There's no doubt wind erosion alone can create some pretty incredible shapes.
For me, these guys lost all their credibility when they failed to give accurate information about where the pictures came from. Why not link back to the original NASA pics?
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
Administrative contact: Michael Van Flandern
Technical contact: Kevin Van Flandern
Mouthpiece for: Tom Van Flandern, big-time Cydonia-face, um, "enthusiast".
Have yourself a browse through metaresearch.org and you'll find out all sorts of interesting things. Like, apparently the speed of gravity is "not less than 2 x 10^10 c", and therefore probably infinite.
Feel free to read some stuff on Jerry Pournelle's site about this guy.
Here's another URL that directly addresses the gravity-speed thing Tom Van Flandern loves so dearly.
If he were a bit more dedicated, he'd qualify as a real, quality, Usenet kook. I don't think he quite makes the grade, though.
For more on that moon thing, by the way, Fortean Times still have an old article up about it.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Yanno, if you took one flake of dead skin off your arm and slipped it into a scanning electron microcsope, it would look exactly like all of the above photos.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you look at a blob-shaped cumulus cloud hoping to see a giraffe, you will see a giraffe.
The presence of sentient life is easy to spot. Symmetrical placement of objects; Placement or creation of objects/material with straight lines and the presence of (near) perfect circular anything. None of these appear naturally according to any rules we can think of. The wind doesn't stack rocks, vegetation or fuel cells in convenient piles near one's hovel.
Wouldn't it be funny though, if Mars is in fact totally dead (like our moon) but we are stumbling across some OTHER civilation's space exploration program?
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Something that is missing from the images is a scale. This can be extremely important in interpreting images. A good example where scale can be miss-used was one of Graham Hancock's (wrote Chariot of the Gods and other twaddle) claims about a plateau in south america (I forget what it is called). Basically this plateau is very high, very large and very flat. it is also very dry. It is covered in marking, some of which Hancock interpreted as alien run-ways, and indeed from the photos they did look remarkably plausable.
The problem though was that the structures were only a few feet wide, he had neglected to put a scale on the images.
Basically, many features look like something they are not, when viewed in the wrong scale. Also these images have no context, ideally there should be a pair of images, the fine resolution ones, together with a larger scale one showing the context. Ask any archiologist and they will tell you, any object is next to useless out of context.
Before I start taking any of these sorts of things seriously, I want scales and context.
Paul Leader
I'm just waiting for them to find the face of the Virgin Mary. My neighbor's window does a pretty good Jesus in the wintertime, though at other times it looks like Satan.
Heck, if those Greek dudes could decide that those five stars look like a crab, and these seven look like a bear, then who knows what they would find on Mars?
Spots: ? Looks like they cranked up the contrast like crazy. Tubes 1: Pretty clearly barcan dunes in a valley.
Tubes 2: Ditto
Track: Ditto (ho hum)
Vegetation: Another one where it looks like they cranked up the contrast like crazy - these actually look like sunspots (?). If they're actually from Mars, they are lava flows.
Triangles: No clue - need to see in different light angles
Strange Lines: These are dust devil/tornado tracks - pretty cool, eh?
T: There are a bunch of these near Valles Marineris (which is a 10km+ deep version of these long, blunt-ended vallies. Their formation is a source of major contention. Probably a faulted graben feature.
Remember the "face" on Mars? That one was very effectively debunked with the MGS images. As long as you show individual images, you can pretty much see anything you want, but if you look at them in different light angles, you can start to piece together what the features actually are. However, if they actually showed those (or read the science), they'd have nothing.
That being said, I think that alot of what folks see looking at mars is sort of what you get looking at the old ink blot tests. you can see all kinds of things there, when all it really is, is ink on papaer. Probably most of it is that way.
On the other hand, if there were little green robots out there running around, a place like mars might not be a bad place for a base, although the asteroids would be better suited for most operations. So it spotting structures from space would not be unusual.
Of note in this discussion are this story from last week on ABC News, about a group of 20 ex military and others coming forward and saying that their were just to many weird things going on. You can see the real Video of the original press conferance here: http://www.connectlive.com/events/disclosureprojec t/ in two parts, (p1 = 1h45m, p2 = 0h55m)
If this comes up as legit, then I would be surprised to NOT find something on Mars. but alot of it is likely nothing at all.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This has been taken to heart by a well known site, famous in fringe circles as one of the more serious sites in the fringe science area:
Clarke Item One: http://www.enterprisemission.com/images/arthur.jpg
Clarke Item Two: http://www.enterprisemission.com/sir.htm
An Explanation?: http://www.enterprisemission.com/can.htm
Take with the usual pinch of salt.
Although I can see the possibility for weird politics inside nasa.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
#47, "arranged triangles" is quite clearly one of the Florida vote ballots that, had it been accurately interpreted, would have given Gore his rightful place behind Clinton.
It also happens to be punchcard #4 of the DeCSS code. The MPAA better follow up on that one, there is quite clearly a threat of loss of proportion as never before imagined.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Did they find the Starbucks logo yet?
Blarf.
Seriously, this is crap!
^]:wq!^M
Exclamation Point my patoot!! That's a slashdot symbol on Mars! CmdrTaco, is there something we should know?
Sickman's spinfusor catches Anonymous Coward by surprise.
I looked through what they had to show, and some of it was interesting, and they almost had me convinced that maybe they were on to something, and then they started pointing out animal shapes... FREAKIN' ANIMAL SHAPES! WHY would someone expend massive amounts of resources to make multiple Kilometre sized animal shapes? Consider the following:
/dev/null.
Mars has had this climate for long enough that some of the pretty little animals that are represented didn't exist in the forms that we have of them today when the climate is confirmed to be as it is now. So, this would mean that someone would have been 'artistic' enough to put the shapes on now, and now the climate eats away at them.
Also, if there is intelligent life on Mars right now, they would have to know what these animals look like in order to carve them into the surface of their own planet. They could receive our TV brodcasts, but then wouldn't you expect coca cola signs? they are a helluva lot more common than some quadraped mammal on TV. If they sent some kind of supersensitive probe here to look at what our world looks like so they'd have a picture, it is possible that we would have detected it's orbit, and probably shot it down or at least tried some form of stuff against it.
Basically, my argument is that unless the research is WHOLLY scientific, not "look at the pretty animals", we won't get anywhere with dumbasses like these people trying to publish stuff like this. All credibility of the earlier stuff is destroyed with the later stuff, and I'd be ashamed if I had been someone who contributed work to that and then saw that as the end product. I hope that this gets laughed all the way to
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
It must be the weekend.
When do we get stories on hair replacement systems that work? Or how about, amazing 400 pound babies. Or everyones favorite, the "Devil's face seen in smoke of burning building"
Is OMNI still publishing?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hmm, whilst on the topic of strange lines, I was wondering if anyone here could tell me what these strange geometric lines are that I saw when I was flying over Russia (at about 35,000 ft) on the way back to Europe after a holiday in Japan:
Big white diamond
Thick line
Grid lines
I do not think these are not roads, rivers, or pipelines - all of which have been suggested to me so far...
WARNING: Images are each 1.6Mb in size, and I'm not able to connect to the machine to upload smaller copies right now...
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Analysis accompanying several of the images (#49, #52) notes the appearance of "writing". You might wonder what the Martians might wish to communicate at such a grand scale.
"Coincidentally," back in February, I painstakingly "enhanced" the images of magnetite chains in Martian meteorite ALH84001, which NASA announced appeared to be of "biological" origin.
My Photoshop skills are "rudimentary," but, like those intrepid explorers at "Metaresearch," that did not deter me from improving these blurry images to reveal their hidden meaning.
What I have uncovered is quite startling. As you can see, those clever Martians were not content to communicate on the "meta" scale, they made sure to leave us messages at the microscopic level as well.
http://www.galiel.com/aybabtu/magnetitechain.jpg
(the "original" NASA images, clearly "modified" by "agents" of "THEM", can be found here:e s/magneticbacteria/bacteria.html
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01imag
The "press" release is here: http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01_11AR .html
The "truth" is out there, people. It's way, way, waaaaay out there.
P.S. (Ever notice how both "NASA" and "THEM" have four letters? Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it....)
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
One of the most incredible books to have been written about this is 'The Mars Mystery' By Graham Hancock. The book postulates at length about these phenomena.
Graham Hancock has a really well written, and comprehensive web page, with a page of links that specifically deal with this subject here.
There is a lot of information there, and on the linked pages, about recent discoveries, and not so recent discoveries. One linked page refers to a set of lunar photographs released by Nasa in 1966.
I am not sure personally that this is evidence of anything too fantastic, aliens, conspiracies or the like, but whether it is or not, it is interesting to note that there are some phenomena that do not fit into our currently accepted scientific world theory, and that the investigation into them is going on quite specifically outside of the mainstream.
As Paul K Feyerabend put it, "Success in science depends not only on rational argument but on a mixture of subterfuge, rhetoric and propaganda."
-- The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
You may think the site is a load of crap, but after examination you might think otherwise. Check you beliefs at the door...you might find something interesting...
Listen to my music.
The "strange lines" picure seems to me a lot like the dust devil paths I've read about. Them NASA folks have actually observed one such line being drawn by one of these small whirlwinds.
:-)
I'm too lazy to post a link. Do a google search on +mars +"dust devils" or something
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The authors of this site have said it all when they explain, in effect, that *...these images have enormous detail making possible several different interpretations.*
Several people have already provided excellent alternative interpretations, and all that I might add is that what they interpret as trees are most likely boulders. They have done this interpretation on the basis of what appear to be tall, straight shadows toward the upper right-hand corner. These look much more like changes in the exposure of bedrock or underlying soil in the prevailing downwind direction of large boulders.
Another point to keep in mind is that Mars has a gravitational acceleration about one-sixth that of earth, and many landforms may look unfamiliar on aerial photos because of the increased steepness of surfaces this allows.
This "face" lunacy has been debunked. Note also that you are NOT seeing original images of the "face", but instead "digitally enhanced" photos, which appear to have had a smiley face drawn on them. See the Mar/Apr SI for more details, as well as this special issue:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/
I thought that some of these pictures were uh... blurry and took some level of interpretation to see but most of these ok looking. But then again, take a look at how many shapes, forms, animals, etc. we've seen and made from the billions of stars in our skies (constellations)! I guess if you take enough pictures of stuff, you'll start to see things in 'em. Especially random hilly terrain pics. Good idea: one of you techheads should program a random terrain generator linked to a webpage and have a voting system to see if a person sees anything in that picture. Would make a great website... name it amisecretmartianface.com or something *snicker*.
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/