Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars
that they've been manufactured by scale-model Egyptians living in
the Antarctic wasteland? (The hypothesis loosely fits the observations,
but much else we know about the polar environment and the
physiology of humans speaks against it.) They are, in fact, generated
by wind erosion - the splatter of fine particles picked up by strong
winds blowing mainly in the same direction and, over the years,
sculpting what once were irregular hummocks into nicely symmetrical
pyramids. They're called dreikanters, from a German word
meaning three sides. This is order generated out of chaos by natural
processes - something we see over and over again throughout the
Universe (in rotating spiral galaxies, for instance). Each time it
happens we're tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker.
On Mars, there is evidence of winds much fiercer than any ever
experienced on Earth, ranging up to half the speed of sound.
Planet-wide duststorms are common, carrying fine grains of sand.
A steady pitter-patter of particles moving much faster than in the
fiercest gales of Earth should, over ages of geological time, work
profound changes in rock faces and landforms. It would not be too
surprising if a few features - even very large ones - were sculpted
by aeolian processes into the pyramidal forms we see.
There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, where a great stone face a
kilometre across stares unblinkingly up at the sky. It is an unfriendly
face, but one that seems recognizably human. In some representations,
it could have been sculpted by Praxiteles. It lies in a landscape
where many low hills have been moulded into odd forms, perhaps by
some mixture of ancient mudflows and subsequent wind erosion.
From the number of impact craters, the surrounding terrain looks to
be at least hundreds of millions of years old.
Intermittently, 'The Face' has attracted attention, both in the
United States and in the former Soviet Union. The headline in the
20 November 1984 Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid
not celebrated for its integrity, read:
SOVIET SCIENTIST'S AMAZING CLAIM: RUINED
TEMPLES FOUND ON MARS. SPACE PROBE DIS­
COVERS REMAINS OF 50,000-YEAR-OLD CIVILIZA­
TION.
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