Life on Mars

Life on Mars

NEWS: goo.gl/a3kAcQ



Humans have speculated for a long time about the possibility of life on Mars, so when NASA released detailed images taken by the mast camera of its Curiosity robotic rover, which landed on the planet in 2012, conspiracy theorists, unsurprisingly, went into overdrive. “People see shapes, faces, pyramids, insects – all kinds of stuff – on the surface of Mars,” says MacDonald. “And much as NASA points out that there’s genuinely nothing there, that these are shadows and tricks of the light, the more the conspiracy theorists react against that voice of authority. In fact, NASA are in a constant tug-of-war with conspiracy theorists.”

While many of the claims are humorous – one photograph supposedly contains a figure resembling Elvis Presley – some have gained traction, because they seem more “convincing”. Last year, for instance, it was widely reported that within one of Curiosity’s photographs of Mars’s barren landscape, two crumbling pyramids appeared to be visible – evidence, it seemed, of a lost civilisation on the Red Planet. “The Mars conspiracy theory is interesting,” MacDonald says, “because, unlike the moon landings, it isn’t suggesting fakery, but that actual alien life is being covered up by NASA. And because people are seeing pyramids and recognisable human forms, such as statues, the suggestion is not only that alien life once lived there, but also, perhaps, that the alien life form was us.”