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People have imagined Mars as an abode of life for so long — centuries at least, probably much longer — that NASA’s recent self-styled “significant” announcement of strong evidence for liquid water long ago was, let’s face it, pretty ho-hum to both space enthusiasts and the general public.
So where did the breathless Internet rumors come from? Where was the evidence for current water, such as brine springs? Are those microscopic threads really just debris from the airbags, and if so, why do they seem to keep appearing even as Spirit moves farther away from the landing site? And aside from the junk that the two rovers brought with them and strewed across the landscape (didn’t the NASA science team expect to be confused by some of that?), are there any other shapes seen in the images that look, well, organic?
Sure, intellectually, it really is “significant” that the evidence is now in that there’s a location somewhere off Earth where “life as we know it” could once have survived if it had developed at all. It’s the first, but by no means the last, such location that our explorations will encounter.
But a habitat that’s only “potential” is empty, and leaves an emptiness inside us too. There is a seductive urge to fill that emptiness with imaginations in the suggestive shapes that the rovers have been seeing.
The one that intrigues me most — so far — was referred to by "New Scientist" magazine’s veteran space writer David Chandler with the delicate, neutral phrase, “resembling a piece of curly macaroni.” It’s also been called “the rotini pasta,” and similar gastronomic analogies.
There’s a word for what it might be. Everybody knows it, but it’s too risky to use it lest you get bundled up with the crackpot Martian visions of bunny rabbits, ski jumps, ribbed sandworms, capital letters, and stone faces that have been flooding the Net.
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