Mike wrote:
>We don't know for a fact if there are or are not non-human artifacts on
>Mars or not, but anyone with two eyes and at least a 120 IQ can plainly
>see that the landscape at Cydonia is NOT a non-human intelligently
>constructed artifact. Since most people who are not blind can see this,
>we should stop wasting our breath and money dealing with a few people
>who refuse to beleive their own eyes.
If this is an architecture, it wasn't built by us and it's very, very old. It's interesting that you don't think it's prudent to "waste money" (a myth--we've already got a craft there ready to take pictures without costing anything) on taking a better look at structures "only a blind person sees," since some of the more intriguing archaeological finds right here on Earth have been made by satellites that reveal structure the human eye can't make out.
We're talking _at least_ thirty thousand years of Martian weathering. Of course artificial structures on Mars aren't going to jump out like, say, a picture of New York City from a few thousand feet. We can rightly expect the confirming details to be subtle.
Carl Sagan noted that the presence of intelligence on Earth is revealed by the _geometric_ aspect of its constructions. There are enough geometric anomalies in the Cydonia region, and elsewhere on Mars, that seem to fulfill this criteria. As such, they deserve close scrutiny and objectivity.
What were you expecting? The Chrysler building? Chrome and glass and satellite dishes? Another point: if the formations on Mars are artificial, they were probably built as self-contained structures; the enviroment on Mars hasn't been too hospitable of late. So looking for urban sprawl and so forth might be too anthrocentric an approach.
--Mac Tonnies