Need a new city break destination for your next holiday? Mars could be your answer.
Yes, really. A truthseeker claimed this week to have discovered the ‘clearest example yet’ of a Martian city.
‘This is by far the most detailed view of a Mars city to date,’ Joe White, who runs ArtAlien.TV, said of the 4km wide city buried under 50ft of sand.
‘Many of the smaller buildings are buried in sand but larger ruins can be seen.’
‘Raised roads, walls and T junctions all over it. Structures inside walled compounds,’ he added, pointing to high-quality images of crisscrossing dunes.
Images of this grid-like pattern of pin-straight ridges and right angles were posted on GIGAmacro, a database of photographs composed of at least one billion pixels.
White attributed the discovery to Greg Orme, an Australian professor who has long combed the King’s Valley of Libya Montes at the Martian equator for signs of ‘artificiality’.
The Libya Montes is a highland area that includes a face-like formation that’s sometimes called ‘crowned face’. (Though, experts say this might just be an example of how we often see ‘faces’ in ordinary objects.)
Across the region, White pinpointed various grooves, bulges and shapes that he says appear to be roads and other types of infrastructure.
White speculates the rounder, egg-like formations in the images may have once contained water for irrigation, when water is precisely sprayed to help crops grow.
NASA has spent decades trying to figure out if there is – or was – life on Mars. Space officials have described some of the stranger-looking formations on the planet as ‘polygons’, as White notes of the King’s Valley.
‘There is even a 90ft bridge centre right. The elevated roads are four to five metres wide and over 60ft high on the east side of the city,’ he continued.
‘One of the roads even goes up the Kodiak mountain near the centre of the city. Some seem to go through it, suggesting a tunnel.
‘Elon Musk will have a bit of a surprise when he gets there.’
Musk, the billionaire owner of X and the rocket company SpaceX, has long said he wants to help bring millions to Mars to build a self-sustaining civilization.
No one, however, has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect an astronaut’s boot to land on the red planet until the 2040s, and that would be after a nine-month voyage.
And it would take a fair bit of time to colonise Mars, a planet covered by barren terrain, toxic soil, freezing temperatures, dust storms that blot out the sun for weeks and air that is impossible to breathe.
And cost a lot too. Even shooting an Apple up to Mars would cost hundreds of pounds.
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