Rocks on Mars
If we may choose to believe that these rocks mean something wild and something beyond what we know to be possible — not that we should, but simply that we may — it can change absolutely everything.
Last year, I had the chance to ask cosmologist Brian Swimme about a vivid example he used to explain his idea that everything in the universe shares an unrelenting ambition to evolve.
Termed boulders on Mars, his analogy conveys the idea that, latent within the most unimportant bits of matter is the carbon-assembling capability to form complex organisms; that inanimate chunks of molecules can eventually reassemble into even the most complicated forms of mammalian life due to the creationary force that fuels every system to evolve.
“To wake up to the power that’s in a rock. How ever one thinks of consciousness, the rock had power of becoming these intelligent apes.”
- Brian Swimme
This concept was also explored in an interview I had conducted with Michael Wong, who led a team of scientists to conclude as much with their Law of Increasing Functional Information, arguing that all biotic and abiotic life is destined to evolve in complexity, from apples to moons.
The idea has generally been around for millennia, dating back to the times of Democritus. But it’s only of late that we seem to be on this trajectory to understand the transformative nature of evolution much deeper; to see it less through an objective mode of biophysical explanation and more as a subjective progression of all organized systems of ‘life’.
What it signifies is that the swirling particle assemblies and re-assemblies through time — those that grow and evolve like clots of possibility and navigate multiplex avenues of probability — they mean something, if not everything.
So as a decade-old satellite shot of a small ridge from the Cydonia region of Mars has recently been making a lot of waves online, it has the potential to function as a perspective-breaking paradigm, injected right into the most existential veins to our existence.
Granted, it’s different from Swimme’s analogy, which had to do with increasing complexity in a physical sense; this has to do with how our interpretation of something — of a distant rocky square — can help evolve our perspective.
Maybe less discernible, but just as potent, with an extremely powerful proposition at play.
“The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question — the search for who we are.”
- Carl Sagan
The grainy monochrome shot, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at a few hundred miles above the planet’s surface, features four ostensibly perfect corners dusted over by the Martian sands.
The formation is situated on a plateau overlooking the Cydonia region, on the northern hemisphere that borders the plains of Acidalia Planitia to the west and the Arabia Terra Highlands of the east.
This area contains numerous flattop mesas which, like on earth, have been especially kind to preserving impressions of past civilizations; likewise, they’ve been especially kind to the imagination, containing the right kind of ingredients for vibrant geographical expressions.
But there’s a lot more to the story.
Mars, with its 687 day (sol) year and 140 million mile distance from the sun (in comparison to our 100 million mile distance), is in a favorable orbit around our host star.
Evidence convincingly suggests that Mars had been habitable 4.5 billion years ago (only half a billion years before the earliest known Earth lifeforms took shape).
With a thick atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, many regions of Mars (Cydonia included) would have mirrored the temperate zones of Scandinavia. Cydonia itself was a coastal region of an ancient Martian ocean which would have a moderating effect on the local climate, and data suggests a very active water cycle amidst the intercepting valleys of the region.
Per Frédéric Schmidt of the University Paris-Saclay, who co-authored a seminal paper on the circumpolar oceanic stability on Mars:
“Our simulation revealed that three billion years ago, the climate in much of the northern hemisphere of Mars was very similar to present-day Earth, with a stable ocean… Our result contradicts theories claiming that such a northern ocean could not be stable. It also increases the time period for an Earth-like climate on Mars.”
Erosion of the valleys is highly suggestive of abundantly flowing water, which itself is suggestive of significant rain near the equator of Mars during this time.
So, at the least, the stage for life is well set; what’s missing so far are the actual footsteps.
Unless this enigmatic square serves to change everything.
Regardless of what the square turns out to be, what matters most is what we stand to gain from the prospect of what it might mean — a total redefinition of everything we know about ourselves and our place within the whole of the universe.
And so we fixate our gaze upon the possibilities that encircle this square — we run the probability generators that drive our dynamos of meaning and extrapolate outwards as we try to digest the reverberating revelations.
Because what we seem to be coming to terms with — through each new discovery and each new milestone — is that reality is far more subjective than we care to appreciate.
That, in life, nothing is objectively known with any absolute certainty, so we have to clutch at meaning and truth from a subjective point of reference.
And in such a world where subjective truth seems to win out time and time again, everything is more malleable, and our navigation through the fields of probability more limitless; we thus come to learn that we ourselves can largely determine the parameters of possibility.
“Life as we know it is a dynamic system of all these different molecules playing together and reinforcing one another, keeping the entire system stable and able to resist perturbations, learning about its environment and being creative and curious.”
- Michael Wong
The statistical likelihood that this may be a chance fluke of nature, similar to the tessellated pavements of Tasmania or the square-faceted structure of lobster eyes, may never come to be as low as the chance that this innocuous assembly of 90 degree angles signifies a civilization that existed millions of years and miles away from our own place in the universe.
So if we may choose to believe that these rocks mean something wild and something beyond what we know to be possible — not that we should, but simply that we may — it can expand our horizons and disrupt so many paradigms of existence, if not for any other reason than to simply infuse more fun into the whole story of what we are.
Interview with Professor Schmidt coming soon
