Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Homunculus, Tarantula and North American Nebulae, all irregular
clouds of gas and dust, illuminated by bright stars and each on
a scale that dwarfs our solar system. When astronomers mapped
the distribution of galaxies out to a few hundred million light
years, they found themselves outlining a crude human form which
has been called 'the Stickman'. The configuration is understood as
something like enormous adjacent soap bubbles, the galaxies
formed on the surface of adjacent bubbles and almost no galaxies
in the interiors. This makes it quite likely that they will mark out a
pattern with bilateral symmetry something like the Stickman.
Mars is much more clement than Venus, although the Viking
landers provided no compelling evidence for life. Its terrain is
extremely heterogeneous and diverse. With 100,000 or so close-up
photographs available, it is not surprising that claims have been
made over the years about something unusual on Mars. There is, for
example, a cheerful 'happy face' sitting inside a Martian impact
crater 8 kilometres (5 miles) across, with a set of radial splash marks
outside, making it look like the conventional representation of a
smiling Sun. But no one claims that this has been engineered by an
advanced (and excessively genial) Martian civilization, perhaps to
attract our attention. We recognize that, with objects of all sizes
falling out of the sky, with the surface rebounding, slumping and
reconfiguring itself after each impact, and with ancient water and
mudflows and modern windborne sand sculpting the surface, a wide
variety of landforms must be generated. If we scrutinize 100,000
pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something
like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy,
it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there.
A few small mountains on Mars resemble pyramids. In the
Elysium high plateau, there is a cluster of them - the biggest a few
kilometres across at the base - all oriented in the same direction.
There is something a little eerie about these pyramids in the
desert, so reminiscent of the Gizeh plateau in Egypt, and I would
love to examine them more closely. Is it reasonable, though, to
deduce Martian pharaohs?
Similar features are also known on Earth in miniature, especially
in Antarctica. Some of them would come up to your knees.
If we knew nothing else about them, would it be fair to conclude
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