From Martian utensils to the man in the moon…

From Martian utensils to the man in the moon…our imaginations will always get the better of us says Russ Swan 

I’ve been seeing things. Things that aren’t there or, if they are, are not what they seem to be. These visions are at once spooky, engaging, and one of the finest methods of work displacement I’ve yet come across.

It started with the release by NASA last month of an image from the Curiosity rover, showing an object on the surface of Mars looking remarkably like a soup spoon. I say on the surface, but one of the most arresting features is that this particular spoon is suspended just above ground level, attached only at the end of its ‘handle’ to the bedrock.

Immediately, of course, some of the loonier elements of the Space Cadet Corps took to social media to proffer their theories on the object. To my delight, some started noticing other items of cutlery and tableware in these Curiosity images, providing proof that the rover must be exploring the remains of some ancient Martian kitchen. A purported spatula was reasonably well defined, but the chopstick looked to me more like the roof aerial of an executive car.

Officially, these are said to be ventifacts – wind-sculpted artefacts which, because of the thin atmosphere and low gravity of the Red Planet, can take these remarkable forms. There is a long and illustrious history of seeing objects for what they are not, both on Earth and elsewhere. Ever seen the Man in the Moon? Some people see a basketball player, and in parts of Asia the prevailing legend is of the Moon Rabbit. To me, though, it’s always a sunglass-wearing happy face that is only visible in naked eye observations, never in pictures.

One of Galileo’s first telescopic observations was that Saturn had ‘ears’, and as soon as telescopes improved enough to resolve detail on Mars the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced that he could see canals.

Each technological development has brought with it a new batch of imagery and a new clutch of simulacra to puzzle over. Almost exactly a century after Schiaparelli’s canals came the first successful Mars lander, Viking 1. The probe made many important scientific discoveries, but will be remembered most for an image taken from orbit revealing the infamous Face of Mars – a hill with vaguely anthropomorphic features.

Back on Earth, meanwhile, the faces-in-objects phenomenon (pareidolia), has become the social media meme du jour. Buildings that look startled, cheese graters with smiley faces, ranks of parking meters resembling soldiers on parade. These things are everywhere, once you start to see them.

There are very good reasons why we (actual) people are so good at spotting these apparent patterns in inanimate objects. We have evolved highly developed visual processing capabilities, and therefore lots of brain power. We may not have the smelling ability of a springer spaniel, the hearing of a bat, or the somatosensory sensitivity of a spider, but we can spot a face from a mile away.

On top of this is the real human superpower: imagination. Closely linked to intelligence, it is imagination that allows us to create objects as mundane as, well, a spoon, or as sophisticated as a planetary rover.

Many of the current glut of citizen science projects rely on human capabilities in pattern recognition. Show me a machine that could look at NGC 2023 and suggest that it looks like a horse’s head, and I’ll show you the next candidate for the Turing Test.

A quick tour of extraplanetary simulacra reveals a wonderful range of bizarre objects. Star Wars fans should look to Mercury, where a landform looks just like Han Solo frozen in Carbonite. How many parsecs will it take you to do the Kessel run now, Han? At the other end of the solar system, please tell me I’m not the only one to see the eponymous cartoon animal in the white heart on Pluto?

But it is Mars that provides the richest pareidolia pickings. Among the various objects reported from recent rover images are a coffin, a dragon, a tiny little Bigfoot that could be a replica of Copenhagen’s statue of the Little Mermaid, and (my personal favourite) a pharaoh-like statue reminiscent of those at Abu Simbel in Egypt. On Earth.

I honestly doubt whether many of the conspiracy theorists who point to these images as evidence of an official cover-up are serious in their claims. Surely nobody thinks there is really a bust of Barack Obama on Mars, but many are amused that there is an image that looks a bit like that. No, for there to be a conspiracy it would be necessary to be able to draw links between these objects. What possible connection could there be between a dragon and a soup spoon, for instance? If there really were a conspiracy, NASA would never drop a clanger like that.