ABOUT FACTS NET Space/Planets

 

Photo Source: Clipart.com

Mars, the red planet, was named after the god of war. All indications by probes and telescopic examination indicate that Mars is a barren planet. When you look at photos from Spirit and Opportunity, the two Mars rovers that are there now, you see sand and rocks. Some see possible ruins as my previous photos of Mars from NASA might indicate. Be that as it may, today you will see plenty of nothing. It is a view reminiscent of what one would see if he stood in the middle of the Sahara Desert, in some spots and others are like being at the bottom of the Grand Canyon without the high walls. Could this totally inhospitable place have harbored life at one time? I think that is the scientific sixty four million dollar question.

A more important question, or at least as important, is how did Mars get this way. At one time was it a lush jungle and grass planet with large bodies of water floating across it's surface? Could it have been a planet that more closely resembled Earth in atmosphere and landscape? Right now Mars could be the biggest warning to us that we will ever see. It could be showing us the results of careless energy and land management. Imagine for one second, that at one time Mars had a population of people on it, not to different from us. Further more they were advanced, even more advanced than we are today. Their aerosol cans ruined the ozone, their exhausts poisoned the atmosphere, their unwise use of water resources caused wide spread water pollution and their nuclear weapons and war finished off the planet.

While this is only fiction right now, it might have happened. The Martians faced with a dying planet, might have devised a plane to leave. Where could they go? If they headed out into deeper space they would be faced with Jupiter, this is certainly not a friendly planet so they would have to forget it. Heading toward the sun they would have seen Earth. Earth, a lush green water planet, much as their world had been. Perfect for colonization. They might have encountered some sort of humanoid life on this planet which they altered to become more and more like them. As a matter of fact if you believe in evolution, scientists have shown that there may have been several different times when the human race branched off into two distinct types of beings. The last ones were the Neanderthal and us.

Photo Left: Mar's Grand Canyon
Photo Right: Olympus Mons
Photo Source: NASA

So why is Mars so barren and why doesn't it have any atmosphere? No one really knows the true reasons, the best they can do is make educated guesses. One thing that I have heard over and over is that for some reason, something caused Mars not to be able to retain its normal atmosphere and most of it went out into space, leaving its present thin atmosphere. Could Mars have been hit by a huge meteor? We can't be sure, but there is a canyon on Mars that is suspected of being the largest one in the entire Solar System. It is about 2,200 miles long. What caused it? Did this event effect the atmosphere? The huge canyon is not the only traumatic feature on Mars. Mars also has the largest volcano. It is Olympus Mons. It is over 300 miles wide. What a beast. If you thought Mt. Everest was high, this volcano is 3.5 times higher. Could a massive emission by this volcano have blown most of the planet's atmosphere out into space?

As I have said in other articles, I have been accused of wondering about things too much. But here is something that I wonder about that I haven't seen anywhere. Could the atmosphere of Mars have become heavy in some way and sunk into the interior of the planet? Wouldn't that be something, a planet with an atmosphere on the inside. Maybe water also sunk. Lets take this to the ultimate step. Maybe beings moved into the interior since there would have been atmosphere and water. These beings might have brought animal and plant life with them and figured out how to make plants grow without being on the exterior of the planet. I know this is a way out theory without any evidence, but ponder this, signatures of a gas that is released by life forms has been detected in caves on Mars. This may not mean much, or it may mean there is some sort of life in caves and maybe deeper inside the planet.

Mars should be very important to us earthlings. If Mars was the victim of poor management, maybe we could learn from those mistakes. If Mars was the victim of some huge natural disaster than maybe we could learn something that would help us avoid this on our planet. Unfortunately for us, it seems that we never learn much when it comes to protecting our home. For example, you would think that by now, we would have developed ways of powering things that didn't dump huge amounts of poison into our air. Think about all the things that we do that effect our atmosphere. We even have government projects that shoot holes into our precious atmosphere. We certainly don't show our atmosphere much respect. Maybe there were Martians and maybe they did the same things we are doing and Mar's current state was the reward for their carelessness.