Posthuman Blues

I got this cool email from a reader of my Mars site:

I really enjoyed your "Cydonia Imperative" pages. Its a refreshing view of some of the research being done in the region. The part that I liked the most about it is that you attempt (if not always successful) to keep an unbiased point of view about the anomolies in the images.

I've read much of Hoagland's work in the area and it just seems too one-sided (more specifically it seems like he tries to stretch things into fitting his artificiality (is that a word?) argument). I've also read so-called debunkers' views on the issues and they tend to come from the complete opposite end of the spectrum (except its much worse, no reason or data generally to support their claims other than "look at it"). Its hard to lend credit to a rushed conclusion without considering the null hypothesis.

I salute you for presenting things from both ends in a rational manner which can be hard to do with such a subject matter. It seems that we either want or dont want these landforms to be artificial and get so wrapped up in what we want we fail to see what is there. If it turns out someday that none of the landforms are artificial, then hey it was a fun ride! I am working on a phD in Artificial Intelligence so all my monetary funds are heading into that, but if i did have the means to leave a tip i would (in a way this email IS my tip, its all i got to give at this point). Keep up the good work.

I responded:

I agree with you entirely. Culturally, we're conditioned to either "believe" or "disbelieve" in any given strange phenomenon. We suffer from a very binary outlook and leap to conclusions instead of evaluating the evidence.

The Cydonia inquiry is interesting because, as Carl Sagan admitted before his death, it's testable science. Ultimately, we can find out if there are artifacts on Mars. But until we land there -- or come across a conclusive photograph, which I doubt will happen -- we can continue approaching this as the scientific puzzle it is.

"Debunkers" will continue making distorted statements, as will "believers." But in the end none of it matters. Even if this is a false alarm, it's an excellent opportunity to examine the process by which we form hypotheses and arrive at conclusions.