Pyramids/Face of Cydonia and Tubes on Mars

[Minimalist]

That first photo is a combination of low-resolution photography and pareidolia.

Here's a high-res photo.

[FallentoReason]

Somewhat of a tangent:

I've always thought that if a civilisation of aliens existed, wouldn't it be reasonable to think they would almost look like us? Here on earth it's safe to say our bodies are the winning combination, so why would it be any different anywhere else? Even if the climate was somewhat e.g. cooler, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect features like thick fur? As in, wouldn't life turn out very similar to what we see here?

[Anomalocaris]

Mars may have had a warmer, wetter, denser atmosphere for a while very early in its life. This is evidenced by widespread shore lines features created by bodies of water stable enough in depth for long enough to make wave cut benches visible from space. It may continue to periodically possess short lived, but dense and possibly wet transient atmospheres after episodic volcanic activity or major meteor impacts, as evidenced by large scale outflow channels formed recently enough to not have many impact craters inside them. The volume of water flow needed to make these channels is so huge that the water vapor boiling off from the surface of these floods would provide Mars with a fairly thick temporary atmosphere that might last a few years or decades.

Mars may have had life, may yet have life. We don't know.

But the evidentiary value of the face and pyramid is about the same as the face of Jesus on a piece of toast.

The tubes on mars are lava tubes. Lava tubes form wherever large amount of low viscosity lave erupt quickly from volcanos. There are lava tubes on the moon. Lave tubes do not imply life or intelligence.

The soil on mars is very strongly reducing and deadly for earth plants. Try to plant something in baking soda and you will see. Making Mars both habitable and ecologically self-sustaining is not as easy as dropping algea or plants on Mars. Also Mars has no ozone or magnetic field. So top few meters of Martian soil is completely sterilized by UV every martian day. You know those UV lights that you can stick in water bottles to sterilize water in 30 seconds and garranteed to kill 99.999% of the bacteria and viruses in water? Imagine one of these things stuck in every inche of Martian soil all over the entire planet.

Mars noon temperature at equator might occassionally reach 70 degrees, but on average Mars is very cold, not just at the poles. Also, liquid water in reasonable volumes are not stable on Martian surface except at the bottom of one or two very deep canyons. Water either freeze, or turn into vapor. There is no stable liquid phase.

[Cyberman]

Popular astronomy pundit Phil Plait pounded this Cydonia stuff into the ground ages ago.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoa...index.html

As for the 'glass tubes', it's all a matter of orientation. There is an optical illusion very familiar to astronomers who spend much of their time looking at this sort of thing. I'll borrow Phil's demonstration for convenience:



That is actually the same picture of a crater; the left-hand one is flipped upside-down, giving the concave structure the appearance of being a convex dome. The same thing is happening in your 'glass tube' photo: an image of concave sand dunes becomes a solid convex tubular structure. Such sand dunes are a fairly common feature on Mars. The glassy appearance in the photo seems to be a contrast artefact of processing the digital image. I'll let Phil Plait explain:

In digital images, the contrast in the image has to be chosen. Someone turning the computer bits into a displayed image has to pick the brightest thing to display as white. Anything brighter than that will appear to be that same white. So if you have a feature in an image that is a little bit brighter than the surface around it, and you set it to look white, then it will look shiny to your eye. It isn't shiny; it's just a wee bit brighter.

Mars is indeed a world with fascinations all its own. Pyramids, abandoned cities and glass tubes (or worms, depending on how active your imagination may be) are, sadly, not among them.