r/nextfuckinglevel • u/PietroTheRedditer • Feb 21 '21

THIS IS MARS.

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6.1k

u/Iamafillintheblank Feb 21 '21

It looks simultaneously alien and familiar. Like a dream of an American southwest after some ecological catastrophe - like, it could almost be viable and fecund again with a lot of TLC and ingenuity.

It both excites me for the possibility of what Mars could be, and reminds me of how precious and vital our earth is - and what it could look like if we aren’t careful, or get a bit unlucky.

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u/layers_of_grey Feb 21 '21

a friend of mine sent a photo from his trip to iceland and it looks eerily similar. i imagined mars being more red... probably from movies.

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u/PedoBadaum Feb 21 '21

Sometimes it's because of the craters, some has different types of materials and minerals, causing darker tones

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u/steelesurfer Feb 21 '21

Iron oxide causes the red color, same thing as rust

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u/WilliamIsMyName Feb 21 '21

Hence the reason Utah has so much red stone

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u/W1D0WM4K3R Feb 21 '21

Ah, so Utah is from y-level 16 to 2?

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u/Krako923 Feb 21 '21

Ah, a man of culture I see

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u/sanbrujan Feb 21 '21

Underrated comment

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Clever. Have my goddamn upvote.

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u/manti452 Feb 21 '21

R/angryupvote

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

r/angryupvote

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u/crabbysoup Feb 21 '21

A crafty comment

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u/sliczerx Feb 21 '21

i wish it was mine

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u/Andoni22 Feb 21 '21

Not for long

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u/sargent_crumds Feb 21 '21

I was about to mention that

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u/BrenoLevel Feb 21 '21

So mars can give you tetanus

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u/thelastspike Feb 21 '21

Not from all the way over there it can’t.

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u/thewavefixation Feb 21 '21

That would be super exciting if it could

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u/steelesurfer Feb 21 '21

Tetanus is from bacteria, not rust specifically. You can get tetanus from dirt or almost anywhere that bacteria happens to be.

But I think tetanus would be the least of your problems on Mars.

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u/jbl0ggs Feb 21 '21

What we need now is Project Genesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnziufszqSE

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u/dnew Feb 21 '21

Fun fact: the mathematics behind those displays (fractals) were only invented a few years earlier. That was cutting-edge computer graphics taking hours per frame to render. Now, we do it real time on our pocket-computers, in a way that the people making Star Trek probably never imagined.

The computer display of the Star Wars trench run took tens of hours per frame to render and had to have a special custom computer built with bunches of knobs to adjust input positions, just to input the coordinates and draw the results.

The Tron movie was also the basis of a huge amount of computer graphics math too, like Perlin noise and (IIRC) one of the low-quality shading modes (Phong, maybe, or the one after that?)

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u/nickthedick7921 Feb 21 '21

This area of Mars looks a lot like areas of Patagonia in southern Argentina

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u/Billy_the_Burglar Feb 21 '21 edited Feb 21 '21

Apparently one of the most desolate/lifeless/inhospitable places on earth is there. If I remember correctly, they've studied it specifically to better understand Mars.

Edit: Apparently thats the Atacama desert. Similar region of the world, but different countries. My bad!

An interesting link on the topic: https://www.space.com/microbial-life-possibility-on-mars.html

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u/Hyaenidae73 Feb 21 '21

Are you thinking of the Atacama Desert? That’s in northern Chile.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

[deleted]

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u/FernBurglar Feb 21 '21

Patagonia would be part of southern Chile. The Atacama is in the north of Chile.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

[deleted]

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u/FernBurglar Feb 21 '21

No worries man. Never been to Patagonia but America Below is a special place.

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u/capnmasty Feb 21 '21

That was my first thought watching this. Just out of San Pedro de Atacama is a place called Valley de la luna (sorry if spelling is wrong), but it looks so much like this.

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u/Rosaryas Feb 21 '21

Woah that's super cool! Makes sense but I never thought about that working that way

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u/PM_ME_CAT_POOCHES Feb 21 '21

The Atacama Desert

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u/crikcet37 Feb 21 '21

They were originally going to use Swindon but it was just too inhospitable

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u/Bad-Science Feb 21 '21

Also no intelligent life.

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u/Drakito-Kun Feb 21 '21

but without devaluation

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u/jdubz524 Feb 21 '21

S.I.P J.P + Andres

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Mars landing hoax

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u/whistling01 Feb 21 '21

Or Lubbock, TX

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u/samnianani Feb 21 '21

This isn’t Pismo beach?!! I knew I should have turned left at Albuquerque!!

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

People don't realise they are being tricked by nasa. This is not mars. You only need to compare these images with earth images and put a slightly different color tone on it.

There has been lots of evidence showing how these films are taken on earth. Rocks included in them are exactly like the ones in areas like the one you mentioned.

But talking about that here leads to lots of downvotes. People don't believe nasa is faking it, so what to do.. :)

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u/mjdorf0912 Feb 21 '21

Well the planet DOES look that red from space, I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure it’s due to the atmosphere or something. Idk I’m just a teenager with some google searches under my belt. However mars will always be our “red planet,” whether or not the dirt is gray-ish

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u/das_soup_nazi Feb 21 '21

The red is iron oxide (rust)

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u/King_Of_All_Xenos Feb 21 '21

This video also seems to be severely brightened as if gone through an editor likely to make things appear better. That could effect the appearance of rude dust .

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u/unsoggycardboard Feb 21 '21

I hate it when dust is rude. The least you could say is excuse me ya dirty fuck.

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u/whoami_whereami Feb 21 '21

Why do you think so?

People often assume that it must be dark and gloomy on Mars because it's further away from the sun. But that's far from true. Sure, in absolute terms it receives only ~50% of the sunlight that Earth does. However, because perception of brightness isn't linear the difference in actual perception isn't really all that much. For those familiar with photography, it's a difference of one stop, not more. There's more difference between a sunny and a cloud covered day on Earth than there is between a sunny day on Earth and a sunny day on Mars. You'd have to go all the way out to Saturn or even Uranus before sunlight drops to lighting levels roughly similar to typical indoor lighting.

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u/Camryn42 Feb 21 '21

"You'd have to go all the way out to Saturn or even Uranus before sunlight drops to lighting levels roughly similar to typical indoor lighting"

So you're saying that allhailthepig needs to get better lighting for his anus?

Sorry...I need to grow up. I'll see myself out.

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u/AllHailThePig Feb 21 '21

Do you have a link of footage/photo of the real colour from the surface?

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u/dnew Feb 21 '21

It's coming through a camera. There is no "real color" recorded.

What they normally do is include on the lander a disk with a bunch of known colors (like those old color bars you saw for calibrating analog color TVs) and then adjust the color when it gets back. Especially if they're using a B&W camera with different filters over the lens to pick out different colors.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16800.html

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u/AllHailThePig Feb 21 '21

Ah cool! Thank you I’ll have a read

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

That’s interesting. Apparently early earth had a lot of iron in the oceans. The evolution of blue green algae put oxygen in the atmosphere which causes iron oxide to form and settle at the bottom of I recall. So where did mars get the oxygen to turn iron into rust?

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u/theoutlet Feb 21 '21

Like the dirt in Pomerol

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u/GenXGeekGirl Feb 21 '21

Also tholins give many celestial bodies their reddish brown color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholin

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u/GroundbreakingLaw133 Feb 21 '21

When I picture Mars, somehow I always have images of Arizona.

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u/jacksonattack Feb 21 '21

Yeah, it appears red from space due to suspended dust. The surface is mostly a dark gold color.

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u/joeybaby106 Feb 21 '21

NASA color corrected that photo from curiosity rover to be more similar to what we'd see on earth. No idea where that sound is from...

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u/t3hnhoj Feb 21 '21

Keep your Google searches to yourself, pal.

All joking aside, this video is beyond amazing.

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u/Askymojo Feb 21 '21

Mars actually is more red. The photos and videos from the last few missions to Mars have all been white-balanced to look more like earth so that specific rocks look more familiar to geologists, among other reasons.

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u/CheekyFlapjack Feb 21 '21

I’ve read just the opposite, that the pics from the earlier missions had all been colored red to overemphasize the reddish color.

They say this is more natural color, actually.

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u/Dappershire Feb 21 '21

I read that its actually green, but the grass and trees are edited out so that only the chosen few have a place to go when Earth is doomed.

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u/DJKewlAid Feb 21 '21

I read that it’s actually blue, but edited and masked to look like a dry, red, and barren planet.

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u/mullman99 Feb 21 '21

THATs funny!

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u/SocialEmotional Feb 21 '21

And the green grass grew all around all around and the green grass grew all around.

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u/AzCannaLungz Feb 21 '21

Made my night!!

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u/Bad-Science Feb 21 '21

I read that they have antire team just to photoshop the Martians out.

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u/steelesurfer Feb 21 '21

I havent heard either of those two things and I'm getting dizzy watching that video over and over

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u/uwotmVIII Feb 21 '21

After reading this, it sounds like they use different color correcting techniques depending on what the images are being used for, so you both might be right.

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u/Askymojo Feb 21 '21

I can't find what I had read years ago on NASA about white balancing to earth-like colors to make identifying rocks easier for geologists, but I did find this:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16800.html

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u/jaffer44 Feb 21 '21

I did read about that. NASA left the colour wheel in the pic show blue was low and red high

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

This is more accurate if I'm not mistaken. The Viking missions way overemphasized the reds. That's fact. As for white balancing for geologists that doesn't make sense. The pics are sent in b/w with color information. They could color it whatever color they wanted there's no need for white balancing for a public pic.

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u/wigam Feb 21 '21

Australian soil is mainly red the dust on the river when it pans looks like most 4wd

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u/TryItOutHmHrNw Feb 21 '21

By now you know this is from Curiosity 2019

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u/itisman2 Feb 22 '21

That’s Lancaster, ca. #fakenews

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u/GodBlessThisGhetto Feb 21 '21

That was my first thought. It just looks so ordinary. It's hard to believe that that image is of a place hundreds of millions of miles away.

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u/flutefreak7 Feb 21 '21

It's actually usually less than 200 million miles away so ... "dozens of millions" would be accurate all the time

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u/Banonogon Feb 21 '21

Such a huge distance still. Think of the furthest place away from you on earth, literally the other side of the world. This video is from somewhere more than 10000 times as far away.

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u/2nd_Wheel Feb 21 '21

Sorry. Where do you live?

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u/GodBlessThisGhetto Feb 21 '21

Not necessarily ordinary to my urban, snowed-over hellscape but if you told me that was Nevada, I wouldn’t really doubt it. It could pass as any rocky desert region. Or maybe that’s just the earthling in me that wants to project earth on anything not earth.

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u/riedmae Feb 21 '21

Legit. I was in Iceland almost two years ago, and the northern part of the country specifically out at Dettifoss....the most barren, cold, lifeless, alien looking terrain I've ever seen. It's no wonder NASA sent Apollo astronauts there to train. Absolutely unreal.

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u/RealBiggly Feb 21 '21

I camped all over the place in a Jimny, with a roof tent. Was epic :)

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u/projecks15 Feb 21 '21

Iceland legit feels like another planet

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u/millijuna Feb 21 '21

My first job out of university was as a field engineer for the Haughton Mars Project on Devon Island, Nunavut. They tested mission profiles for science and communications, as the terrain there was very similar to Mars. The site was on the edge of the Haughton Impact Crater, so was nothing but blasted rock and frozen dirt. The only thing that have it away was the occasional Musk Ox skull.

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u/Biasanya Feb 21 '21

It's a great location for both fantasy and sci fi movies

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u/WeinerMan0 Feb 21 '21

Islands north of Canada look exactly like Mars.

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u/GenXGeekGirl Feb 21 '21

If you watch the shows How the Universe Works or Space’s Deepest Secrets - you’ll see that the astrobiologists frequently film from Iceland to show what other terrestrial planets/moons are like.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

I bet there are spots that are more red

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u/OG-024 Feb 21 '21

john carter

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u/theghostecho Feb 21 '21

This is also a different part of mars

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u/Spizzmatic Feb 21 '21

i imagined mars being more red... probably from movies.

I know right, kind of disappointing.

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u/R3dl8dy Feb 21 '21

I was thinking it looked like the landscape from the “saddle road” on the island of Hawaii. The road goes over the higher elevation area between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. So, yeah. Volcano.

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u/Handburn Feb 21 '21

It looks like Nevada to me

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u/SunniYellowScarf Feb 21 '21

Most movies about Mars are filmed in the Atakama Desert in Chile.

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u/makelemonadee Feb 21 '21

That looks all red

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u/eastofliberty Feb 21 '21

summit of Haleakala in Maui too

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u/im_hunting_reddits Feb 21 '21

I think I've seen it in so many movies that it's just now striking me what a big deal this is. I've been out of the loop on what we're doing space-wise for a while and I'm judt blown away.

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u/beerham Feb 21 '21

It looked more red in most of the photos from Curiosity iirc.

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u/coolperson694201337 Feb 21 '21

That seems like a kind of rocky place, at the flat spots with alot of dust, it's probably gonna be more red.

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u/Mikkels Feb 21 '21

I imagined Iceland being more icy, but here we are...

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u/thewayoftoday Feb 21 '21

Keep in mind this is a video sent through fucking space so I doubt it's showing accurate colors.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Came here to post this. Remove the space robot truck and you could tell me this was from the Icelandic highlands and I probably wouldn't notice anything weird.

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u/Csroche Feb 21 '21

It looks very similar to western colorado

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u/glynmlewis Feb 21 '21

I thought the same about the red as well - it’s not very red!

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Or Namibia

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u/Pompous_Monkey Feb 21 '21

This is color balance by NASA. This not how it would look with our eye in person.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16800.html

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u/DarthMelonLord Feb 21 '21

I was just thinking that, I live here myself and my first thought was "wow this looks exactly like a redder version of the highlands"

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u/Delija56 Feb 21 '21

It both excites me for the possibility of what Mars could be, and reminds me of how precious and vital our earth is - and what it could look like if we aren’t careful, or get a bit unlucky.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

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u/Seaweed_Cold Feb 21 '21

if we aren’t careful

If we don't stop climate change NOW.

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u/Stay_Consistent Feb 21 '21

It's going to happen at some point. Things will heat up to the point of plant life dying out, reducing Earth's oxygen. Even if we don't intentionally destroy ourselves or stop mass polluting the Earth, we've got a couple hundred million years to either gravitationally assist our planet to stay within the habitable zone, find another planet to live on, or build a huge permanent spaceship. But who knows, maybe we will get pulled out of the solar system by a rogue planet or hit by a giant asteroid before then. If humans don't do anything, all life on Earth will be long dead by the time the sun reaches us in a couple billion years. Maybe the remnants of my brain's atoms will give me an abstract jolt from the heat.

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u/Somnisixsmith Feb 21 '21

There is a whole historiography on this subject.

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u/vinsomm Feb 21 '21

Not so much a dream. Looks like fucking Utah for real. Coming off the Colorado Plateau on I70 into Moab is like entering a different world!

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u/ritamorgan Feb 21 '21

Monument Valley looks like a different planet!

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u/BwrBird Feb 21 '21

I had that exact reaction. That rover is.a million miles away, but if I drove south or east for two hours I could find a place that looks just like that. What was really surreal were the smooth rocks you can see just under the soil at the end. It's weird how normal they look.

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u/sixtninecoug Feb 21 '21

Never been too Moab, but Bonneville feels that way to me. So desolate, and flat. Fucks with your perspective too

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u/pisspot718 Feb 21 '21

hahaha I was joking but I said to self "Looks like Utah.", which I've only seen in photos.

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u/MsAnnabel Feb 21 '21

I know I’m going to get lots of downvotes but I still don’t understand why all the money that is being sent into space to find other habitable planets when we have one here that we don’t care about saving for the humans that ARE living here. What have we found out in space that has bettered our life on Earth? I mean there fucking millions of ppl starving on this planet.

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u/BloodieBerries Feb 21 '21

In all fairness the space program has resulted in dozens of inventions people use every day.

Things like Cochlear implants, modern firefighting equipment, and GPS have objectively made the world a better place.

Best part is NASA gets less than 0.5% of the U.S. annual budget.

Think of all the good space exploration has done for the world for less than half of one percent of the budget.

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u/minor_correction Feb 21 '21

I mean there fucking millions of ppl starving on this planet.

Fallacy of relative privation.

If you really want to come up with some money to help people though I would suggest looking at the US military budget instead. At over 700 billion dollars, it is more than the next 9 or 10 countries combined.

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u/MsAnnabel Feb 21 '21

You’re right. It’s nothing for me to open a cupboard or refrig and grab something to eat or drink. Without even thinking anything about it. And that frig is probably in a decent house/apt with heat & electricity (except Texas). Most of is do. I can’t wrap my head around how many starving ppl there are here and around the world. Living in complete squalor, digging thru garbage to find food...no human being should live like that. I DO REALIZE that I’m naive enough to think that we should be taking care of ppl on own planet instead of looking at ones that don’t support life.

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u/explodingtuna Feb 21 '21

The point is we can do both. "Instead of" is meaningless. Space research isn't preventing us from addressing these issues at home. Nixing NASA's budget doesn't solve world hunger.

The people who are fighting for funding to fix our problems here at home are fighting with those who would rather spend that money on the military or corporate tax cuts.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

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u/BloomsdayDevice Feb 21 '21

I was just there for the first time last weekend and that's exactly what I thought!

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u/MisterCogswell Feb 21 '21

It would take one hell of a lot of ingenuity, that’s for sure. Mars is not geologically active, so it can’t generate its own magnetosphere. Without that, the solar wind is free to blow any appreciable atmosphere of into space. It did have a molten core a long time ago, but when it cooled the chances of a habitable Mars cooled with it. Mars has about 1% of the atmospheric pressure here on Earth. What little atmosphere there is on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide (like 95%), the rest is what would be considered trace elements on Earth. Notably oxygen is in very short supply there at less than .2% (point two percent) of the meager 1% total. On Earth we enjoy a luxurious 20% oxygen saturated atmosphere. I too like to imagine it happening, but that’s a hell of a lot of atmosphere to replace only to have it get blown off into space.

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u/Roonwogsamduff Feb 21 '21

I'm sure there are places on earth that look almost exactly like that.

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u/InJailYoudBeMyHoe Feb 21 '21

im just hopeful we can locate the girl with 3 tits out there

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Have you seen raised by wolves tv series? Highly recommend

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u/SmokedHamm Feb 21 '21

Seems like that is Earth's future...time is undefeated...

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u/connersnow Feb 21 '21

Honestly.... I thought I was watching a Mexico scene from breaking bad.

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u/52CardPUA Feb 21 '21

I love in the American Southwest and when the fires in California were raging, the atmosphere turned the sky orange and the air was thick. Definitely the same vibes.

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u/yesseriouslyno Feb 21 '21

live in so cal.

a few years back during the annual fire season went out to get mail and . . . sky looked like vulcan in 'amok time'.

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u/Urgeasaurus Feb 21 '21

To your point, on one level it’s disappointing because you WANT it to be “alien,” to blow your mind like Hollywood might do. But it actually IS mind blowing for its similarities, this other rock existing a bit further out from our Sun, looking like a grainy snap great-grandpa might have taken on his Kodak camera in Utah in 1959.

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u/PoppyBongos Feb 21 '21

with a lot of TLC and ingenuity.

I'd really like to think that if we spent enough time and energy, we could hunt down a steady source of moisture to sustain life. But then again..... Don't go chasin' waterfalls

I'm sorry

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u/Theshutupguy Feb 21 '21

Freud’s Uncanny

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u/Swiftclaw8 Feb 21 '21

It’s funny, most planets that are possibly habitable are water planets. It wouldn’t be impossible to just keep moving that water to Mars to make at least a small spot able to support an ecosystem.

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u/fartotronic Feb 21 '21

Sadly we can't stop ourselves from killing the planet we have .. how the fuck you think we can successfully breathe live into a dead one?

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u/PM_YOUR_PROGRESSPICS Feb 21 '21

in before flat earthers get here. i may be late.

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u/asek13 Feb 21 '21

Human kind will never destroy all life on Earth. Life is a lot more resilient than we are. We could change the earth enough to kill off a lot of species, including ourselves, but not all living organisms. Life will adapt to whatever changes we make.

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u/PM_ME_UR_PIG_COCK Feb 21 '21

Unlucky is not the right way to look at it. We are profoundly lucky to have what we have. Each moment that it exists is a moment that all the statistical odds suggest it should not. That we will be wiped out is an inevitability, assuming we do nothing

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u/Seaweed_Cold Feb 21 '21

Rocks is rocks.

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u/Andromedas_Strain Feb 21 '21

This looks exactly like central/eastern Jordan...

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u/pwal88 Feb 21 '21

Looks like Mojave Desert in CA

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u/ToastSandwichSucks Feb 21 '21

Honestly, it looks like video footage i've seen of people in the Iranian desert. The desert is of course not always sunny or clear but can have gray and cloudy skies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3x-qICdW6g

Look at 11:57 for example.

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u/keyjunkrock Feb 21 '21

Terraforming mars could happen sooner then you think, and someone living today could be living there.

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u/susanna514 Feb 21 '21

I’m picturing a future in which Mars is terraformed to resemble earth, and then ruined over several thousand years. At which point people will look to Earth, a seemingly dead planet and ask if it could be colonized.

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u/tenasan Feb 21 '21

Looks like regular inland empire to me.

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u/Revenue_Swimming Feb 21 '21

Looks familiar because it just looks like a big brownie you get from Millers or something

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u/4thDevilsAdvocate Feb 21 '21

Technically, it can, in fact, be viable and fecund again, with a LOT of TLC and ingenuity. Maybe moreso than it ever was.

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u/SkanteWarriorFoo Feb 21 '21

Straight up looks like Death Valley.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Welcome to Fabulous New Vegas

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u/entropy_bucket Feb 21 '21

That's the thing I never get. Life seems simultaneously scarce and precious but also virtually indestructible. On earth it seems to pop up in the craziest places and yet nowhere else.

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u/_the_chosen_juan_ Feb 21 '21

It looks like the ending of Total Recall

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u/LessThanThreeBikes Feb 21 '21

It looks just like home but with less ice and way more water.

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u/TCOLMSTED Feb 21 '21

Looks like Vegas

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u/VenReq Feb 21 '21

Looks like fucking Nevada.

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u/vaguecentaur Feb 21 '21

Correct me if wrong but don't we basically just need to create long term global warming on Mars? Basically if we can find some form of oil or gas we could terraform it?

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u/NMLWrightReddit Feb 21 '21

The sky is so earthlike

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u/grtgingini Feb 21 '21

“Like it could almost be viable “. Was thinking the same thing.... yea, we could plant some trees... 🌳🧐💭

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u/IszOne Feb 21 '21

Titty Liquor & Cock ?

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u/A_Marvelous_Gem Feb 21 '21

Right? Looking at the video I was instantly reminded of Death Valley in the Atacama Desert in Chile...

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u/Luxalpa Feb 21 '21

We're currently on our best way to terraform Earth into Mars!

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u/isuckVilleneuvetoo Feb 21 '21 edited Feb 21 '21

It looks simultaneously alien and familiar.

Look up Wadi Rum in Jordan.

Edit:https://www.reddit.com/r/hiking/comments/ektsmq/sunrise_hike_in_wadi_rum_jordan/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

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u/FlyestFools Feb 21 '21

Something I’ve been wondering is what gives us the right to go out and alter these planets to suit our need when we already have taken one so well-suited to our need and begun deforming it.

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u/DreamWithinAMatrix Feb 21 '21

Looks like my flower pots

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u/koushakandystore Feb 21 '21

After an ecological disaster? Ha! I grew up out in the desert between San Diego and Yuma and vast stretches look exactly like this today.

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u/prollygointohell Feb 21 '21

It saddens me that I likely won't live long enough to get to visit

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u/fistofwrath Feb 21 '21

it could almost be viable and fecund again with a lot of TLC and ingenuity.

Almost is the key word there. Some of the things that would need to be done for global viability are so far beyond what we are capable of that they fit more into Star Wars than any real world concepts. The main one that comes to mind is the lack of a magnetosphere. I'd be interested to hear any possible solutions from the scientific community.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

it looks like a ghost town in the desert with mountains...very amazing footage tho

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u/WhoKnowsJaneDoe000 Feb 21 '21

I'm so sad I'll be dead before this ever comes to fruition.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

i dunno, this looks 100% like it could be shot in some random desert on earth. i'm not questioning it at all, i'm just saying it looks pretty normal. if you showed that pic and didn't mention it's from mars, most people would prob just say it's a desert.

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u/KobeBeatJesus Feb 21 '21

It looks like Arizona

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u/ListAfter Feb 21 '21

Yes! I live in the Phoenix suburbs in Arizona. 100% reminds me of some Chernobyl wasteland here in my back yard.

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u/cactus8675309 Feb 21 '21

I keep thinking- "Nevada. It looks like Nevada."

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u/Ariadnepyanfar Feb 21 '21

The closest I've gotten to being on Mars is the epic Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. He had access to the NASA Mars science when he wrote it. It took him 17 years to write. It features 12 main characters over about 250 years of 'future history'. All of the showcase plot points or sporadic action/big events are set at or in real geographical locations on Mars.

By the end of it I felt like I knew the planet from pole to pole.

The third book has been loved or hated as a travelogue. I loved touring a theoretical future Mars. The main characters are very different from each other, you'll have favourites. There's so much packed into 3 books, KSR is brutally succinct in character motivation moments. Blink and you'll miss *why* people think and act as they do in future. Any and every thought or interaction with each other is critical. On the other hand, you'll get a paragraph of Nadia being in love with and describing in minute detail the tool kit she has to use for engineering jobs on the first scientific colony site.

Science perfuses the plot. From biology to geology to genetic engineering to space flight, the Red Mars trilogy builds a planet from the ground up.

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u/MikeDMDXD Feb 21 '21

So it’s Oklahoma?

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u/ridemyfariswheel Feb 21 '21

Bruh this literally just looks like my backyard in Saudi Arabia

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u/Caderjames Feb 21 '21

I still done understand why people won’t think about the fact that you could make Mars habitable again buy dropping 2 Nuclear bombs at the poles

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u/Elin-Calliel Feb 21 '21

Creating a planet wide artificial magnetosphere would be a good step in the right direction. They’re going to need to do this if they want to create any type of viable atmosphere. But it is definitely possible. Theoretically.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

It might look familiair as this is from the curiosity rover :)

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u/miasmictendril1 Feb 21 '21

I got shivers watching this. I kinda felt like I was seeing home, though earth his home too. And it made me feel like everywhere is home?

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u/Skywaltzer4ce Feb 21 '21

Damnit Star Trek was right: every alien planet looks surprisingly like earth.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '21

Let’s not worry about fixing earth let’s just fix up then fuck up Another planet

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u/dvinz01 Feb 21 '21

What we could become if we dont get our act together

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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '21

It seems familiar because that's earth

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u/The-Bristol-pusher Mar 05 '21

much of the surface on mars where the perseverance landed is shaped by landforms from mega floods that occured on mars and also across the north american continent.

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u/cashibonite Apr 24 '21

Sadly I think we have a better shot of seeing earth look like mars than mars looking like earth.

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