This image looks like there's a wrench on Mars, but it's just a regular rock.
Brian Corey Dobbs Productions
Blue Planet Red
Directed by Brian Corey Dobbs, streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Blue Planets Red claims to be a documentary about Mars. The world presented by director Brian Corey Dobbs is not one you or I might recognize, but it certainly has some appeal: it was home to an advanced civilization of pyramid builders who either failed to save their world from destruction or destroyed it in an orgiastic nuclear conflict.
Dobbs lays out his case for advanced Martian life directly into the camera, many raise their eyebrows and pause artfully. I really liked him. But I wasn't at all surprised when I watched his film to find out that his showreel was partly woo-woo (by which I mean dubious videos about mobile phoneselectromagnetic fields and cancer).
But intentionally or not, Blue Planet Red It's a historical document: the last hurray of a generation of explorers and enthusiasts who came of age under the shadow of a 2-kilometer mountain, a geological feature of sorts, in the Martian region of Cydonia. Here in 1976, where Mars' southern highlands and its northern plains meet, NASA's Viking orbiters captured blurry images of what looked like a giant human face: the so-called Mars Face.
Let's not spend too much time here debunking what has already been debunked, so often and so convincingly, elsewhere. Improve the image resolution and the face will disappear. Rocks that look like tools and bones are actually rocks. And the presence of xenon-129 in the Martian atmosphere suggests an ancient nuclear conflict only if one ignores the well-understood process by which the now extinct isotope iodine-129 would decay to xenon-129 under the rapidly cooling conditions of Mars. lithosphere.
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The ambiguous data from the Viking orbiters provided an ideal environment for the development of fantastic ideas.
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And yet there is something touching about capturing fixed ideas the current generation of researchers. The film includes Richard Brice Hoover, who headed astrobiology research at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama before retiring in 2011 and helped demonstrate the existence of extremophile life on Earth. He is convinced that he has found microfossils in Martian meteorites. Despite his enthusiasm, Hoover never bothered to explain in the film why each fossil rests on top of a rock sample rather than being buried within it.
Co-author John Brandenburg is a fairly respected plasma scientist, if you can get him off the subject of Martian nuclear war. And then there's Mark Carlotto, who spent 40 years observing the remains of civilization on Mars where everyone else sees rocks. Drag him to Earth and he will become a capable archaeologist.
After last Apollo moon landing In 1972, initial interest in the space race began to fade. The images sent back by the Viking orbiters promised the next great discovery. Their blurry mix of innovative but ambiguous data was an ideal environment for the growth of fantastic ideas, especially in the US, where the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal encouraged skepticism and paranoia.
Dobbs's vivid retelling of tall tales about Martian history suggests that it is events 3.7 billion years ago, when the wet, warm planet turned into a dust bowl. For me, it's more a story of what happened to a group of enthusiasts glued to monitors and magazines in the 1970s. Let's put aside our contempt for a moment and look this generation in the eye. Bright hopes will no longer confuse beautiful minds.
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Simon Ings is a writer and science writer. Follow him on X @simonings
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