Martian Elephant

NASA has released an image of a lava flow on the surface of Mars that looks surprisingly like the head of an elephant in profile, complete with a big ear, a little eye, and a trunk. Of course, that has nothing to do with Mars and everything to do with how the human mind seeks out patterns in nature, even if it has to make them up.

Mars especially has fostered such leaps of the human imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century, the astronomer Percival Lowell argued that there was an advanced civilization on Mars because he saw a network of canals stretching across Mars and connecting cities to the planet's polar caps. The problem was that nobody else saw Lowell's network. Decades later, a cottage industry grew up around a NASA image that seemed to show something like a human face on Mars alongside a pyramid complex. Under different lighting conditions, the face and pyramids looked like ordinary mesas.

In this political year, having found an elephant on Mars, let's see if NASA can also find a jackass.