[Ray Allan]

No Congressman, There's No Evidence of an Ancient Mars Civilization

In case you've been wondering, there's no evidence that Mars hosted an alien civilization thousands of years ago.

Nonetheless, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked a panel of planetary scientists to speculate about this possibility today (July 18), during a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Space Subcommittee.

The inquiry followed testimony by panelist Ken Farley, the project scientist for NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission, stating that the Red Planet had lakes and rivers, and perhaps even a huge northern ocean, until about 3.6 billion years ago. So it fell to Farley to answer the question of whether Mars was perhaps once home to intelligent aliens.

"So, the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago, not thousands of years ago, and there is no evidence I'm aware of that--" Farley began.

"Would you rule that out?" Rohrabacher interjected.

"I would say that is extremely unlikely," Farley responded.

The belief that intelligent aliens may call Mars home has a rich and eventful history. For example, more than a century ago, American astronomer Percival Lowell claimed to have spotted canals on Mars, which he hypothesized had been built to bring water from the planet's polar ice caps down to the midlatitudes. And in 1976, photos by NASA's Viking 1 Mars orbiter showed a landform that bore a striking resemblance to a human face. Though clearer imagery by later spacecraft revealed the "Face on Mars" to be an ordinary rock formation, some people still claim that it's evidence of an ancient civilization.

Many orbiters, landers and rovers have explored Mars over the decades, and none have detected any evidence intelligent organisms ever arose there. But that doesn't necessarily mean the Red Planet has never supported life of any kind.

https://www.space.com/37534-mars-civ...ress-nasa.html