martian landscapes & the mysterium tremendum

Just take a look at these amazing photos that came back from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been orbiting and photographing mars since 2006 at resolutions of an inch a pixel.

ice erosion, south pole of mars

They look so organic to me, so suspiciously similar to the living processes that are at play all around us here on the earth. It really makes me think about what we mean by the word “organic”. Websters says “of or relating to living organisms”, yet few would argue that these pictures are indications of life on mars.

They sure look like the result of living processes to me though. They look so much like living things do: composed of cells, shifting through time, gradually settling, and then decaying away. We are all familiar with these kinds of facts as they are the fundamental facts of the earth. These photos show that they are quite clearly fundamental processes of Mars as well.

I would argue that they are processes of living systems, period. The surprising conclusion being that the wind, the sea and the stones around us are every bit as alive as we are, and possessed of the same patterns that animate our progress and interactions.

How far a leap is it to assume that there is some source at the heart of the universe somewhere in some abstract center that animates it all, pulsing out some string of ons and offs that ultimately becomes everything around us. Like some huge resonating field that snaps otherwise lifeless dust into animated patterns by way of invisible but ever-present energy.

You be the judge: