Life on Mars, see link inside for more details?

Question

These pictures could be faked or possibly just have another explanation, but they sure look real.

http://mmmgroup.altervista.org/e-trees.html

http://members.shaw.ca/science1/mars-trees/South1-trees.htm

Answer 1

Those pictures are not fakes.Since Arthur C Clarke believes them that ought to be good enough for all of us.Isn't it interesting that right in plain sight we have proof of life on another world and almost no one seems to notice or care.

Answer 2

another explanation is that it's a kind of geyser:

http://xmb.stuffucanuse.com/xmb/viewthre...

http://themis.asu.edu/news-polarjets

Answer 3

Seems pretty real! I believe it! =O

Answer 4

I'll go on the assumption that none of the pictures are fakes. Even then, it seems highly unlikely that they are any kind of vegetation. The conspiracy buffs that like to say there are trees on Mars really don't seem to grasp just how big the implications of this really are, and how much other evidence there is against the existence of trees on Mars. To put it another way, not everything that looks like a tree in a fuzzy black and white photograph actually IS a tree, especially when it's living in an environment below -100 degrees celsius, in an extremely rarefied carbon dioxide atmosphere, under very weak sunlight, on a planet that has provided essentially no OTHER evidence of supporting life. Our telescopes show Mars as an orange-colored place (as compared to our own green and blue Earth), and no image sent back by any lander has ever shown so much as a single blade of grass sticking up from the martian surface. Are we really supposed to believe, then, that just a few thousand kilometers away there are forests of vast trees a kilometer tall? Has NASA really managed to land in the martian equivalent of the Sahara Desert on every single try? And furthermore, what are these trees supposed to eat? If they were eating carbon dioxide, like our plants do, then we should be seeing a significantly higher presence of oxygen near the areas where the 'forests' are growing. As far as I know, no such thing has been observed.

So, if they aren't trees, then what ARE they? There are a number of possibilities. Just off the top of my head, it's conceivable that if a meteor landed on some ice, the debris form the impact could darken the surrounding ice, while some of the ice could be melted by the impact and flow back into the crater, forming the kind of fractal 'branches' we see in the pictures. Streams form similar fractals here on Earth, on a wide variety of different scales. I also looked it up on the Internet, and apparently another proposal is that the marks are really the locations of geysers which spray muddy water up from underneath the surface. Presumably many of the geysers would go on having periodic eruptions for quite some time, because the shaft created by one eruption would make it easier for another geyser to erupt in the same place. And in fact, both of these explanations fit the image better than the tree idea. Why? Because if you look at the images, you'll see that there is a lot of empty space between the trees. Here on Earth, when a forest grows (especially a forest with very tall trees), it usually covers pretty much the entire surface of the ground, because the trees will grow everywhere that there's enough light for them to grow. On the other hand, meteors would form a more or less random spattering of marks (which would be erased in areas if the ground shifted or was blown around by the wind, resulting in patterns that look more organized than they otherwise would), while geysers would tend to leave fairly even spaces between them due to the available pressurized liquid having all been blown out one geyser, making it unavailable to start a new geyser in the undisturbed ground. I would therefore say that the geysers are probably the most likely explanation for those pictures, given what we know about the conditions on the martian surface.