Mysterious doorway found on Mars isn't an alien's house.


A mysterious doorway on Mars mugged by NASA's Curiosity rover last week is nothing to get agitated about, say a bunch of expert geologists, incontinently crushing our dreams of finding evidence of alien life. The doorway isn't the entrance to a accursed Martian grave, it's not the gateway to a dungeon filled with intimidating monsters, and it's not the point of an ancient creator that will let Douglas Quaid give Mars a permeable atmosphere. 

 It does not indeed lead to a bitsy delve where an old man offers you a rustic brand and tells you it's dangerous to go alone. It's just, like … a shallow hole in a gemstone wall. Bummer. 

The doorway was presumably formed by" natural corrosion,"geologist Neil Hodson told LiveScience, while planetary geologist Nicholas Mangold said there was" nothing artificial"about the doorway. Fractures in the gemstone and thermal stress may have caused a hunk of gravestone to simply fall down, leaving a gap that just looks like a doorway. 

 And it does really look a heck of a lot like a constructed doorway, the kind of thing I'd make in a game like Minecraft while setting up a temporary base and not bothering to add windows or indeed an factual, closeable door. The only thing missing are the heaps of clay, beach, and saplings bobbing just above the ground where I chucked them to make room in my force for further ore. 

While you'd hope NASA would continue to probe the doorway, at least by making the rover drive through it to see what is in there — it actually can't. First of all, the doorway is lower than it looks in the filmland, standing lower than a cadence altitudinous (the Curiosity rover is about2.2 measures altitudinous). Second, if you zoom in on the images you can see there is actually no innards. It's a shallow alcove, not a doorway leading into a grotto or chamber. (You can check it out for yourself then via Gigapan). Most probably the hunk of gemstone seen sitting near the door is the piece that fell down from the wall, leaving a shallow wedge that looks like the entrance to a hallway. 

 While I always appreciate scientists doing rational and logical analysis on the cool- looking shit we find on other globes, it's still kind of a bummer that the doorway is not commodity stupendous like evidence of the actuality of alien engineers. And this clearly is not the first time commodity originally mysterious and instigative in our solar system has been revealed to be no big deal. Late last time China's Yutu 2 rover spotted what looked like a cell on the moon, which we suspected could be anything from Spelunky 2's robot to Crota from Fortune, but it just turned out to just be a gemstone that was not indeed vaguely cell- shaped. And growing up I was fascinated by the Face on Mars which turned out to be a hill that, upon near examination, does not look anything at all like a face. 

Either aliens need to stop doing such a good job at hiding from us, or scientists need to stop doing such a good job figuring out that there are not aliens hiding from us. Either way works for me.