Looking over the five years of this thread, I'd forgotten how I check in here about once a year or so. So one quick question for this year.
For the life of me I can't quite understand how Jean Ward's observation that patterns on the surface of Mars "seem to resemble those of rice paddies here on earth" could possibly be compelling.
I'd grant some weight to a guy like Avi Loeb, the astrophysicist from Harvard, even though the vast majority in the scientific community disagree with him. But Jean Ward? He's not even a scientist, from what I can find online. He's a telecommunications guy.
Mainly-- if someone wanted to make a case that there was intelligent life on Mars billions of years ago, or hundreds of millions of years ago, I could understand the logic of that. (Maybe evidence of the ancient civilization could have been erased.) Sounds like there was plenty of water on ancient Mars.
But it sounds like there's a scientific consensus that Mars didn't have much water as recently as about a million years ago. Certainly hardly any at all near the equator, as this guy acknowledges he's focusing on. So how could it even be remotely possible that "evidence of a potential farming complex" could be so recent? Mars has high winds and lots of dust... sounds like things erode and get covered up very quickly, as soon as decades, or even a couple of years.
So if someone wants to chime in and explain how Ward's observations could be anything other than pareidolia, I'd be curious to hear. Was this supposed "farming complex"" hundreds of years ago, or millions of years ago? I'm trying to give Ward the benefit of the doubt, but to me, it carries about as much weight as if Ward had said, "hey that puffy cloud up in the sky kinda reminds me of a farming complex." Granted, I haven't watched or heard much of his stuff, so I don't even follow his logic on this one.