The Mars Pyramid Mystery (Conspiracy?)
You know that Rubik’s Pyramid you lost in 1983? The one that Chris Pack could solve in like 30 seconds but that you could never solve without taking all the little trianguler pieces apart and reassembling them with all the colors in the right places? You thought it got lost in the closet, right? In one of the plastic bins behind your D&D; manuals and the full-size Millenium Falcon that you could never bring yourself to give to your younger cousin like your mom wanted you to, even though you hadn’t played with it in like three years. Nope. Turns out, it was on Mars.
The Mars Curiosity Rover just beamed back a picture of it. It’s covered in dirt, and scientists think it’s just a rock. They’re going to have the robot zap it with it’s ChemCam laser. (It’s going to have a hell of time reassembling it afterwards, isn’t it? Remember how hard it was to snap all those little pieces back into place? They were kind of sharp, sometimes you thought it might be easier just to read the book and master the thing like Chris Pack. But you were never that smart.) Then preparations begin to investigate it up close with its “hand lens” and its X-ray spectrometer.
“It’s a cool looking rock with almost pure pyramidal geometry,” said NASA’s John Grotzinger, maintaining that the uncanny shape was common for Mars rocks and likely caused by wind erosion and definitely not a sign that magic aliens visited Earth thousands of years ago and built the pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica and left a message for the Masons or the Illuminati or whoever’s really in charge to put the very same image on the dollar bill with that creepy, single, all-knowing eye peeking out the top.
“Our general consensus view is that these are pieces of impact ejecta from an impact somewhere else, maybe outside of Gale Crater, that throws a rock on to the plains, and it just goes on to sit here for a long period of time. It weathers more slowly than the stuff that’s around it. So, that means it’s probably a harder rock.”
Yes, I’m sure, just a regular piece of impact ejecta. I would imagine the wind on Mars blows at a precise 51.5 degree angle, at a perfectly consistant velocity for exactly one third of the year, then switches directions to another precise 51.5 degree angle for the next four months (wait, years are probably longer on Mars aren’t they? It’s farther away from the sun than we are, right? Anyway for the next third of the however long its year is) and then again for the next — always maintaining that perfectly consistant velocity so as to gently wear down a whole bunch of Rubik’s Pyramid-sized rocks into almost purely geometric Rubik’s Pyramid shapes. Sure! Just a normal thing to find up her on Mars! And I’m sure that when the ChemCam laser blasts this thing to pieces, it’s not going open whatever heretofore undiscovered dimension, whatever dark-matter warp in the time-space continuum through which it traveled, 29 years ago, from your closet in New Jersey to the surface of fucking Mars, about halfway between the Gale Crater and those “interesting” rocks at Gleneig. YEAH, I’LL BET THOSE ROCKS ARE PRETTY INTERESTING!!!
And surely, surely, the shape of this “rock” has nothing to do with Frank Ocean’s new “Pyramids” video, wherein John Mayer just happens to play his mid-song guitar solo standing in front of a blue neon PYRAMID with some crazy geometric design in orange lights that looks an awful lot like the Scarab spaceship Journey blasted off in on Escape. Or how Cat Power and her boyfriend have to shoot laser guns that fire beams of the VERY SHAME SHAPE into the chests of post-apocalyptic desert zombies in her new video for “Cherokee.” Or the fact that Gucci Mane and Big Sean, in their new video, rap (and rather enjoyably, especially Gucci!) in front of an entire wall of these mysterious pyramid shapes — all lit up and glowing bright, with the same little cornerstone triangle on top, separated, so that it looks like it might twist with the turn of a twelve-year-old’s wrist, that we know from our currency and Roger Dean’s awesome Asia album covers.
These three videos all just came out this week. The SAME week. Just a simple matter of coincidence, though. Easily explainable by NASA and Vevo.
How long do you think before the ChemCam shoots? The Curiosity Rover has traveled 950 feet since touching down on Mars six weeks ago. I’m guessing the calibrations and programming will take NASA a while to compute and transmit, and that we’ll have our answer exactly three months from today. December 21st, 2012. If time doesn’t stop then and the world doesn’t end, go back home to your mom’s house, go upstairs to your old room. Open your closet, look in the bins behind all your old D&D; books and Star Wars stuff. Your Rubik’s Pyramid will be there.