Two decades ago, we were captivated by the image, beamed back by the Viking 1spacecraft, of a human visage on Mars. This year, NASA's Global Surveyor, which limns objects 10 times smaller than Viking could capture, revealed the "Face on Mars" was merely eroded rock humanized by light and shadow. Still, the original lkik=eness is so vivid that some have refused to admit it was a fiction of our imaginative, brains.
We see faces everywhere-- envision them in clouds, trace them in tree trunks, construct them in starry skies. Are we hardwired to find faces, or do we have some deep-seated emotional need to see them?
In fact, faces render vastly foreign places familiar. We see our image chiseled in Mars because it means we are not alone. To quell our deepest fear loneliness--we seek gazes that greet ours in welcome, reassuring us that we matter to others. We embrace the idea of our likeness on Mars as proof that our hopes are shared by someone beyond our world
