There is a turtle on Mars! Or rather the fossil of a Martian turtle. Or better yet, to put it even better: the Rover Perseverance photographed on August 31, 2025 (Sol 1610) a rock in the Jezero crater and the image became viral only yesterday, September 5, when Space.com published it as “photos of the day” and immediately after Petapixel it relaunched it describing it as a sea turtle with head and front fins, wow. Not a real turtle, of course, although many on social networks
They have no doubts, as always on what is not true (social networks are very useful: the truthfulness of something is inversely proportional to the number of people who believe is true on social networks).
Randomly: a user on Reddit swore: «It is proof! You can clearly see the head that appears from the shell ». Another: “Do not tell me that this is not a turtle, it is identical to those found in the ponds here on earth”.
And someone really exaggerated: “We found the first animal alive on Mars, other than fossils.” It is called Pareidolia and not a poetic habit, rather an evolutionary reflection: the brain prefers to make an extra mistake rather than one less than one less, that is, it is better to exchange a stone for a predator than a predator for a stone, better to recognize an imaginary face between the leaves that do not notice the real face of those who observe you. This is how millions of years of natural selection have left us with this useful defect, which still leads us to see appearances and animals where there are only rocks and shadows. On Mars it is up to the turtle, yesterday was a medieval helmet, the day before yesterday the famous “face of Mars” photographed by the Viking 1 probe in July 1976, which is later accompanied by the “seated man”, a rock photographed by the Rover Spirit in 2007 who, by a wrong angle, seemed an entire human figure cared for with his arms on his knees. If you are looking for those who have continued to support over the years, it was a Martian you would remain amazed.
The catalog of cosmic illusions does not stop there: in the nebulae we saw gigantic hands, divine eyes, cosmic owls; In the Helix Nebula, about 650 light years from us, we seemed to see “the eye of God”; In other galaxies, spirals renamed with religious names as if the whole universe should fix us from afar. Even in the glasses of wine emerge female profiles, in geographical maps the penisolles become boots or noses, and in the terrestrial rocks we recognize statues or skulls, all in order to delude ourselves that there is a meaning behind the case. Thus, while on Mars we still seek a concrete test of Martian life (fossil traces of microbial life, do not remain of dinosaurs or plants) we are satisfied with invented animals and imaginary figures, to our brains manufacture stories when in front there is only a stone.
In short, in the end too here remains a stone, nothing more than a stone, yet we fill it with turtles and skulls and flying discs and seated men and Madonne on the toasts and civilizations never existed and astronavians disguised in the geoglifices of the pyramids (there is no Egyptologist who can hold the confrontation with one convinced of seeing a space shuttle on the wall of a pyramid). Each surface must postpone a message, a clue, a secret, a confirmation that we are not alone, when we ourselves on a stone drift in a universe too large and we cannot keep us company even between us, inside the house.