Reg discovers corporate logo on surface of Mars

LogoWatch Hearty congratulations are in order this week to the boffins at NASA for their successful landing on the surface of Mars.

The result is some terrific pictures of the Red Planet, showing a vast, rubble-strewn wasteland entirely devoid of atmosphere or intelligent life.

Perusing these pictures got us thinking - no, not of Canada - but rather of the horrible inevitability that sooner or later some bright spark would discover a likeness of Linus Torvalds hewn from the Martian rock, or a boulder in the form of Christina Aguilera or the Virgin Mary etched in a dried river bed.

This extra-terrestrial simulacra hunting has been a popular pastime since 1976, when the Viking Mars probe apparently revealed a huge human face carved on the planet's surface, presumably by super-intelligent beings with an advanced technology (or a lot of jack-hammers at least), and nothing better to do with their time.

Well, we here at Vulture Central decided to get straight on the case, and unleashed our highly-trained team of digital enhancement experts on the new NASA images. Although we did not in all honesty expect to find anything of interest, what our meticulous analysis did eventually reveal pretty well throws the received wisdom of human evolution out of the window, then runs down the stairs after it and administers it a good slap:

The implications of this discovery are almost too chilling to contemplate. Either human civilisation is based entirely on cross breeding between our distant ancestors and intergalactic computer resellers who abandoned their home world when the surface water froze, or IT superstores have already staked a franchise claim on Mars in advance of our eagerly-awaited colonisation of that planet.

Either way, the question is not now "Where in the World?", but rather "Where on which World?" ®

Bootnote

We sincerely hope the Brits can make contact soon with their own Beagle probe, and that the poor puppy has not in fact fallen down an enormous crater closely resembling Heath Robinson.