wronexan hour ago
Did someone perhaps come here after watching Sebastian Lague’s pen plotter video?
There is a brief mention of chaos terrain while he searches the surface of Mars for an interesting plot.
Gravitylossan hour ago
99% of scifi papers over these things. Somehow people always land in nice flat areas. Aliens' ground vehicle was modified from an airport tow truck. Talking about convenient flat land.
Even on Earth, with weather and generous erosion, large portions of land are very dense forests or very rough mountains.
selljamhere37 minutes ago
One of the 1%. Alien famously starts with the crew of the Nostromo (a space mining rig) riding a transport down to an uninhabited moon where the transport of this mining vessel is damaged by... landing on a rock.
ceejayozan hour ago
> Somehow people always land in nice flat areas.
Well, yeah. You pick those.
It's why Blue Origin does their tourist flights out in the desert.
We've even found some specific such sites. Forest coverage turns out to be a very minor issue on Mars.
https://www.space.com/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-sample-re...
altmanaltman30 minutes ago
Tbf if you were an alien landing on earth, there's plenty of smooth flat surfaces available. If you can pick your landing spot, why would you pick dense forests or very rough mountains? Same logic when we land on other planets
ozyschmozy2 days ago
I've been reading the Mars trilogy (by Kim Stanley Robinson) after it was recommended on an HN thread a while back, and it's been on my mind to look into what the "chaos" was. Pretty neat
omnicognate3 hours ago
"Badlands of Aram Chaos" itself sounds like a sci fi title. Also, the picture of it in the "Gallery" section is cool and visually confusing. I'm struggling not to see a smooth, reflecting water surface in it, that can't possibly be there.
Edit: I think it's an aerial picture, but my brain insists on seeing it as one taken from the surface.
andai2 hours ago
Yeah, I was just looking at that. What the heck. It's aerial?
Reminds me of "name one thing in this picture"
tokai3 hours ago
I'm surprised that we do not have any chaos terrain on Earth. Can't find any explanation why. We have had large sudden flood events on Earth, but maybe weathering orders the 'chaos' over time?
card_zero2 hours ago
The suggested mechanism is that sedimentary rocks form over ice. That puzzles me in itself, because it implies a river with ice at the bottom. But anyway, then some heat source arrives and melts the ice, causing a sort of rug pull that means the rock layer drops down and breaks up. Kaboom.
petsfedan hour ago
I think the most likely case for sedimentary deposition over ice would be something like volcanic eruption or an impact event redepositing material onto pre-existing ice.
1970-01-012 hours ago
We almost certainly did at one point, but life and tides can fill-in the gaps. We also truly do not know what terrain is underneath Antarctica, Greenland, etc.