Martian chaos terrain

93 points25 comments4 days ago
Gravityloss

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.

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wronex

Did someone perhaps come here after watching Sebastian Lague’s pen plotter video?

https://youtu.be/qyNWDzO6kKQ

There is a brief mention of chaos terrain while he searches the surface of Mars for an interesting plot.

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ozyschmozy

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

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hodder

Fascincating article. Also a cool band name.

jakzurr

Holy smokes, what a rabbit hole. Saving this link for late night reading.

andrewrn

Perfect Hacker News link :)

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Razengan

Man there's so much cool shit to see out in the universe if we can only get our crap sorted for long enough to get our ass off our home.

tokai

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?

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sandworm101

Another fun mars fact: The first image from the surface was made using crayons.

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-tv-image-of-mars-han...