Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock
Not that anyone in power is going to care, but there’s even more evidence that Americans are coming to overwhelmingly loathe AI — despite, or perhaps because, they’re using chatbots more than ever.
In a sweeping new poll conducted by Pew Research, only 16 percent of respondents said they believed AI will have a positive impact on society — a number as dismal as the perception of the tech.
Meanwhile, 49 percent of adults say they use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which remains the most popular by a considerable margin, with a quarter saying they use the tools daily. That proportion is considerably higher than the 33 percent of American adults who said they used AI chatbots in 2024.
In other words, the tech’s widespread adoption isn’t helping its perception. A full 40 percent of respondents said they anticipate AI will have a negative impact on society, and 31 percent said it will impact them personally in a negative way, too.
This varies quite a bit by age. Gen Z adults, ages 18 to 29, were the most wary of AI, with 48 percent believing it’ll be negative for society. Yet they’re also the group that reported using AI the most, at 66 percent.
Interestingly, the 30-49 year olds and the 50-and-up brackets are more closely aligned, at 39 percent and 37 percent respectively viewing it as negative. They’re using AI less, though the dropoff between their usage is significant: 61 percent of 30-49 year olds said they used AI chatbots, while only 42 percent of 50-64 year olds did. It was less than a quarter for 65 years and older.
What’s driving this gap between perception and usage is unclear. You could argue that some feel compelled to use it, even when recognizing the tech’s shortcomings and the ethical dubiousness of the industry that’s building it. In fact, many are literally forced to use it at work, with bosses often more enthusiastic about the tech than workers are.
In any case, it’s a real problem for AI’s long-term staying power. Right now the industry is being propelled by hype and the mountains of cash that’re being pumped into it, while profits remain elusive. If no one likes AI years or decades from now, will there be enough customers to keep the industry running?
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
“The changes that appear to occur in the empty worldwe call real only because of our ignorance.Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”
~ Hsin Hsin Ming
Xinxin Ming, meaning literally: “Faith-Mind Inscription,” is a poem attributed to the Third Chinese Chán Patriarch Jianzhi Sengcan and one of the earliest Chinese Chan expressions of the Buddhist mind training practice. It is located in section T2010 of the Taisho Tripitaka. Wikipedia
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jun 22, 2026 Serena Roney-Dougal, PhD, received a doctoral degree from the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom, for a parapsychological dissertation. She is author of Where Science and Magic Meet and The Faery Faith: An Integration of Science and Spirit. She resides in Glastonbury, England, where she served on the Town Council. In this video, rebooted from 2020, she describes her commitment to the Green Party and to achieving certain ecological objectives in her local community in the coming years. She explains her passion for a sustainable future in terms of the Buddhist ideal of compassion as well as the global, indigenous sense of wholeness and oneness with nature. She recounts her struggles in understanding the perspectives of her political opponents. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on December 5, 2020)
I have been thinking about the sexuality of Jesus since I was thirteen.
A man from South Korea writes. When he was sixten, in 1984, to be exact, he spontaneously entered a state of cosmic consciousness while sitting in the back row of a high school classroom. He was looking out the window, mesmerized by some shimmering sunlight reflecting off the side of a bright white building. Caught by the sight, he found this beauty and joy strangely expanding and growing inside him. And then,
[s]uddenly something weird happened to my body. I felt like thousands of hot small worms came into existence inside of me. At first, they appeared near my foot and crawled up my body, making my pleasure bigger and bigger. As if the dead body of an animal was full of tens of thousands of small maggots without leaving any space, my body was being fully occupied by all these hot and small creeping things. They made me feel that my body was boiling like hot water. In that way, my body was getting hotter and more aroused by the upward creeping of innumerable “energy” worms, and my whole body and mind were filled with even greater pleasure! And when those creeping and crawling things inside reached my whole body. It happened! Or more exactly, I exploded into It.
[William James] remained troubled, however, by how to reconcile this state of cosmic consciousness with the mundane needs of the ego or social self. He now writes often of the “trauma” of these initiatory states.
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” he prayed, directly from the biblical text [Song of Songs 1:1]. “And He did. I was overcome with the erotic passion of my Beloved.”
Put simply, the men who could receive such a teaching, who “had ears to hear,” were those whom we would today call gay, and those who could not receive such a teaching were those whom we would today call straight. Sexual orientation, in other words, determined the hierarchy of Jesus’s kingdom of heaven, and it was the gay man, not the heterosexual married man, who was clearly privileged by Jesus. This is certainly an imperfect and anachronistic way to gloss such a saying, but it is hardly, I think an inaccurate way.
What makes biblical love “spiritual,” then, is not its lack of sex (there is plenty of that), but its sublimation of the erotics of the Beloved into a systematic denial of social hierarchy and a radical affirmation of the man or woman “on the bottom.”
[F]urther down the path, one would learn to see the phenomenal world as a “mansion of fun” in which to take delight in the omnipresence and essential bliss of the divine.
Indeed, the word personality is derived form the Latin for “mask”: a persona is quite literally a “mask” that one speaks (sona) through (per).
Mythically put, it is suffering and a psyche’s subsequent dissociation that often grant access to the super- or x-tra of the hero. Thus it is the early horrible event of a little boy witnessing the murder of his parents outside a theater that psychologically produces the figure of Batman, and it is the trauma of watching his father accidentally murder his mother that produces the rage that triggers the transformation of Bruce Banner into the Hulk in the Hollywood movie.
[S]exuality and death are indeed two sides of the same mortal coin. Organisms engage in procreative sexual activity because they die. If there were no death, there would be no need of sexual activity.
[T]he attentive reader may have noticed that my earlier discussions of consciousness in the history of religions were actually discussions of consciousness and energy. The two, I would suggest, cannot be separated, ever.
—The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, by Jeffrey J. Kripal
“For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, It would be utterly scorned.”
William Blake was a British poet, painter, printmaker, and engraver. A visionary artist and nonconformist, Blake expressed his radical views on society, politics, and religion through his poetry, paintings, watercolors, and illuminated books. His work often hid criticism within complex mythology to avoid persecution from the British government. Wikipedia.org
There’s an urgent need to study how artificial intelligence makes ethical choices because it soon will make many such decisions in our stead, says computer scientist Iyad Rahwan
Support sound science and smart stories Help us make scientific knowledge accessible to all Donate today
You’re driving along and a person darts in front of you — do you swerve even if it means crashing into a wall? What if the person were a child?
And when filing taxes, do you take advantage of any loophole you can find?
Pretty soon, artificial intelligence systems may be making these kinds of decisions for us. More than half of the global population is already using AI chatbots today, and various kinds of AI will likely become part of our lives in a growing diversity of contexts and products.
Computer scientist Iyad Rahwan and his team at the Center for Humans & Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin believe we should study such issues before they arise in real life. In what they call “science fiction science,” the team is examining future scenarios by looking at how people behave when using novel kinds of AI and asking people how they think AI ought to behave.
CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND)
Computer scientist Iyad Rahwan
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
The goal, the researchers stress, is to predict in as much objective detail as possible how people and AI will interact in the future, not to prescribe how companies and governments should navigate this treacherous terrain.
Will we always struggle to trust AI, or will we come to prefer it over working with humans? Will interacting with AI make us behave better or worse? And who should be held responsible when things go wrong?
Rahwan and coauthors explored the moral psychology of artificial intelligence in the 2024 Annual Review of Psychology.This discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do we need to study the “moral psychology of AI”? Isn’t moral psychology a distinctly human thing?
The short answer is we need a moral psychology of AI for the same reasons we need moral psychology of humans. We need to understand what drives humans to be more or less moral, in order to promote a more moral society and more moral behavior in our institutions. Now that AI machines are increasingly interfacing with the world, I think we need to do the same for them, since they will be making decisions with moral consequences.
We need to understand what moral principles they follow, if any, and to what extent these are due to their training, their programming, the datasets they were fed or the contexts in which they operate.
There’s a famous problem called the “Collingridge dilemma,” which claims that when technology is still easy to change and adjust, we don’t have enough information to know what to do. Then, by the time we do have enough information, it’s so entrenched it’s become very difficult to change.
So I think it’s very important that science builds this body of evidence early enough, ideally ahead of time, to speed up our ability to respond to these new challenges. Imagine if we’d done a proper scientific trial on the impacts of social media on children back in 2010, and discovered the adverse impacts it had on socialization or mental health in those early days. That would probably have been good.
As AI chatbots become more agreeable to interact with, we may get too attached to them and risk social isolation or intentional manipulation by the companies that run them, as Iyad Rahwan depicts in this cartoon.CREDIT: EVILAICARTOONS.COM
One problem may be that these things are often a moving target. Social media has changed a lot from what it was like in the beginning, and AI systems are changing even faster.
I agree. The platforms are continuously changing. AI chatbots today may be trying to be nice and polite, accurate, and sort of politically correct, but there’s no guarantee of that in the long run. They are already moving towards hyper-personalization, where everybody’s chatbot behaves differently. The AI, for example, may affirm whatever prejudices and conspiracy theories the user already believes in, in order to keep the user engaged. AI chatbots are already highly sycophantic, agreeing with our politics and affirming our prior beliefs and value judgments. They may also, alternatively, subtly push political agendas set by the AI company and its political allies. The political and financial incentives acting on AI companies may take us to very strange places, which is why I think it’s important for us to study the behavior and impact of AI agents now.
They may be trying to be nice, but because they are trained on data generated by humans, AI systems may also have adopted many of our unfair biases. What can be done about that?
We know such biases exist among humans, and they manifest themselves in online data, whether they’re images or text. So when machines learn from our data, they pick up on these biases. And when they are trained to generate similar data, they’ll reproduce those biases too, when making decisions or producing text or images.
A 2023 study using ChatGPT-3 showed this may also happen when AI bots summarize text. When humans summarize stories, they tend to remove information inconsistent with common stereotypes, which can lead to a shift in the text towards more stereotypical information. It’s similar with AI: If, for example, a text states a man is a business executive and also doing most of the chores around the house, the second thing is more likely to be left out by an AI system asked to summarize the text, thus reinforcing the stereotype.
Now that we know AI does this, we can try to overcome this problem by fine-tuning the AI model to eliminate those kinds of biases. This is probably easier to do with machines than humans, by training them on more carefully curated data or by reinforcement learning, in which AI learns to make better decisions through human feedback, to discourage stereotypes.
This may create a new kind of problem, which is that the training reflects the biases of a handful of companies from one or two countries, whose AI applications may be used in all domains — decision-making, human resources, legal, educational and so on. So I think we need to quantify those biases by interrogating each of these models, regardless of their origins. We need independent scientific analysis of how accurate, racist or sycophantic different AIs are, and trustworthy institutions to certify them as such.
For high-stakes domains like medicine, at least, the European Union’s AI Act is going in that direction. Under this legislation, AI applications classified as “high-risk” must be independently assessed before they hit the market. Developers have to prove their systems are accurate and secure and have mitigated discriminatory biases — much like how a new medical treatment must go through clinical trials before it can be prescribed to patients.
But from a scientific perspective, how do you define what qualifies as a bias?
In my own research, I’m very interested in cultural variation in moral psychology and its impact on AI. Very early on — in the prehistoric times of 10 years ago, which is like a century in AI time — we launched the Moral Machine experiment, in which people were asked online to give their opinion about how a future autonomous car should solve a moral dilemma. Basically, there’s an unavoidable crash, and scenarios were presented in which people had to choose whose safety the car should prioritize.
We translated it to 11 languages, and the website went viral and became a very large-scale survey.
We had tens of millions of decisions from people worldwide, which gave us a really rich picture of all the agreements, but also of cultural differences. There are broad, universal agreements: Almost everybody prefers to save children over adults, women over men, a person crossing legally over a jaywalker, and so on. But there were differences in the relative strength of these, which means the way people resolve these dilemmas across different cultures differ in significant ways.
For example, people in every single country thought the vehicle should prioritize the safety of children and younger people over older people. However, the intensity of this preference varied considerably. In Western countries, which score high on individualism, the preference was stronger. In Eastern countries, there was higher value placed on the lives of the elderly.
Countries also differed in the extent to which they prioritized pedestrians who were crossing the street legally over those who were jaywalking. In countries with a stronger rule of law — a measure of compliance with laws and confidence in government — people were more likely to sacrifice jaywalkers to save legally crossing pedestrians.
Research shows that when asked how driverless cars should behave in traffic, people around the world agree on many things — but there are also some distinct differences, as this cartoon by Iyad Rahwan illustrates.CREDIT: EVILAICARTOONS.COM
This is not limited to issues with future autonomous vehicles. It may also be an issue for large language models (LLMs) or image-generation models. Some things have different interpretations in different cultures. For example, in the West, there is a strong consensus that we want to eliminate gender stereotypes in AI. But there are other cultures where a traditional gender division of labor is considered acceptable or is a foundational part of their social organization.
So now we’re in the realm of politics — and culture wars. You might say, “I want to eliminate any biases and every stereotype from these models, around the world,” and maybe that’s the right thing to do, right? But it’s important to realize that’s someone’s decision. The technical question is the easy one.
So you’re not saying what should be done, only that policymakers should be thinking about it.
That’s right. Science can highlight some of these tensions, but it cannot, of course, resolve them. For example, if you ask people as citizens what they think the car should do, they say it should minimize the number of casualties, even if that harms the person in the car. Yet if you ask people which car they would prefer to ride in or buy, they will usually prefer the car that is trained to protect them.
If the programming is left to the companies, they’ll cater to the consumer, and make cars that deprioritize the safety of others. There are similar dynamics with the large language models: Companies are driven to meet consumer demands. The question is, what negative consequences might this have for people who aren’t buying the product, but still might be affected by its decisions? If a car protects only its driver, or an optimization algorithm considers only the benefits to its owner, other people might be harmed.
Perhaps if drivers would be held legally responsible for damage to others, that would help?
I’m not a legal expert, but it seems to me that if a car is making all the decisions, it would be strange for the owner to be responsible, unless they were able to adjust the settings of the car. In that sense, car makers might have an incentive to give you the choice, like a little dial for car owners to control risk distribution. Or you could imagine people using third-party updates to adjust the ethics of a car.
Do you have a sense for how these issues are currently being handled by the car companies?
“If you ask people as citizens what they think the car should do, they say it should minimize the number of casualties, even if that harms the person in the car. Yet if you ask people which car they would prefer to ride in or buy, they will usually prefer the car that is trained to protect them.”
— IYAD RAHWAN
I think among carmakers, the general discussion now is about trying to minimize harm across the board. I think we’re not yet at a stage where we can distinguish if certain groups are being harmed more often.
The safety record is pretty good, certainly better than human driving. There are now between 30,000 and 40,000 road deaths, not counting injuries, per year in the US alone. If the number of road deaths caused by self-driving cars turns out to be much lower — which it currently seems to be, though of course it is too early to be sure — perhaps the discussion about unavoidable collisions can be avoided. Then, we need to understand what kinds of priorities should guide the behavior of the vehicles in such “edge cases.” Once these priorities are societally agreed upon, governments will need new systems to monitor the behavior of these vehicles and enforce the rules.
You emphasize in the paper that even if we ourselves are paying for the AI system or the product that contains it, we shouldn’t assume the AI always has our best interest in mind.
Indeed. One thing we’ve experimented with early on that is now becoming reality are what we called “self-interested AIs” trained to serve different interests than that of the user. AI companies may have interests that conflict with ours, and this is not new. We’ve always had companies that prefer to use cheaper materials with consequences for consumer safety, for example. That’s why we have government regulation. For AI, we’re still figuring out what the appropriate analogies are. In which domains do AI applications require more scrutiny — medical, legal, financial? And in which domains can consumers judge for themselves?
One thing that happens when we leave moral decisions to artificial intelligence is we may no longer feel as responsible for the outcome ourselves. How might this affect our behavior?
We’ve recently done a study on this in which people were doing tasks themselves or using AI to do them. Most people are inhibited from cheating too much, but AI appears to reduce this inhibition. When rolling a die and asked to report the score themselves, only 5 percent of people cheat, even if they could easily get away with it. Yet if they’re prompting an LLM, the number goes up to about 25 percent of people that are willing to cheat.
And if people are provided with a turning dial that allows them to balance honesty versus revenue, 85 percent cheat. All these honest people become cheaters, probably because they can say, “I just asked to maximize revenue, I didn’t ask it to cheat.” Similar issues may arise in many aspects of life, and this will be even more of an issue for AI agents that find their own way towards achieving your goal, instead of following explicit orders to act unethically.
How do you think all this time we spend with chatbots might affect how we treat each other?
We’ve done a few early studies showing that people prefer to collaborate with people rather than AI systems, even if the AI systems are nicer. But a more recent one found they can also start favoring machines over humans. We had participants play a financial “trust game” where they had to choose between cooperating with a human or a bot. Initially, people were biased against the machines. But once they learned over multiple rounds that the bots were actually more cooperative and trustworthy than the humans, they started preferring the machines.
So once you fix the problem of AIs behaving badly, they might start outcompeting humans, even in the context of social interaction. Some people are having AI friends now, and perhaps some of us will be tempted to behave more like AI with other people. If AIs are always affirming and sycophantic, human friends might have to behave more like that AI just to compete. If the only way to keep a human friend is to act like a sycophantic bot, that would be a terrible outcome.
We haven’t really looked at whether people adopt the chatbot’s attitude, but a recent study of ours did demonstrate that we are already adopting words that chatbots like to use, “delve” being the most infamous example.
Stay in the Know Sign up for the Knowable Magazine newsletter today
Indeed, people are doing plenty of delving these days. If, say, the European Union would put you in a position to regulate AI, what would be your first decision? What do you think can and should be done now?
If I were in charge, I would be really silly to assume that I know all the answers myself. But that doesn’t mean I would do nothing. What I would do is change the rules so that companies must open up not just their data, but also their product design to scientists. I would change regulations so that experiments on AI products can be conducted by independent scientists, not out of the kindness of the companies, but by law.
Researchers should be able to probe the current algorithms and maybe even alter them to conduct the best possible research on the impact of these things. That way, we can answer the big questions people have, such as whether AI is increasing misinformation and polarization, and what the mental health impacts of interacting with AI might be, and so on. We could really certify that what are essentially broad utilities are not creating massive societal problems. The stakes are high. We don’t want to stifle innovation, but we should allow scientists to study it.
Tim Vernimmen is a freelance science writer based near Antwerp, Belgium.
I am the founder and premier investigator of the Mars research group known as The Cydonia Institute and a member of the Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR). My research encompasses over 30 years of study and analysis of NASA and ESA images of the planet Mars.
I have coauthored two books and six peer-reviewed science papers that discuss anomalous formations on the surface of Mars. Over the past two decades, I have attended various science conferences and seminars as an invited speaker and appeared on numerous radio, podcasts and television programs, such as Beyond Belief and Coast to Coast with George Noory. I also appeared on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, The Proof is Out There and The UnXplained with William Shatner.
Discussion of artificial objects on Mars first began with the discovery of the “Face on Mars” back in 1976. Later, other intriguing and anomalous objects in the same region were found to display geometrically interesting characteristics. The above picture of the Cydonia region shows the famous “Face on Mars” top centre. The landscape is scattered with other intriguing images including pyramid shapes.
From Artist to Investigator: A Journey into Mars’ Anomalies
Before I continue, I would like to make a very clear point. I am not a scientist. I am an artist. My early schooling was in the visual arts. I am a sculptor, painter, art instructor, writer, curator, and the former director of the Sculptors’ Association of New Jersey. I have exhibited extensively throughout the New Jersey and New York area and was represented by the Grace Harkin Gallery in New York’s East Village. By the close of the 1980s, my work was recognised by one of the most influential art dealers of the twentieth century, Ivan Karp, and I had a one-man show at his gallery, the OK Harris Gallery of Art in SoHo. I was on top of the world.
Outside my short art career, I had a great interest in archaeology and studied the artwork of the Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Native American cultures. I attended glyph workshops at the University of Pennsylvania and learned to read Maya hieroglyphs. I also joined the Pre-Columbian Society, holding membership with the University of Pennsylvania and its affiliate in Washington D.C.
After finding a book by Randolfo Pozos titled The Face on Mars, Evidence for a Lost Civilization? my studies quickly turned to Mars. The structural formations presented in his book were truly remarkable. Around this time, a friend informed me about a new video by Richard C. Hoagland featuring his UN Briefings titled The Moon/Mars Connection. Hoagland was one of the first researchers to promote the discovery of the famous Face on Mars and expose evidence of artefacts on the moon.
Moving forward with the eyes of an artist, over the next thirty years, I acquired a vast collection of images from the ever-growing NASA archives. I found numerous formations with a high degree of geometric form and symmetry and others with pictographic design. Shuffling through my best-of-list, I decided to present some of these discoveries as a traveller’s guide to these anomalous structures on Mars.
My investigation opens with a short history of aerial photography, from the innovative use of hot air balloons and aeroplanes to the current use of high-tech satellites and LiDAR. I scrutinise its ‘bird’s eye view” advantage for military reconnaissance and explore the creation of Google Earth, which has enabled armchair archaeologists to travel the world. They have discovered everything from giant bird and deer geoglyphs to the ruins of long-lost ancient cities submerged by the sands of time.
Exploring Elysium Planitia: The Pyramids of Mars
My tour of Martian structures begins in the northeastern quadrant of the red planet in an area known as Elysium Planitia. There, I provide the reader with the opportunity to take another look at a set of enormous pyramidal formations that were once made famous by the world-renowned astronomer Carl Sagan (Figure 1). He was so intrigued by one of these pyramidal formations that he included it in his early lectures and his 1980 book and television series Cosmos. Unfortunately, Sagan never had the opportunity to examine better images. Five years after his death, the European Space Agency released a high-resolution image of the area that showed the pyramids to be real and captured an entire complex of additional pyramidal structures.
Mysteries of Nepenthes Mensae: The City of Symbols
From there, the reader travels to west and is confronted with a pair of city complexes occupying the planet’s Nepenthes Mensae region. The pair of settlements includes over 20 pictographic and geometrically shaped structures nestled within a small and condensed area. The first settlement consists of a small group of highly symmetrical and geometrically shaped structures that include a Hexagonal Pyramid, a U-shaped Delta, and a Five-sided Star formation (Figure 2). The complex also features pictographic formations representing a full-bodied Dove, Killer Whale and the head of a Bulldog Bat. The second Nepenthes Mensae settlement consists of a connective train of four aligning platforms, each containing an assortment of highly symmetrical and geometric structures such as ovals, squares, triangles and rectangles.
Another mysterious feature is below this pair of city settlements within the same area of the Nepenthes Mensae region of Mars. Both NASA and The European Space Association (ESA) released a set of images showing an elongated hexagonal structure that is highly symmetrical. The six-sided structure has a thick, relatively flat platform with a central mound formation. After doing a quick Google search of ancient ruins around the world, much to my amazement, I found the remains of an identical elongated hexagonal mound in the southern region of central Turkey. Known as Araban Hoyuk, the six-sided mound has a similar flat platform design with a central mound formation, just like the structure on Mars. I sat staring at the screen in disbelief; I was looking at its terrestrial companion, a true doppelganger.
Libya Montes and the Keyhole Enigma
Continuing my tour on a westward trek, I take the reader to a well-known area of the planet just above Isidis Planitia known as Libya Montes. It is here that NASA proudly proclaimed to have photographed an odd formation that resembles an “exclamation mark” on the surface of Mars. The isolated formation appears to sit alone in the middle of nowhere. Although the highly symmetrical structure can also be seen as a keyhole and screams of artificiality, NASA scientists quickly dismissed it as a natural phenomenon.
Taking on the challenge, my colleagues and I delved into a comprehensive analysis of the keyhole-shaped structure and produced a science paper which shows this geometrically precise structure to not only be highly symmetrical but also match the design of the keyhole-shaped tombs found in Japan (Figure 3).
As a result of our studies, the Martian Keyhole structure can now be found all over the World Wide Web in news reports, blog articles and YouTube videos. It was also featured on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and the UnXplained program with William Shatner.
Pushing further west, across this once thriving planet, the reader travels down below Valles Marineris and into the Atlantis Chaos region of Mars. Once there, the reader is exposed to an extensive investigation of the remains of an ancient city nestled along the vast edge of a dead lake. The city consists of a gridded network of broken walls and shattered foundations that bring to mind the compartmentalised city of Al-‘Ula in Saudi Arabia (Figure 4) or the shell-shocked remains of Dresden after World War II.
Directly below the remains of this gridded city in Atlantis Chaos are two neighbouring settlements. Both settlements contain a set of five large geometrically shaped formations that include squares, triangles, and other polygonal forms. They are all very similar in size and have almost identical dimensions.
Parrotopia: A City Under the Wings
The tour concludes in a large-impact crater located within the southwestern quadrant of the planet known as Argyre Basin. Setting on the western side of this massive basin, the reader will experience a real “bird’s eye view” of a parrot-shaped formation over a mile long (Figure 5). The sculpted parrot formation has clear and recognisable features in the appropriate size and shape of a real parrot. It has a head, eye, beak, body, and wing. Additional anatomical components include two legs with feet and toes. When two geologists and four veterinarians examined the formation, they all confirmed that this parrot geoglyph on Mars has over twenty-two points of anatomical correctness. Yes, that’s right, over twenty-two points of anatomical correctness!
Beyond the mind-blowing accuracy of the parrot formation, the wing area above the main body contains the remains of an entire city. Dubbed Parrotopia, the city includes a port jetty, a towering lighthouse and other shoreline-related structures. Hidden within the wings streets and gridded infrastructure, we find the pictographic imprints of the Maya Rain God in his various mythological incarnations.
Before the Parrot geoglyph’s inclusion in my new book, it was the subject of two papers published in peer-reviewed science journals. It featured on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and The Proof is Out There programs. It was also mentioned on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and, most importantly, as a “tip of the hat” to its discover Wil Faust, an anthropologist and city planner from Pennsylvania, NASA officially titled the area Parrotopia.
The reader is left with a little-known Mayan story that records what archaeologists read as a Star-War. The conflict was between the ancient cities of Naranjo and Tikal with the occupants of the planet Mars. Maya records show that Naranjo was founded around 896,000 years ago by a group of unknown people related to Mars and worshipped a primordial creature known as the Zip Monster, the patron god of Mars (Figure 6). It appears that just as the 13 colonies of America fought a revolutionary war with their homeland, England, to acquire independence 22,000 years ago, the colonies of Naranjo and Tikal fought a similar battle for independence with the occupants of Mars.
Figure 6: Zip Monster. Detail of page from the Dresden Codex. Drawing by the author.
This New World story sounds quite similar to the Sumerian stories of the Anunnaki wars between Earth and Mars with Enlil and Marduk, as interpreted by Zecharia Sitchin. In both versions, all life on Mars is extinguished by some kind of nuclear war. This dim scenario is supported by NASA’s detection of high levels of Xenon 129 within the Martian atmosphere, which was recently revealed by theoretical plasma physicist and astrophysicist Dr. John Brandenburg.
The current evidence of structures and ruined cities presented in official NASA and ESA images of Mars suggests that they were built after their original occupants were destroyed. Therefore, it is speculated that what we see today are the abandoned remains of that second occupation, which was only partially destroyed.
When this collection of structures is examined, you will find that they exhibit a direct correlation between the architecture and iconography of many of the cultures found on Earth, most notably within North and South America. These findings are supported by image specialist James S. Miller, geomorphologist William R. Sanders and geologist Michael Dale. They offer pro and con arguments for the artificial and natural origins of these unusual formations. Side-by-side comparisons of Martian structures are presented with their terrestrial counterparts, offering evidence of a shared aesthetic achieved in two opposing worlds.
In the foreword to The Great Architects of Mars, Dr John Brandenburg says that the evidence presented would appeal to anyone interested in the mysteries of Mars and our ancient past or if we entertain the idea that Mars and the Earth share a common point of origin. He states: “This is a unique and extremely important book, which provides the clearest and most precise evidence, ever compiled, to support the existence of artificial structures on the surface of Mars.”
As an artist, I have an eye for art and architecture, and my book, The Great Architects of Mars, results from those observations. I invite you to take another look at Mars with clear eyes and remember that through NASA’s own pictures, the truth will be revealed.
George J. Haas’s book The Great Architects of Mars: Evidence for the Lost Civilizations on the Red Planet (with a foreword by John E. Brandenburg, PhD) is available from Inner Traditions.
No Paywall. No Clickbait. Only Truth. This website exists because a few choose to give back for what they receive. If New Dawn has enriched your vision or sparked insight, let your gratitude flow. Help sustain the work that awakens the world. Your contribution matters more than you know.
About the Author
George J. Haas is the founder and premier investigator of the Mars research group known as The Cydonia Institute. A member of the Society for Planetary SETI Research, he has co-authored two books and six peer-reviewed science papers related to anomalous formations on the surface of Mars. He has appeared on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, The Proof is Out There, and The UnXplained with William Shatner. He lives in Waterford, Virginia.
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.
One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.
Long before Maurice Sendak insisted that “the child is the best part of the human self” and that the measure of a well-formed adult is “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” Le Guin writes:
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.
Our job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can’t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we’re led to think there isn’t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.
This is the paradox we must live with as we go on dying: that we are finite but unfinished, that maturity is not the prelude to mortality but the discovery of the immortal in us.
Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount.Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It’s okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page.
In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whether these are simply different side doors to our ongoing yearning to bridge matter and mystery in order to make meaning (my view), I was reminded of a forgotten speech by one of the most original minds and brightest spirits of the past century.
On Valentine’s Day 1971, a year after the publication of her classic Centering, the poet and potter M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) was invited to speak at an arts festival in Maine. Going “from horticulture to alchemy to the history of consciousness, with a few poems sprinkled in, and relying heavily on paradox,” the address she delivered, later included in The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (public library), is one of the most honest, imaginative, and articulate investigations of creativity I have encountered — a bold defiance of the fracturing of culture anchored in the passionate insistence that “the center is everywhere,” that it is “made up of differences, uniquenesses, in a tissue of relationships, interactions, interpenetrations.”
Mary Caroline Richards at Black Mountain College (Getty Research Institute. Photographer unknown.)
At the center of her cosmogony of creativity are the connections between the life of the individual human being and the life of the universe; between the inner invisible realm, which she calls “the force,” and the outer visible realm of its manifestation, which she calls the “the flower”; between the different fields of study and work through which we explore these realms. She writes:
Artists are sometimes particularly attuned to these connections, scientists too, mystics too… There may be a message in this way of working. Maybe that’s what a subject is, a gathering of ideas as set in motion by a central impulse. Like a magnetic field. Start the field going, and elements begin to swarm. By what logic? By attraction. By resonance. Maybe that’s what relevance is: the feeling of attraction and resonance between ideas and people.
This feeling, Richard observes, is what we call creativity — the mystery to which we try to give shape in matter — and it begins not in the mind but in the heart. She considers the force by which the cabbage flowers:
Cabbage… grows a big heart. Out of this heart come leaves. As the leaves grow, the heart grows. The cabbage gets its leaves from the inside, where there aren’t any. Cabbages grow from the inside, from the heart. And by growing they create their hearts.
A neurophysiologist from Yale says that brains too are created in this way: from un-brain forces. He says that the human brain is created by thinking, that ideas and values create chemical reactions in tissue. Like a cabbage, somehow the physical form grows from an invisible realm.
This invisible realm must be a powerfully creative region. It furnishes us not only with cabbages and brains, but with our scientific hypotheses, religious experiences, and works of art.
With the recognition that works of art begin with “a feeling for things, a feeling which is a way of knowing about things,” she adds:
We tend to call any undertaking an art when it seems to be drawing upon the fullness of inner feeling and upon careful regard for physical expression. To live and to work in the world mindful of the processes which are necessary to infuse matter with soul forces, to use techniques on behalf of living forms, is a great art.
In this sense, she observes, living itself is an art — the art of connection. Just as Erich Fromm was formulating the ideas that would become The Art of Being, Richards writes:
Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don’t know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by. The verbal arts we practice, or visual arts, or graphic arts, or theater arts, or musical arts, or liberal arts, are part of something. They are not the whole story. And they are interconnected at the center with all the other parts.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Pulsating beneath this interconnected totality is the essence of all creative work. While the young Jane Goodall was contemplating the indivisibility of art and science, Richards considers what creativity in all its forms asks of us and what it gives us:
Total concentration, total focus, enjoyment, discovery, inner effort, creating something, feeling secure in the process yet not knowing or demanding to know how it will come out. Many of the things we do may have this quality. Take gardening, for example, or making lab experiments, or working out a new equation, or cooking supper, or having a child, or teaching a class, or running a college, or praying, or going for a walk, or getting married, or dying.
This feeling of generative not-knowing — something the artist Ann Hamilton so beautifully articulated a generation after Richards — is also our best path to knowledge, integral to the creative process of science:
When we live in the spirit of science, we live in a quality of inquiry, of wonder. We put one foot in front of the other, standing firmly balanced on the earth, finding our way on. Each step is both an answer and a question. We both know and don’t know what we are doing… We need to learn to hear the yesin the no; the no in the yes. To hear what is not said. To see what is not visible.
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.