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A Martian Crater for Mac?

By Gregon

This Friday would have been the 35th birthday of Fortean writer and all-round good guy Mac Tonnies (Mac passed away last October). Over at Macbots, a website tribute-of-sorts created “out of a desire to allow something beautiful to grow out of a tragedy”, Sarah has posted what I think is a very cool idea: petitioning for a Martian crater to be named after Mac:

I received a very interesting email last night that I think you all would be interested in! Shepherd Johnson would like to collect votes and showcase Mac’s work on Mars to persuade USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) to name a Martian crater for Mac.

Shepherd has a contact at USGS who has stated that Mac “falls under the criteria for the naming convention, which is that craters are named for writers and others who have contributed to the lore of Mars.” All that is required for this is a recommendation, but Shepherd and I would like to go the extra step and showcase Mac’s work, as well as show a whole bunch of citizen support!

Shepherd has started by creating a Facebook group for people interested in having a crater (preferably in or near the region of Cydonia!) named for Mac. If you are a Facebook user, please join to show your support! We have no idea if voting will help, but it certainly couldn’t hurt!

Next, we are looking for ideas of ways to showcase Mac’s work, which is where we could use some help from the Macbot community. We could either give this USGS contact a list of URLs that link to his Mars-related material, or possibly direct her to a page here at Macbots where we post everything Mars-related we can find, but either way, we need help searching for the material!! Neither of us know Mac’s work as well as the whole community does, so we really need the hivemind to get this off the ground!

If you can think of a link, article, or anything of Mac’s that you think would be useful, please post a comment here, tweet me @macbots, or email me at blazingbetta [@] gmail [dot] com. It may take a while, even a couple years, to see this effort come to fruition, but I think Mac is definitely worth the effort!

If we’re going to have asteroids named after prominent skeptics, I say it’s about time that Martian craters are named after Forteans. Show your support by joining the Facebook group, and/or sharing ways of showcasing Mac’s writings about Mars.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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5 Comments

    1. Yes and no
      [quote=red pill junkie]While this is a fantastic idea, IMHO, naming an exploring rover after Mac would be more fitting.[/quote]

      Fitting yes, but rovers eventually lose power, freeze over and are abandoned. A crater is forever (or at least until it gets hit by another meteor).

      1. Nothing is forever, mate 🙂
        True, the rover will eventually cease to function. Yet it will remain part of the Martian landscape for eons —not to mention the pages of our own history. A curious alien artifact that may someday be part of an exhibition on ancient space colonization in some future Martian museum.

        I dunno, it just seems to me that a robot would be a better homage for our favorite Posthuman writer, that’s all 😉

        PS: The sad state of the Mars “Face” in Cydonia, who may very well be just a curious natural formation —or not— shows us that nothing lasts.

        PPS: And this discussion made me think in the oddity that it’s easier to name a huge geographical formation in Mars, whereas naming a rover or an exploration vessel would be far difficult —completely the opposite of what happens in our planet 🙂

        1. face
          The sad state of the face shows what happens when you don’t take care of your natural monuments. Sites like the natural rock formations at Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial need careful maintenance, as do the oddly shaped hill formations at Giza.

          For a post-humanist, we should name a coordinated flock of robots, not just one. The flock covers more terrain, is more fault tolerant, and can be replaced gradually. So while the individual robots are vulnerable, but the flock can survive for a long time.

          1. Flock of bots

            For a post-humanist, we should name a coordinated flock of robots, not just one. The flock covers more terrain, is more fault tolerant, and can be replaced gradually. So while the individual robots are vulnerable, but the flock can survive for a long time.

            The Macbot cloud, I <3 it! He even wrote about cybernetics and nanotechnology as a means to explain some of the most weird aspects of the UFO phenomenon —i.e. conversing with the aliens through "telepathy", and their ability to appear and disappear.

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