Welcome to Ceres, a dwarf planet within the asteroid belt. It's being visited by the Dawn probe as we speak. It also has one two lights shining on its surface Not saying it's aliens. Probably just a long abandoned alien outpost with a grudge and an automated invasion fleet.
DAMN KIDS! I tell them and tell them to turn off the lights when they leave a planet. I bet the front door is open too. I'm not heating the whole galaxy you know!
After checking with my sources I can say it's ice. Totally is. Nothing to see here, move along Seriously, it's weird. First of all you'd think sunlight out there wouldn't be strong enough to produce such an effect. Secondly, it's visible from different angles.
Maybe it's one of the failed Mars probes that missed orbital insertion and, by some amazing coincidence, kept going and hit Ceres?
I know this is a literal shot in the dark, but what if the lights coming from Ceres are biological in origin? Bioluminescent microbes that live just under the crust of diminutive Ceres(?).
That could very well be. Great if we find out for sure! What if something like my dream I had a while back comes true? I posted it, the dream where I was boring through ice on Europa and found a pointed skull of a small shrew-like creature with sharp teeth?
Whenever I read things like this, I'm reminded of an old SF story I once read called something like "The Emissary" or "The Ambassador." No clue as to who the author was. Anyway, it takes place on the first manned mission to Jupiter. The crew can't help but notice that one of Jupiter's moons has what appears to be latitude and longitude lines on its surface. As they get closer to try and figure out what might have caused those lines, they realize that that's no moon, its a space station! (Or rather, space ship.) They land, and find their way into the ship. Its pretty barren, the crew either having left, or the ship having orbited Jupiter for so long that everything organic has long since decayed. In the middle of the ship, however, they find a statue, representing what they can only guess were the species of the aliens who built the ship. Its a lizard-like figure, reaching out with his hand, thus acting as the emissary (or ambassador) of the title.
Ahh, come on Lanz. Leaving aside the fact that it is not possible adding around 1/3rd to the mass of Mars and restarting their magnetic field due to the heat of impact makes a cool what if. In a few million years it might even be Earth like. Where is your sense of imagination?
Using asteroids to increase Mars' mass is less viable than trying to slam an asteroid into Venus to speed up its retrograde rotational period, and even that poses significant hurdles that wouldn't make it a good use of resources.
