January 08, 2004
Mars:
Apart from the different colour it does look like a stony desert in the Australian outback doesn't it.
Mars Exploration Rover Mission
The cultural encoding of the inland deserts in Australia is the Dead Heart. It is an encoding that evokes of images of heat, vast tracts of sand, a featureless wasteland where little grows and nothing lives. It is a desolate and lonely place where nothing moves during the day.
The desert areas of Australia do have a history. They were once coverd by sheets of polar ice, and before that by great areas of shallow seas. Since the continent continues to edge slowly northward its desert regions may well become tropical regions.
The desert by moonlight, animals that are nowhere to be seen during the day are everywhere. As dawn comes, the star-filled sky slowly changes from black to stripes of blue, green, orange until the rising sun breaks over the horizon and lights up dewdrops on flowers and huge spider webs that stretch between the desert trees, despite the lack of rain.