Brian Cory Dobbs

Ryan, we have an image there of what this next would look like.

So this is carbon dioxide corrosion.

Mars's atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide.

So if there's a bunch of metal up there, it's going to start looking like brown, like the rest of the brown rocks, flaky rocks all over the place.

Right, right.

And that's the thing to keep in mind is that the Mars surface is old.

So that there's anything there, number one, if there was truly a civilization there that left these things behind, that there's anything there today is a miracle.

But that it doesn't look pristine, I'm not bothered by.

Because it's so old.

However, the Martian atmosphere is not like our atmosphere.

It's less than 1% as dense.

There's really not a whole lot of wind erosion...

There's very, if anything, very little water erosion.

All the Mars atmosphere can blow around is dust.

So wind erosion really doesn't work the same way there on Mars.

It's just entirely different.

It's weak.

So when it lost its atmosphere, everything sort of just froze into place, being preserved, actually.

So decay and erosion doesn't take place nearly as quickly as it would on Earth.

Gotcha.