Is there a 10km alien base on planet Mercury? These people say “yes”

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, which makes it a blazing 800 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface. It also doesn’t have an atmosphere, which makes breathing more than slightly out of the question. These few small facts alone, have made NASA fairly confident there isn’t any life on the tiny planet. At least, certainly not life as we know it.

Recently, it was discovered that Venus might have microbial life – and Venus is arguably even more inhospitable than Mercury. So, when claims of life on Mercury started to pop up it might have sounded more credible than it probably should have.

Alien “bases”

The picture above is a publicly available NASA image taken by a probe that was sent to Mercury back in the 2010s. A determined alien hunter who looks for proof of extraterrestrial life in all kinds of interesting places, has circled what he believes to be obvious alien bases.

If you’re having a hard time making out the bases, don’t feel bad. The objects circled are, without a doubt, craters. Without an atmosphere Mercury gets hit by meteors far more often than Earth does – this causes the planet to be pockmarked with craters of varying sizes.

So, these “bases” that the alien hunter is calling “ribbon-shaped white ceramic structure[s]” are definitely just craters reflecting light from the relatively close sun. Its possible sunset in this area of the planet was beginning to occur – hence the angled light and deep shadowing within the holes. If the sun had been directly over the top of these craters you’d be able to see more clearly into the holes.

Looking in all the wrong places

The alien hunter who “found” these images are known for looking at publicly available images and circling anything with interesting shadowing or a little too much blur & then calling it alien technology of some kind.

Here’s the thing though – if the U.S. government is hiding the existence of aliens from us, why would they allow NASA or Google Maps to release images of “proof” to the public? If these pictures proved that “the odds of aliens existing are at 100 percent”, then we feel like they never would have been put on the internet.

Are extraterrestrials out there?

It’s possible life from other planets exists, especially in other solar systems where planets exist in what NASA calls the habitable zone – an area around a star where a planet may be able to have liquid water, since Earth-based life is very dependent on access to water.

In fact, part of the reason Venus isn’t completely out of the running for potential life is due to the fact the atmosphere has liquid water in the form of clouds. Though, it seems pretty unlikely we’re going to find life of any kind in our own solar system.

The Fermi Paradox is a complicated equation which states that intelligent life should exist out there in the universe, and that we should have already made contact with them – at least mathematically speaking. However, as far as we know, we haven’t – hence the paradox. This equation calls into question a number of things, and has a lot of scientists wondering if the creation of intelligent life is statistically unlikely to occur in the universe.

In the end, visitors from another planet may or may not be in our future – but really, we can only keep looking to the stars and reaching out in the hopes of a reply.