Imagine our surprise, then, when the Curiosity rover recently stumbled upon what appear to be the remains of a decayed rib cage sticking out of a Martian rock.Ĭuriosity has been roaming around Gale Crater, a 96-mile impact crater, for more than a decade, taking pictures the whole time. It’s a classic trope, and one which has been employed exhaustively, but it’s never been tried in real life. That false Earth is the world you’re living on right now.Įach of those stories have one thing in common: by the time the credits roll, we’ve learned that what the characters took for an alien world was, in fact, Earth all along. And the humans looking for Earth, they eventually gave up, settled someplace else, and named it Earth in honor of the world they never found. Having escaped the clutches of the apes, Charlton Heston's Taylor rides the shoreline on a horse and discovers the partially buried remains of the Statue of Liberty. The last surviving astronaut of that asteroid mission, lived just long enough to learn his spacecraft had malfunctioned and he had crashed right here at home, in the Nevada desert. In each case, the protagonists of these stories (not to mention the audience) were in for a big surprise. RELATED: Where is the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ cast now? Edward James Olmos, Katee Sackhoff & more The remaining humans inhabit 12 colony worlds, but they’re searching for a lost colony and their true home: Earth. The characters of Battlestar Galactica ( streaming now on Peacock!) represent the remnant of humanity leftover after all out war with a cybernetic race of warmongers known as the Cylons. There, they encounter populations of intelligent non-human apes and a subclass of primitive humans. Astronauts on an interstellar voyage waken from stasis and crash land on an alien planet in a star system 300 light years from Earth. The 1968 film Planet of the Apes (also written by Serling) has a similar premise. Slowly, the rest of the crew perish, trying to survive on an alien world, until only one remains. Disaster strikes and half of the eight-person crew is killed when their craft crashes on the asteroid’s surface.

In the classic run of The Twilight Zone (check the SYFY schedule for airdates), Rod Serling delivered one of the most blistering twists in storytelling history with the episode “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.” The 15th episode of the first season begins with a crewed mission to an unexplored asteroid.

Nasa mars rover finds aliens