CHAPTER V
Blues for a Red Planet
In the orchards of the gods, he watches the canals . . .
– Enuma Elish, Sumer, c. 2500 B.C.
A man that is of Copernicus’ Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlightn’d by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy . . . that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours . . . But we were always apt to conclude, that ’twas in vain to enquire after what Nature had been pleased to do there, seeing there was no likelihood of ever coming to an end of the Enquiry . . . but a while ago, thinking somewhat seriously on this matter (not that I count my self quicker sighted than those great Men [of the past], but that I had the happiness to live after most of them) me thoughts the Enquiry was not so impracticable nor the way so stopt up with Difficulties, but that there was very good room left for probable Conjectures.
– Christian Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c. 1690
A time would come when Men should be able to stretch out their Eyes . . . they should see the Planets like our Earth.
– Christopher Wren, Inauguration Speech, Gresham College, 1657
Many years ago, so the story goes, a celebrated newspaper publisher sent a telegram to a noted astronomer: WIRE COLLECT IMMEDIATELY FIVE HUNDRED WORDS ON WHETHER THERE IS LIFE ON MARS. The astronomer dutifully replied: NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY KNOWS . . . 250 times. But despite this confession of ignorance, asserted with dogged persistence by an expert, no one paid any heed, and from that time to this, we hear authoritative pronouncements by those who think they have deduced life on Mars, and by those who think they have excluded it. Some people very much want there to be life on Mars; others very much want there to be no life on Mars. There have been excesses in both camps. These strong passions have somewhat frayed the tolerance for ambiguity that is essential to science. There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time. Some scientists have believed that Mars is inhabited on what has later proved to be the flimsiest evidence. Others have concluded the planet is lifeless because a preliminary search for a particular manifestation of life has been unsuccessful or ambiguous. The blues have been played more than once for the red planet.
Why Martians? Why so many eager speculations and ardent fantasies about Martians, rather than, say, Saturnians or Plutonians? Because Mars seems, at first glance, very Earthlike. It is the nearest planet whose surface we can see. There are polar ice caps, drifting white clouds, raging dust storms, seasonally changing patterns on its red surface, even a twenty-four-hour day. It is tempting to think of it as an inhabited world. Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears. But our psychological predispositions pro or con must not mislead us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evidence is not yet in. The real Mars is a world of wonders. Its future prospects are far more intriguing than our past apprehensions about it. In our time we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurances of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
These opening lines of H. G. Wells’ 1897 science fiction classic The War of the Worlds maintain their haunting power to this day.* For all of our history, there has been the fear, or hope, that there might be life beyond the Earth. In the last hundred years, that premonition has focused on a bright red point of light in the night sky. Three years before The War of the Worlds was published, a Bostonian named Percival Lowell founded a major observatory where the most elaborate claims in support of life on Mars were developed. Lowell dabbled in astronomy as a young man, went to Harvard, secured a semi-official diplomatic appointment to Korea, and otherwise engaged in the usual pursuits of the wealthy. Before he died in 1916, he had made major contributions to our knowledge of the nature and evolution of the planets, to the deduction of the expanding universe and, in a decisive way, to the discovery of the planet Pluto, which is named after him. The first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Its symbol is , a planetary monogram.
* In 1938, a radio version, produced by Orson Welles, transposed the Martian invasion from England to the eastern United States, and frightened millions in war-jittery America into believing that the Martians were in fact attacking.
But Lowell’s lifelong love was the planet Mars. He was electrified by the announcement in 1877 by an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, of canali on Mars. Schiaparelli had reported during a close approach of Mars to Earth an intricate network of single and double straight lines crisscrossing the bright areas of the planet. Canali in Italian means channels or grooves, but was promptly translated into English as canals, a word that implies intelligent design. A Mars mania coursed through Europe and America, and Lowell found himself swept up with it.
In 1892, his eyesight failing, Schiaparelli announced he was giving up observing Mars. Lowell resolved to continue the work. He wanted a first-rate observing site, undisturbed by clouds or city lights and marked by good ‘seeing,’ the astronomer’s term for a steady atmosphere through which the shimmering of an astronomical image in the telescope is minimized. Bad seeing is produced by small-scale turbulence in the atmosphere above the telescope and is the reason the stars twinkle. Lowell built his observatory far away from home, on Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona.* He sketched the surface features of Mars, particularly the canals, which mesmerized him. Observations of this sort are not easy. You put in long hours at the telescope in the chill of the early morning. Often the seeing is poor and the image of Mars blurs and distorts. Then you must ignore what you have seen. Occasionally the image steadies and the features of the planet flash out momentarily, marvelously. You must then remember what has been vouchsafed to you and accurately commit it to paper. You must put your preconceptions aside and with an open mind set down the wonders of Mars.
* Isaac Newton had written ‘If the Theory of making Telescopes could at length be fully brought into practice, yet there would be certain Bounds beyond which Telescopes could not perform. For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in perpetual tremor . . . The only remedy is the most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser Clouds.’
Percival Lowell’s notebooks are full of what he thought he saw: bright and dark areas, a hint of polar cap, and canals, a planet festooned with canals. Lowell believed he was seeing a globe girdling network of great irrigation ditches, carrying water from the melting polar caps to the thirsty inhabitants of the equatorial cities. He believed the planet to be inhabited by an older and wiser race, perhaps very different from us. He believed that the seasonal changes in the dark areas were due to the growth and decay of vegetation. He believed that Mars was, very closely, Earth-like. All in all, he believed too much.