The first Mars generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, astronomers, biographies, mars, social phenomena

In 1877, Mars and Earth had a "great opposition". The two planets were close together, just about 56 million km (35 million miles). The orbit of Mars is somewhat elliptical, so at "less favorable" oppositions, dates when Mars is directly outward from the Sun and high in our night sky at midnight, the distance can be as great as 102 million km (63 million miles). Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli took advantage of the great opposition to observe Mars nightly, for weeks. In addition to blotches and pale areas, he saw a few seemingly linear features, which he called canali, the Italian word meaning "channels".

The word canali does not refer to artificial waterways; other meanings are "troughs" and "gullies". Unfortunately for the next generation or two of the American and European public, when Schiaparelli's  work was translated into English, the translator chose to use the word "canals".

About seventeen years later, Percival Lowell, nearing the age of forty, having observed Mars in telescopes located in Boston and elsewhere, built his observatory near Flagstaff, on "Mars Hill". With the 24-inch diameter telescope he installed there, he watched Mars obsessively during every period of opposition. The drier, steadier air in Flagstaff enabled him to see the planet more clearly. Over time, he discerned numerous linear features, writing of them as "canals". He inferred that they were produced by intelligent Martians.

Lowell's articles, books, lectures, drawings and later photographs of Mars stirred a kind of Mars Mania for a generation, as described by David Baron in The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

Percival Lowell was rich, driven, obsessive, and probably bipolar. He had earlier had a varied career, including being a kind of envoy for Korea and Japan. Once the observatory was completed, and he had released his book Mars, the planet and his theories about the Martians and their engineering abilities dominated his life and enthralled the public.

His public lectures and writings kept Mars Mania going for the rest of his life, in spite of opposition from roughly half of the scientific establishment. One particularly telling blow came from an experiment conducted by Walter Maunder, which became known as the "Small Boy Theory". Maunder began with maps of Mars produced by Schiaparelli and Lowell. He removed all the canals and replaced them by scattered dots or bits of riverine shapes. For each of several tests, such a doctored map was hung high on the wall at one end of a large classroom, and schoolboys were seated throughout the room. They were asked to copy the map as well as they could, without moving from their seats. Those closest to the front made the best facsimiles, of course. The farther back a boy sat, the more likely he was to add straight lines where dots and fragments seemed to run together in his vision.

Lowell never wavered from his view of a canal-riddled Mars. This image from page 62 shows one of his maps showing the "canals" and "oases" (dots) he drew. Just below it is an image I captured from Google Mars, taking in the approximately same view of the planet. The straight edges of some dark areas are artifacts of different camera views stitched together.

The scattered dots in the lower image are craters. I remember in 1965 when the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent us images of Mars that resembled a moonscape: loads of craters, and no canals. This was just a century after the Flagstaff Observatory was established.

Have you looked at clouds to see "cloud animals" and other fantasies? Various amorphous shapes can look like faces. There is a blotch in the abstract pattern in my shower that looks a little like a panther's head, only when I have my glasses off. This is called pareidolia. A roughly lined-up string of spots can look like a straight line when seen from a certain distance.

But what further affected Lowell as he aged was a bad case of confirmation bias. It's something we are all prone to: when we like an idea, we remember facts that support our view and discount those that don't.

At one point, Lowell spent some time looking at Venus. He produced the map in the upper part of this pair (from page 76). He was told that the "map" seemed to just reflect the blood vessels in his retina; he apparently agreed, and retracted the map. 

I've viewed Venus a number of times with various size telescopes. To a normal human eye, it is featureless, a blank white disk. However, if Lowell had lived a century later, and had a cataract operation, he might have seen features on the surface that are visible in ultraviolet light, particularly if he used a dark blue filter such as Cobalt glass. The lower image simulates such a view; I just "blued up" an ultraviolet photo of Venus. The natural lenses in our eyes are yellow, to filter out deep blue and UV light, which are hard to focus and tend to blur the vision. Cataract operation patients can see more UV than the rest of us.

Well, that would only be true before 1980. Since then, the plastic lenses that are inserted to replace the natural lens also filter out UV light. Oh, well, my hopes of getting my cataracts out and gaining UV vision are dashed!

Percival Lowell married at age 53. Eight years later, somewhat a fallen hero but still well remembered by the public that had been enthralled by his lectures, he passed away at age 61. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 Lowell was still sufficiently famous that the planet was given the symbol ♇ using Lowell's initials.

I have just skimmed over Lowell's life. I sympathize with his "neurasthenia", which was probably depression in the "low" phase of bipolar syndrome. I've been there. David Baron did an amazing amount of research to put this book together. The apparatus—source notes, bibliography, list of illustrations, and index—take up a quarter of the volume, almost 80 pages. Many other people who surrounded Lowell and the Mars phenomenon, including Nikola Tesla, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Camille Flammarion, play their parts in this narrative. The fabric of these lives is a fascinating tapestry of the American and European societies of the thirty years surrounding the year 1900, when so much happened.

Why did I title this piece "The first Mars generation?" A new Mars generation has arisen, enthralled by the vision of Elon Musk, who wants to establish a colony on Mars with a million inhabitants. He hopes the first humans to reach mars will do so in the early or mid 2030's. Maybe it will work...