Lowell and Life on Mars

In the nineteenth century, Giovanni Schiaparelli, using telescopes of his time, saw features on the Mars surface he called “canali,” or channels, later translated into English as “canals.” Percival Lowell, an American astronomer with consid­erable personal wealth, became intrigued with “Martian canals” and observed them closely with his own telescopes. He hypothesized in a 1906 book, Mars and Its Canals, that these markings were made by Martians. “That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain,” he wrote.1

In Lowell’s mind, Mars was Earth’s sister planet, but she was dying, drought stricken, arid. He could see through his telescopes that the poles of Mars were white. Did it not make sense that Martian engineers constructed giant engineer­ing systems to transport water from frozen poles to arid regions elsewhere?

These explained the canals to Lowell. What Lowell believed many other scien­tists of his day did not. But Lowell held intensely to his views and proselytized them to willing readers and listeners.

Among those who listened were science fiction writers, who took Lowell’s speculations to greater imaginative lengths. In the first half of the twentieth cen­tury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur Clarke found Mars a fruitful subject of writing. Named for the Roman god of war, Mars was always for some a potential threat to Earth. Orson Welles, in 1938, made that threat amazingly real for many. Taking his cue from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, Orson Welles used the new medium of radio to make an emergency announcement on his evening broadcast that Martians had invaded the United States, with sightings in New Jersey. Terrified, many Americans “bolted their doors and prepared for the worst.”2

Fears of Martians, whether ruthless warriors or benign canal builders, were well at rest by the 1950s. Helped by better telescopes and the observatory Lowell had established in Arizona, scientists in the pre-World War II years learned more and more about the Red Planet. World War II spawned a range of new technologies that proved useful in astronomical research, although not intended initially for this purpose. The Office of Naval Research, in the immediate post­World War II years, supported planetary research at several universities. The U. S. Army and Air Force developed technologies that could be advanced and used potentially in connection with space exploration.

In 1948, Gerald Kuiper of the University of Chicago “used infrared spec­trometry to confirm the presence of carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere” and at the polar caps. American astronomers, as well as those from other coun­tries, created organizations to plan research in planetary astronomy. Mars was a focus of much attention. A “Mars Committee” emerged that enlisted scientists who would “meet annually to share the results of their observations of the red planet.” Growing scientific understanding of Mars, while slow and ambiguous, indicated that Mars was extremely unlikely to have life resembling earthlings. Mars appeared too frigid and too dry for Earth-like beings. But the similarities between Mars and Earth were too intriguing to ignore and rule out possibilities of life in some form.3