Canals on Mars

Canals on Mars

In 1907, Alfred Russel Wallace showed that Lowell’s had erred in his calculation of the average temperatures on Mars. Wallace’s conclusion was that life on Mars – by this he meant civil engineers with an interest in hydraulics – was impossible. But he offered no opinion on microorganisms.

Despite Wallace’s critique, despite the fact that other astronomers with telescopes and observing sites as good as Lowell’s could find no sign of the fabled canals on Mars, Lowell’s vision of the red planet gained popular acceptance. It had a mythic quality as old as Genesis. Part of its appeal was the fact that the nineteenth century was an age of engineering marvels, including the construction of enormous canals: the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, the Corinth Canal, in 1893; the Panama Canal, in 1914; and, closer to home, the Great Lake locks, the barge canals of upper New York State, and the irrigation canals of the American Southwest. If Europeans and Americans could perform such feats, why not Martians? Might there not be an even more elaborate effort by an older and wiser species, courageously battling the advance of desiccation on Mars?

Percival Lowell really saw something on Mars. But what did he see? Image: Moving © Elena

We have now sent reconnaissance satellites into orbit around Mars. The entire planet has been mapped. We have landed a few automated laboratories on its surface. The mysteries of Mars have, in anything, deepened than any view of Mars that Lowell could have glimpsed, we have found not a tributary of the vaunted canal network, not one lock. Lowell and Schiaparelli and others, doing visual observation under difficult seeing conditions, were misled – in part perhaps because of a predisposition to believe in life on Mars.

The observing notebooks of Percival Lowell reflect a sustained effort at the telescope over many years. They show Lowell to have been well aware of the skepticism expressed by other astronomers about the reality of the canals. They reveal a man convinced that he has made an important discovery and distressed that others have not yet understood its significance. In his notebook for 1905, for example, there is an entry on January 21: “In reading Lowell’s notebooks I have the distinct but uncomfortable feeling that he was really seeing something. But what?