Why Martians

Why Martians?

For all of our history there has been the fear or hope that there might be life beyond the Earth. In the last centuries this premonition has focused on a bright red point of light in the night sky. In 1894, a Bostonian named Percival Lowell founded a major observatory where the most elaborate claims in support of life on Mars were developed.

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.

But Lowell’s lifelong love was the planet Mars. Image Magic Castle Midnight Moonlight by Elena

Percival 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).