EJ was more sceptic than many other people when he stopped believing in the canals on Mars before the results of the first US Mars probes were in. The Encyclopædia Britannica for one, while defining the matter at hand with its usual succinctness, grants a longer life to the idea: >Mars, canals of apparent systems of rectilinear markings on the surface of Mars that are now known to be illusions caused by the chance alignment of large craters and other features of the Martian surface. They were the subject of much controversy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Italian astronomer and statesman Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli observed about 100 of them, from 1877, and described them as canali (Italian: "channels"). Others had earlier noted similar markings, but Schiaparelli's writings first drew wide attention to the subject. The U.S. astronomer Percival Lowell became the leader of those who believed the markings to be bands of vegetation, kilometres wide, bordering irrigation ditches dug by intelligent beings to carry water from the polar caps. Lowell and others described canal networks, studded with dark intersections called oases and covering much of the surface of the planet. Occasionally the lines were perceived as doubled; i.e., two parallel lines became visible where only a single canal had been seen before. Most astronomers could see no canals, and many doubted their reality. Experiments with untrained observers showed that disconnected features in diagrams or drawings might be perceived as straight-line networks when viewed at the proper distance. Photography through the Earth's atmosphere offered no solution because the lines were near the limit of resolution of the human eye and beyond that of the camera. The controversy was finally resolved only when pictures were made from several hundred kilometres above the surface of Mars by the Mariner 6 and 7 spacecraft in 1969. These showed many craters and other features but nothing resembling a network of channels.< Schiaparelli, who published first about the canals though others had seen them before him, hesitated to explain them as the work of intelligent beings; there might be geological explanations as well. It was Lowell who, first in a book he published in 1894, envisioned on Mars beings quite different from the Little Green Men of the comics. To his imagination, they must be »a serious race bound in peace and common effort by the relentless desertification of their planet. 'Irrigation', he wrote, 'must be the chief material concern of their lives.' Moreover, the complexity of their global network of canals and oases evoked intellects superior to humans'. « [Voyage Through the Universe: Life Search. By the Editors of TIME-LIFE Books, Alexandria, VA, 1989, p.13] To be sure, when in 1976 the Viking space probes touched down on Mars in order to search for life the scientists responsible for the project did not expect to find superhuman beings there. But even their hopes to find some biological activity at the microbe level were frustrated: the evidence found was at best inconclusive. An ironic footnote might be added to poor Lowell's science fiction ideas about gigantic irrigation works on the red planet which at once became the laughing stock of much of the scientific community. On 1 July 1997 the space probe Pathfinder landed on Mars and sent out an exploration robot called Sojourner. Its detailed photos sent back to Earth showed traces of enormous inundations on Mars---but they must have happened millions of years ago, and after that the waters totally disappeared, leaving a planetwide desert behind.
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.