Life on Mars?

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re looking backward at how generations of Americans have looked forward and have imagined America’s future.

ED: When we look to the future these days, we do a lot of looking at space. And you might think that’s a 20th century habit. But well over 100 years ago, Americans who were thinking about what was to come on earth, we’re fixated, of all places, on Mars.

BRIAN: The person best known for his Mars research in the late 19th century was the astronomer, Percival Lowell. Lowell built an observatory in Arizona with a telescope especially designed to observe the red planet. A recent book called Geographies of Mars describes what Lowell thought he was seeing when he looked through that telescope. Maria Lane is the author of that book, and she joins me now. Welcome to the show.

MARIA LANE: Thanks for having me, Brian.

BRIAN: So what did Percival Lowell see when he looked at Mars, and what did he make of what he saw?

MARIA LANE: So when Lowell looked at Mars, and he was not the first one to see this, but he saw canals. And Lowell’s theory was that they were made by these advanced beings who are more advanced than any beings on earth. And he said what he saw on Mars was the future of the earth. And there was a belief or a theory that he subscribed to that held that planets are constantly drying out. They’re constantly losing their hydrogen to space, basically.

In Lowell’s theory, Mars was a smaller planet. It was older. It was more dried out. It had basically lost all of its water except the polar caps. And so whenever it’s springtime, the polar cap water starts to melt, and the canals are there to convey it as efficiently as possible down to the equatorial regions, which is obviously where people live, because it’s warmer than at the Poles. And this is all done on this globally engineered system, which is essentially unthinkable on earth.

BRIAN: Yeah, and just to be clear, it seems like Lowell looked to this supposed society on Mars as really a model for keeping the earth alive. Is that a fair summary?

MARIA LANE: That’s exactly right. And he thought a lot about this idea that civilizations also evolve. And the way he wanted to make his mark in terms of telling that story was of showing this more advanced civilization that we could and should aspire to. Despite the fact that it has—as he admitted in his very first book—it was a pretty grim ending.

Earth is going to dry out just like Mars. And then it’s going to dry out even more, just like the moon, and it’s going to be a dead rock rolling through space. So that doesn’t sound great. But he was so optimistic that what it would allow us to do is take the best and brightest engineers that we have—and if we could all just work together—we could prolong our life on this earth by working together.

BRIAN: Now Lowell wasn’t just an astronomer, he actually had been a foreign dignitary in Asia. Did that experience influence his thesis about what these lines on Mars really meant?

MARIA LANE: That’s right. Yeah. He was very vigorous in putting forth a kind of political or sociopolitical explanation along with his astronomical findings. We had on Earth at that time this very interesting context related to the colonial exploration of North Africa, South Asia, a number of arid environments where British, German, American engineers were going into these places and building irrigation networks in order to bring life to the deserts and, you know, help produce food.

And so Lowell thought that’s what was happening on Mars. We are seeing the effects of an even more organized, even more advanced civilization on Mars that has done this global engineering of a canal network in order to save the planet from what was happening to it naturally, which is that it was losing its water supply and drying out.

BRIAN: Why do you think that he put Mars on top in this hierarchy of civilizations? I mean, after all, there’s the example of H.G. Wells’ 1898 War of the Worlds. And, you know, there, the Martians are kind of the bad guys, not these great civilizers.

MARIA LANE: That’s true, but they are still more advanced than humans. And the way the Americans made sense of a cultural hierarchy is that if there was someone more advanced than us, then we would soon be that. The British, on the other hand, clearly dominant in world affairs—more than half the globe was under the control of the British empire—but things weren’t going so well by this point. And I think that’s what Wells’ story is about.

You know, what if we get so advanced that we lose sight of all morals? And that’s what those invaders were in War of the Worlds. They were completely amoral. They were solely on a quest for food. They had no concern for human life. And so that that’s the British fear of the future advancement—you know, the end game of colonialism I think. Whereas the American vision was a little bit different in terms of seeing an advanced being as something we would aspire to.

BRIAN: How did Mars continue to figure in Americans’ imagination of the future after Lowell?

MARIA LANE: Well, we certainly know there are not any canals. There may be life on Mars, probably not the kind of life that Lowell envisioned—and certainly a very different idea of what Mars tells us about Earth’s future. I do think it’s really interesting that now when we look at Mars, and we think about Earth’s future, we’re thinking about, could we live there? Could we take advantage of that being an escape hatch kind of environment if we screw up our own planet too badly?

You know, Ray Bradbury’s vision from the Martian Chronicles of, could we become the Martians? Could we become the inhabitants? That is now I would say a dominant way that Mars figures in our thinking about Earth’s future. Of course, you know, since I have done this historical work, I’m kind of more stuck on the old 1890s, early 1900s idea of, you know, could Mars be by analogy giving us some clues about our own future and what we could be like.

Could we be globally organized? What would it take to create something as stupendous as the canal network on Mars? And I think now obviously it’s very different. We’re stuck with ourselves. We don’t have any guide for what we might come up with, because there are no advanced Martians, so we’re going to actually have to figure it out ourselves.

BRIAN: Well, Maria, thank you for helping us make sense of visions of the future today on BackStory.

MARIA LANE: My pleasure.

BRIAN: Maria Lane is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico. She’s the author of Geographies of Mars, Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet.