A new era in planetary exploration.

[n2doc]

BY BURKHARD BILGER

There once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were “Goldilocks planets,” our own astronomers would say: just right for life.

The rest is prehistory. On Earth, the volcanoes filled the air with water vapor and carbon dioxide. The surface cooled, a crust formed, and oceans condensed upon it. In hot springs and undersea vents, simple carbon compounds bubbled up to form amino acids and peptides. The first bacteria moved through the ooze; then came blue-green algae, spreading across the planet like a watery carpet, drinking in sunlight and exhaling oxygen, giving breath to everything that came after. Geologists call this the Great Oxygenation Event—the most momentous change in the planet’s history. It seems inevitable now: life’s triumphant march toward complexity, toward us. But like most creation stories this one is also a cautionary tale. It has both a Heaven and a Hell.

In 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew the first detailed map of Mars, he imagined the planet as an earthly paradise. He labelled one region Eden, another Elysium, others, on later maps, Arcadia and Utopia. Peering through his telescope on the roof of the Palazzo di Brera, in Milan, Schiaparelli had seen what looked like oceans, continents, and water channels swim into view. “The planet is not a desert of arid rocks,” he wrote. “It lives.” And his successors often took him at his word: the sharper their telescopes, the blurrier their vision. They saw mountains of ice and rivers of snowmelt, William Sheehan writes in his 1996 book, “The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery.” They saw fertile oases and a moss-green equator. They saw an irrigation system so linear and “trigonometric,” as the astronomer Percival Lowell put it, that it could only be the work of a highly intelligent race. Some even saw a Hebrew word for Almighty—Shajdai—spelled out on the planet’s surface. “True, the magnitude of the work of cutting the canals into the shape of the name of God is at first thought appalling,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 1895. “But there are terrestrial works which to us today seem no less impossible.”

By the time humanity got its first closeup view of Mars, a little less than a century after Schiaparelli mapped it, the planet had come to seem like a second, more exotic Earth. Books like “The Martian Chronicles” described a place of eerie desert grandeur, inhabited by slender, tawny beings given to strange hallucinations—Taos without the tourists. And though infrared studies suggested that its surface had seventy times less water than Earth’s driest desert, biologists still hoped for the best. “Given all the evidence presently available, we believe it entirely reasonable that Mars is inhabited with living organisms and that life independently originated there,” a study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded in March, 1965.

much more

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/22/130422fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all

[Victor_c3]

1. Long article, but a great read

I love hearing about the the missions to mars. Conquests of science and engineering are the sorts of things that our nationalism should be based off of, not wars and military strength.

[LongTomH]

2. I have to take issue with that bit about the Martian Canals

Excerpt from the New Yorker article:

And his successors often took him at his word: the sharper their telescopes, the blurrier their vision. They saw mountains of ice and rivers of snowmelt, William Sheehan writes in his 1996 book, “The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery.” They saw fertile oases and a moss-green equator. They saw an irrigation system so linear and “trigonometric,” as the astronomer Percival Lowell put it, that it could only be the work of a highly intelligent race. Some even saw a Hebrew word for Almighty—Shajdai—spelled out on the planet’s surface.

Percival Lowell was the astronomer who popularized Schiaparelli's notion of canals (Actually, Schiaparelli used an Italian word meaning "channels.&quot . The fact is, only a few astronomers claimed to have seen them and they were never photographed. As the telescopes got bigger and better, no sign of canals were found, also spectroscopic analysis of the Martian atmosphere showed little water vapor.

By 1920, few astronomers believed in the existence of the canals; that didn't stop popular writers, both fiction and non-fiction from writing about them. When the 200-inch Hale Telescope was under construction on Mount Palomar, a newspaper article ranted on about being able "to see the boats on the Martian canals."



Actually, we can be grateful that science fiction writers kept using the trope of Martian canals; the best of them gave us some wonderful and sometimes beautiful stories:

• Of course, there was Bradbury's poetic Martian Chronicles (1950).
  
• In 1947, Robert A. Heinlein wrote his brilliant short story: The Green Hills of Earth, where the blind 'Poet of the Spaceways,' Rhysling, bemoaned the tearing down of “the slender fairy-like towers” of the Martians and the polluting of the canals.
  
• In 1949, Heinlein had the young hero of his juvenile novel: Red Planet skating down a Martian canal (I loved that novel as a pre-teen).
  
• The last book of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy: Blue Mars had his characters sailing down "The Grand Canal" on a terraformed Mars.

As someone who grew up with "Second Fandom" science fiction, I can wax nostalgic about losing those dreams of the Martian canals. Oh, to be sailing down the canals in a boat with a trio of green Martian beauties!