This article originally appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of the Denver Quarterly, an issue devoted to "Imaginary Landscapes." MARS LIFE In 1996 a team of researchers at the Johnson Space Center split open a rust-colored rock--a hunk of Mars, actually, sent hurtling to Earth some 16 million years ago by an asteroid impact and the vagaries of chance--looking for chemical anomalies that might help them get a better picture of the composition of Mars' atmosphere. What they found instead was a pair of ghosts. One was a tiny, segmented fossil, not much larger than a pinprick, that may provide evidence that life once tried to get a foothold on our nearest planet. The second was Percival Lowell, the late-nineteenth-century astronomer who, though wrong more often than not, secured two myths in the contemporary mind: that Mars has life, and that life on Mars is dying. Lowell, born in 1855, came from a famously poetic family; he was related to Lowells Amy (his sister) and James Russell and Robert (both cousins). He skipped around from interest to interest, from philology to mathematics to aimless travel, worrying his family in the process. In 1877, he did the respectable thing and went to work for the Lowell textile mill, on which the family's fortune was founded. Six years later, and somewhat less respectfully, he quit to become an Orientalist and took a decade-long vacation to Japan, where he conducted some diplomatic work, studied the effects of Shinto trance by sticking pins in his subjects, learned passable Japanese, and wrote a few books, among them The Soul of the Far East (1888) and Occult Japan (1895). His most important discovery during his stay, however, was the work of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Researchers studying Mars in the nineteenth century were earth-bound, of course, and blinkered by the limitations of their place, their time, and their telescopes. Since they couldn't travel to Mars to conduct research, they had to wait around for Mars to become visible, taking advantage of its perihelic oppositions (those times, occurring every fifteen to nineteen years, when Mars comes nearest the sun and aligns itself on the same side as the Earth). These valuable moments of proximity sent early astronomers like Johann von Madler scurrying to their telescopes. In 1843, von Madler identified and followed a recurring dark spot on Mars' face, determining correctly that a Martian day corresponded roughly to Earth's, with the addition of forty minutes or so. Early astronomers were also fooled by a shifty Martian surface. Planet-wide dust storms obscured its face. Smaller storms mingled with the baroque array of craters and indentations on the surface like mighty Rorschach blots, suggesting, though never quite revealing, canals, lakes, cities, and fertile plains. Complicating matters, Mars has a crooked, wobbly axis, making its polar ice cap creep and recede like a bad toupee, which led some astronomers to speculate about mass runoff. Schiaparelli, Lowell's primary influence, examined those dark blotches on the face of Mars during the 1877 perihelic opposition but found some different dark shapes, hatching up and down the planet's surface like scuffmarks on a baseball. He named these "canali," meaning grooves or channels and not, as the over-imaginative scientific press assumed, canals. of the sort only dug out by industry. Yes, a few "channels" existed on Mars, though not nearly so many as Schiaparelli supposed. Still, his discovery (and its widespread misinterpretation) inspired a new area of research--all of it wrong-that was not entirely disproved until November 1964, when Mariner 4 drew close enough to Mars to send back pictures of the canal-less, dusty, red nothing that defines its landscape. In 1893, Percival Lowell switched careers again and became an astronomer. He jumped into his new work with enthusiasm, unaware of the limits known to other researchers. He took seriously the idea of Schiaparelli's Martian canals and, before applying himself to a telescope, began speculating about the society that could build them. Less than a year later, Lowell addressed the Boston Scientific Society and cited "the most self-evident explanation" for the Martian canals: they were "the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings." He concluded that "one planet besides our own is actually inhabited now." In order to backtrack and prove his conclusions, Lowell used his share of his family's fortune to build an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and named it after himself. In 1894, as Mars came near again, he hired two somewhat skeptical Harvard astronomers to assist him. After just a month of research, starting at the first sign of perihelic opposition and ending when Mars was no longer visible, Lowell retired from making observations and wasted no time in beginning to write his conclusions. Meanwhile, Lowell's assistants updated him on the blotches and canals, some of which, it turned out, had a habit of disappearing on second sight. Lowell pressed on against all doubt. A year later, Lowell published Mars, a compendium of dry observations and data that have been greatly updated and corrected since his time. Much of the book concerns spectroscopic analyses of the Martian atmosphere, speculations as to its chemical makeup, and a close study of the planet's wobbly ice caps. Lowell inevitably got around to Schiaparelli's canals and, in so doing, elaborated on ideas that would become the bane of his career. Lowell asserted that the canals, as he observed them, were suspiciously geometric and patterned, and hinted that they were the work of scientific hands. He suggested furthermore that the canals were great waterways leading from a few precious water sources, a last-ditch attempt by a dying civilization to save itself. For a world just proposing the Panama Canal, such a feat of engineering, a planet-wide system of canals, seemed advanced indeed. Lowell drafted pictures of this canal system, overlaying vast maps of his own design over the surface of Mars, showing how straight waterways might crisscross the dark blotches he took to be oceans and lakes. In later books, he included aerial maps of London for the sake of handy comparison. Lowell's evocative and grand ideas about a Martian civilization made him notorious. Reaction to Lowell's findings ranged from popular awe to peer skepticism. William Wallace Campbell, an astronomer from California, condescendingly wrote of Lowell's book, "The world at large is anxious for the discovery of intelligent life on Mars, and every advocate gets an instant and huge audience." Critics called Lowell's work "dogmatic" and "amateurish." More clear-headed astronomers like Edward Maunder and Edward Emerson Barnard, who had the advantage of observing Mars through more than one perihelic opposition and employed a more sophisticated use of spectroscopy, dispelled the theory that canals or, for that matter, any trace of water at all existed on Mars. In light of such overwhelming evidence, Lowell should have backed off from what had merely been a suggestion. Instead, he responded to his critics with the publication of Mars as the Abode of Life, an earnest and optimistic work that answered the question of life on Mars with a definitive but groping affirmation. Lowell whirls from subject to subject in the book, descending to the bottom of the sea to plead the case of the beleaguered anglerfish and then rushing through great forests of grass to discuss the relative toughness of the ant; any organism that ever had a hard time on Earth, becomes, in this book, an example of life's ability to adapt to the harshest environments, even that of Mars. Proof remained elusive, but Lowell offered plenty of captivating distractions instead, to demonstrate that life always has its ways, life survives, life adapts. Lowell had stumbled on a significant insight, albeit unwittingly. Recent findings show bacteria able to grow in places once believed uninhabitable-near volcanic hot springs and in arctic tundra-and this idea underwrites, if not wholly inspires, the ongoing exploration of Mars by robot rovers. Noting the gradually expanding deserts on Earth, Lowell pointed to Mars as a test-run for Earth's impending apocalypse. In "Mars and the Future of the Earth," one of the most frequently anthologized chapters from his book, he writes, "Where days and months of travel would bring one no nearer to its edge, despair might well settle on the mind.... Pitiless indeed, yet to this condition the earth itself must come, if it last so long." From this poetic invocation, Lowell skips past simple anglerfish, fleshing out a Martian civilization that's upright and hopeful, almost human really, adapting itself not through natural selection but by sheer force of will to the challenge of living on a vast Sahara--"able," Lowell wrote, "to rise above its bodily limitations to amelioration of the [Martian] conditions through exercise of mind." Statements like this make Mars as the Abode of Life read more like Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire than Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. It is not so much science as romanticized history. By 1908, Lowell understood no lakes existed on Mars. He seemed, in fact, to relish the idea of Mars as a desert. He understood, too, that Mars was a terribly cold place (by last estimate, the average temperature is -63 degrees Celsius) and its atmosphere was thin (one hundred times thinner than Earth's, which causes water to vaporize on the surface). Knowing all this, or even part of it, Lowell might have concluded that Martian conditions make for certain lifelessness. Many of his contemporaries would have agreed. Instead, Lowell wrote, with a logic that, defying logic, circled upon itself, "Martian conditions themselves make for intelligence." Still, it's difficult to blame Lowell for his abiding enthusiasm. Of all the planets in the solar system, Earth can at least call Mars a neighbor, and not just because of proximity. It has days and nights like Earth's, mountains and valleys, summers and winters. Compared to Earth's other neighbor, Venus, which boasts an atmosphere of sulfuric acid and an average temperature of 867 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars seems quite hospitable. If lifelessness on Mars is often qualified as "dead" or "dying," as Lowell argued, perhaps it's because he hated to admit we're alone. Like him, we're not immune to inventing cemeteries just to whistle through them. After researchers received the Mariner 4 images, The New York Times published an editorial titled, "The Dead Planet," which, though pessimistic, nonetheless tried to soften the bad news, with language that was almost Lowellesque. "The almost infinite adaptability of life here on Earth," it said, "raises the slight possibility that some very primitive organisms...may have evolved and exist on mars now. But the likelihood is infinitesimal." Lowell's sentimental belief in life on Mars didn't make him a success as an astronomer. In the last eight years of his life he correctly charted the course of a ninth planet, the so-called Planet X, but his research--correct this time--only laid the groundwork for a younger colleague at his observatory to take credit for discovering Pluto, in 1930. Lowell died in 1916, fourteen years before he could be redeemed, still convinced that life existed on Mars and admired only by a few close associates and a quickly burgeoning class of "scientific romance" writers. For Lowell's writerly followers, his ideas live on, having inspired a central archetype of science fiction: the desperate but super-intelligent Martian. Spurred on by Earth's abundant resources, the Martians in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) propel themselves here in clumsy cylinders, without any means of returning, in a last-ditch effort to get a drink of water. Their technology is awe-inspiring, all invisible heat rays and trundling war tripods, but in describing the first appearance of a Martian, Wells strikes a note of pity: "[the Martian] had toppled over the brim of the cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like the fall of a great mass of leather. I heard it give a peculiar thick cry." These pitiful eggheads--they also experience difficulty breathing the Earth's air and move heavily, with evident pain--die, succumbing to the common cold. At the end of the novel, the narrator finds them half out of their mighty tripods, their carcasses picked at mercilessly by sea birds. Other dying and desperate Martians appear in everything from George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space (1901)-in which Lord Redgrave stirs up a city of decadent Martians when he leads his beautiful new American bride into their sight, only to leave them rioting and in utter lascivious collapse-to Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip (1964), where the bureaucratic intransigencies of water reclamation get taken, on Mars, to a level of nightmarish absurdity. Nor is the struggling Martian a subject just for fiction. In the November 2003 issue of National Geographic, a writer asks, "Is there life in the ancient ice?" Sure, there is some reason to think so, yet that life, when scientists find it, will not be so dramatic as a pair of ribs sticking out of the red soil or the ruins of a doomed engineer's masterwork. Life, if there is any, will exist only as its building blocks--bacteria, if the scientists are really lucky, but more likely just the stuff of potential: a bit of mineral hematite, some iron oxide, an unusually corroded rock formation--faint indications that water once flowed across the planet's surface and moved through its rusty soil. Copyright © 2006 by Greg Purcell

"Where days and months of travel would bring one no nearer to its edge, despair might well settle on the mind.... Pitiless indeed, yet to this condition the earth itself must come, if it last so long." Percival Lowell, on Mars _____ M O R E: >The Entertainment Industry >Other Writing _____ >Return to No Slander