“Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids,” Elton John once said. “In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them if you did.” Wrong, American astronomer Percival Lowell would have said if he hadn’t ... I guess ... died 100 years ago. Also, what do you mean there’s no one there to raise them? What about you, dummy?
Our man Lowell, you see, was quite convinced that an alien race occupied Mars, though he never directly commented on their potential as babysitters for human astronauts. And he even had the evidence to prove they existed: an immense network of canals carved into the Martian surface that he spied through a telescope.
This saga begins in 1888, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced that he had observed what he called canali on Mars, drawing the sketch below. You might be thinking that Martians would seem to struggle with the whole digging in a straight line thing, but to Schiaparelli, these were purely natural features of the landscape. That’s because canali is Italian for channels, not canals.
That's not how it was translated into English, though.
So, along comes Lowell, who takes the idea of "canals" on Mars and gets … a bit carried away with it. In 1894 he built the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, with a world-class telescope, so he might prove that a desperate Martian race had built “a system whose end and aim is the tapping of the snow-cap for the water there semiannually let loose; then to distribute it over the planet's surface.”
In 1906 he published, no joke, a 400-page tome on the topic, in which he named and mapped an astonishing number of canals that interconnected around the entire planet, in some places forming vast oases, which “are clearly ganglia to which the canals play the part of nerves.” He then proceeded to exhaustively – and, quite frankly, a bit exhaustingly – reason that if “the environment be suitable life will ensue,” but not “until the creatures had reached a certain phase in evolution would their presence become perceptible.”
(An aside: This is a common trope still bandied around about evolution, that there are milestones creatures reach, like us humans with our brains. In reality, critters can develop incredibly complex features such as, say, eyes, then go and lose them in a pitch-black ecosystem like a cave. There are no “phases” to evolution, just continuous adaptation to an environment – or stagnation as a living fossil, if you hit the sweet spot.)
Anyway, the cooperation the aliens achieved in their task, he marvels, puts our own belligerence as a species, our “boyish and unthinking element of the nation,” to shame. He concludes, rather enigmatically and triumphantly: “That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be.”
Today we have the hindsight of knowing that what Schiaparelli and Lowell observed was simply an optical illusion. Telescopes had only been invented at the turn of the 17th century, and were nowhere near as sophisticated as the monstrously powerful devices that can today peer billions of light years out into the universe.
Subsequent mapping of the surface of Mars of course found no such canals, and thankfully none of NASA’s rovers have yet tumbled into the greatest public works project the solar system has (n)ever known. We now know, though, that water likely flowed freely on Mars long ago, but today is almost exclusively locked in the polar caps, with liquid water perhaps flowing from time to time.
Lowell was wrong, sure, really wrong, but his study of the Martian surface and the consequent debate most certainly advanced our understanding of the Red Planet. And his observatory? In 1930, Clyde William Tombaugh peered through its telescope and discovered the planet Pluto, whose existence Lowell himself had predicted.
So yeah, alright, they were maybe wrong about it being a planet. It’s really a dwarf planet and Kuiper-belt object. But we only decided that a few years ago (after much debate among astronomers – some folks in fact vehemently demand it immediately regain its erstwhile title, particularly these third-graders). It’s all just semantics, really.
Like the difference between channel and canal, for instance.
