Are We Alone

20 Pages 4930 Words

surface. He named these features canali, meaning 'channels'. The word was wrongly translated into English as 'canals', and fueled wild speculation about who might have built these canals, and why. The American astronomer Percival Lowell, amongst others, entertained the idea that they were the work of an advanced Martian civilisation, forced to construct these enormous channels in a desperate attempt to irrigate their arid and dying world.
Fanciful though his ideas may have been, Lowell was not the first to speculate about life on Mars. Ever since the seventeenth century, astronomers had studied Mars through their telescopes, and reported that in many ways it is a planet very similar to our own. A day on Mars is only 37 minutes longer than a day on Earth; the planet has white polar ice caps, just like those at the Arctic and Antarctic; and the 25-degree tilt of Mars' axis gives it seasons very similar to those on Earth. If Mars is so Earth-like in so many respects, perhaps it, like the Earth, would be capable of sustaining life.
It was not until the 1960s that the first interplanetary spacecraft journeyed past the Red Planet, and the images that they sent back were disappointing ones. Lowell was right about one thing: Mars is arid, a dusty desert world. The canals, however, had been an optical illusion. Photographs of the Martian surface revealed no network of lines, and no green vegetation. The first pictures of Mars merely showed a faintly cratered landscape, as blank and barren as our own lifeless Moon.
Closer examination of the photographs, however, revealed features that looked startlingly like the remains of ancient, dessicated riverbeds, meandering gracefully across the planet's scarlet surface. In other places, there are the dry remains of 'outflow channels', created when flash floods gushed suddenly across the Martian terrain. The vast green channels observed from Earth by Schiaparelli may have been imaginary, but on a sma...