The View from Serendip by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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15

Mars and the Mind of Man

On November 1971 the space-probe Mariner 9 arrived at Mars, went into orbit, and commenced taking a series of photographs which over the course of the next few months revolutionized our knowledge of the planet. The control centre for the probe was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, and the day before the encounter a panel discussion was arranged a few miles away at Cal Tech. The moderator was the distinguished science editor of The New York Times, Walter Sullivan, and the panellists were Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray (now director of JPL), and myself.

At that time, of course, we did not know whether Mariner 9would succeed or fail; indeed, we did not know until several weeks later, for ironically (though luckily for the meteorologists, who were able to study a unique phenomenon) Mars was completely shrouded by an enormous dust storm. But when the dust settled, an awesome terrain was revealed - volcanoes twice as high as Everest, and canyons that would stretch the width of the United States.

Our 12 November discussion - one of the most vigorous and entertaining I've ever enjoyed - was recorded and videotaped; when, a year later, we had an opportunity to examine the results of the mission, we all sat down and wrote rather more carefully considered afterthoughts. The resulting volume, Mars and the Mind of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), with its selection of the superb Mariner 9 photographs, is a record of one of the truly great advances in our knowledge of the planets.

The passage that follows contains my unrehearsed and largely unprepared remarks on arrival at Cal Tech. The 'afterthoughts' (I hope somewhat more literate) give my carefully considered views a year later.

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I want to go along with Ray Bradbury's views on the importance of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was Burroughs who turned me on, and I think he is a much underrated writer. The man who can create the best-known character in the whole of fiction should not be taken too lightly! Of course, there's not much left of his Mars, and his science was always rather dubious. I can still remember even as a boy feeling there was something a little peculiar about cliffs of solid gold, studded with gems. I think it might be an interesting exercise for a geology student to see how that phenomenon could be brought about.

Another writer I'd like to pay tribute to, partly because he lived such a tragically short time, was Stanley G. Weinbaum, whose Martian Odyssey came out around 1935. And then, of course, the other great influence on me was our Boston brahmin. Whatever we can say about Percival Lowell's (Percival Lowell (1855-1916) founded his famous observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, and brought the so-called canal controversy to the boil in the early part of the century. He claimed that Mars was covered with a spider's web of fine lines, looking very much like an airline map of Earth, which he believed to represent a vast irrigation system.

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