Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan

Author:Carl Sagan [Sagan, Carl]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Origin, Marine Biology, Life Sciences, Life - Origin, Science, Solar System, Biology, Cosmology, General, Life, Life on Other Planets, Outer Space, Astronomy
ISBN: 9780385173650
Publisher: Anchor

18. The Canals of Mars

In 1877 (as in 1971) the planet Mars was close–forty million miles from Earth. European astronomers, with newly developed telescopes, prepared for what was then Man’s most detailed look at our planetary neighbor. One of them was Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian observing in Milan and a collateral relative of the present couturier and perfume enterpriser.

Generally speaking, the telescopic view of Mars was blurred and fuzzy, interrupted by the variable turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere that astronomers call “seeing.” But there were moments when the Earth’s atmosphere steadied and the true detail on the disc of Mars seemed to flash out. Schiaparelli was astonished to see a network of fine straight lines covering the disc of Mars. He called these lines canali, which in Italian means “channels.” However, canali was translated into English as “canals,” a word with a clear imputation of design.

Schiaparelli’s observations were taken up by Percival Lowell, a diplomat once posted in Chosen, the present Korea. A Boston Brahmin, the brother of the president of Harvard University and of an even more famous personage, the poetess Amy Lowell (for some reason renowned for smoking little black cigars), Lowell established a private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the planet Mars. He found the same canali that Schiaparelli had. He extended their description and elaborated an explanation.

Mars was, Lowell concluded, a dying world on which intelligent life had arisen and accommodated itself to the perils of the planet. The chief peril was the dearth of water. The Martian civilization, Lowell imagined, had constructed an extensive network of canals to carry water from the melting polar caps to the habitations in more equatorial climes. The turning point of the argument was the straightness of the canals, some of them following great circles for thousands of miles. Such geometrical configurations, Lowell thought, could not be produced by geological processes. The lines were too straight. They could only have been produced by intelligence.

This is a conclusion with which we all can agree. The only debate is about which side of the telescope the intelligence was on. Lowell believed that the penchant for Euclidian geometry was on the distant end of the telescope. But the difficulties in drawing a great deal of mottled fine detail in a few seconds of good seeing are so great that the eye-brain-hand combination is sorely tempted to connect such disconnected features into straight lines. Many of the best visual astronomers observing Mars between the turn of the century and the dawn of the space age found that, while they could see canals under conditions of good but not superb seeing, they were able in the extremely rare moments of perfect seeing to resolve the straight lines into a multitude of spots and irregular detail.

Then it was found that at least the vast bulk of the polar caps are carbon dioxide and not frozen water. The atmospheric pressure was discovered to be much less than on Earth. Liquid water was found to be entirely impossible.

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