REVELATIONS IN SCIENCE: Where Did the Martian Canals Go
Art design: huxley.media via Photoshop based on René Magritte’s painting Portrait of Steffi Langui, 1961
The expression «Thus passes worldly glory» does not say how exactly. Let me try to fill this gap quickly and unobtrusively. In my childhood, like any well-read child, I knew perfectly well the name Schiaparelli — the discoverer of new worlds, the man who almost convinced everyone that there was intelligent life on our neighboring planet. And now, if you wish, check for yourself — a Google search for the surname Schiaparelli will not immediately bring up information about him; a whole series of the first results is dedicated to his niece Elsa Schiaparelli, a very famous fashion designer. But where is Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835–1910), the Italian astronomer whose discovery was once discussed with great interest all over the world? That’s how it goes — worldly glory…
AN INTERESTING NEIGHBOR
O
f all the planets in the Solar System, only Venus is closer to us than Mars, but Venus is forever shrouded in clouds. Mars, on the other hand, has an attention-grabbing red color, so it was known as a distinct «wandering star» (which is exactly what the Greek word planet means) at least as far back as the astronomers of Ancient Babylon. A planet the color of blood was linked to the bloody god of war, and astrologers assigned Mars responsibility for aggressiveness and sexuality, including the health of the reproductive organs. And all this — while no one had ever seen Mars as anything more than a tiny light in the sky.
But telescopes became more powerful, and in 1659 Christiaan Huygens drew the first map of Mars. Soon afterward, Huygens, along with Domenico Cassini, observed the ice polar caps on Mars. And in 1877, during a great opposition, when Mars is at its closest to Earth, Asaph Hall discovered Mars’s two small moons — Phobos and Deimos. To this day, much is made of the fact that a century and a half earlier, Swift had described these moons with great accuracy in Gulliver’s Travels. Could it be that the Martians themselves provided him with this information?
A TRACE OF INTELLIGENCE?
During that same great opposition, Mars was also observed by Schiaparelli, and the results of his observations astonished everyone — he saw huge straight lines on Mars. They had to correspond to objects whose straightness might not be the work of nature. Schiaparelli himself did not draw overly risky conclusions — he called them «straits».
But the nuance was that «straits» in Italian is canali, and when his reports were translated into English, translators used the not-quite-accurate word canals, meaning structures of artificial origin.
Who had dug these canals? Obviously, the Martians — who else! As early as 1686, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, in his work Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, had suggested that Mars might be inhabited. Water clearly exists on Mars — the polar caps grow in winter and melt in summer. A Martian day is almost the same as an Earth day, the axial tilt is nearly identical — which means the seasons are similar to Earth’s. Why shouldn’t life exist there?
DOUBTS VANISH
Schiaparelli created a map of Mars on which he marked more than 100 canals. He gave them the names of major rivers on Earth — Euphrates, Ganges, Oxus (Amu Darya), and the like. Other researchers also began to discern canals on Mars and publish maps — not quite identical to Schiaparelli’s, but since Mars is so far away, the thought was: let’s look through bigger telescopes, and everything will become clearer!
In 1890, Schiaparelli stopped his research on Martian canals due to deteriorating eyesight, but later suggested they might be artificial structures. The famous American astronomer Percival Lowell (whose role in the discovery of the now-retired planet Pluto was so significant that its astronomical symbol, composed of the letters P and L, is associated not only with the first letters of the planet’s name but also with his initials) continued the research and eventually discovered more than 600 canals on Mars — not exactly where Schiaparelli had found them, but far more of them!
After the publication of his 1908 book Mars as the Abode of Life, in which he expressed near certainty that there was intelligent life on the Red Planet, most considered the matter settled. Indeed, when France established a prize of 10,000 francs in 1900 for anyone who could contact intelligent inhabitants of another planet, they specifically stated that Mars did not count — because that case was already clear and contact with Martians would be established very soon.
WAR AND THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
Literature could not stand aside. The book market was flooded with works about flights to Mars, and the topic stayed at the peak of popularity for several decades. Almost immediately came one of the most famous works on the subject — The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, in which terrifying Martians, feeding on human blood, land in England, utterly crush the British army, but in the end all perish from Earth microbes to which they have no immunity. At least twice, radio adaptations of this novel caused real trouble.
In 1938, in the United States, a young Orson Welles staged one such broadcast so realistically that about a million of the six million listeners believed it was a genuine news report of an invasion and panicked. There was no large-scale unrest — newspapers later embellished the horror stories — but nerves were badly frayed. In some places, the National Guard was even mobilized, and police received more than 2,000 calls.
An even bigger scandal erupted in Ecuador, where the creators, in their infinite wisdom, not only fully styled the broadcast as a documentary report but also began calling the aliens marsistos instead of the correct Spanish marsianos. The panic over an invasion of Marxists — already a universal bogeyman — reached its peak. When the hoax was revealed, an enraged crowd destroyed the radio station, killing six people, including the director’s niece and girlfriend, and the director himself fled to neighboring Venezuela.
HEARTS OF MARTIAN PRINCESSES
In The War of the Worlds, there was virtually no room for the romantic experiences of the characters. This was rather an exception to the rule — in the flood of cheap novels about adventures on Mars, brave Earth supermen were constantly winning the love of beautiful Martian women, very often not just ordinary women but local princesses and queens (and, incidentally, by the will of the authors, no physiological obstacles to such love existed — they even managed to have children).
Such plots were not confined to English-language literature — Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita follows the same template. Moreover, in the USSR it was not the only one — even earlier, in 1908, prominent Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov wrote the novel Red Star, where the main character, revolutionary Leonid (on Mars, tellingly, called Lenny), in addition to studying Martian experience (on Mars, as you can imagine, communism had long been established), also conducts a full-fledged romance with the beautiful Martian Netti.
There are also some truly worthy books about the Red Planet — Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, a brilliant cautionary novel, the Strugatsky brothers’ The Second Invasion from Mars — about aliens who do not conquer but simply buy Earth, paying humans insane amounts of money for their gastric juice — and other high-quality works. But the beginning of the «Martian boom» in science fiction was undoubtedly sparked by reports of Martian canals, which gave rise to an almost unshakable belief that our brothers in mind were living practically next door.
WHY ARE ALL THE MAPS DIFFERENT?
The canals became not only an indisputable fact but even a subject of a certain envy among Earth’s inhabitants — why don’t we have anything like that? Something, of course, was being done: in 1869, the Suez Canal began operating, in 1880 construction started on the Panama Canal, in 1893 the Corinth Canal opened, and in the 20th century, the USSR, using virtually free labor, built numerous canals — the White Sea–Baltic, the Volga–Baltic, the Volga–Don — and even coined a new word from the abbreviation for «convict canal worker» (zakliuchennyi kanaloarmeets) — zek. There were even serious proposals to build canals in Africa, fill them with oil, and set them on fire — so the Martians would finally notice us and come to help.
But the question was becoming clearer: why were the canal maps drawn by different scientists not particularly similar to each other? The better the telescopes became, the fewer canals they revealed — although it should have been the other way around… Some researchers began to call the Martian canals outright an «optical illusion» — such as Vincenzo Cerulli. This hypothesis also needed to be tested…
In 1903, the English astronomer Maunder conducted an interesting experiment. He showed people disks with a completely random arrangement of spots and asked what they saw. Imagine — most of them found straight lines on these disks as good as the Martian canals. People were waiting for the construction of better telescopes that would eventually confirm or refute this hypothesis. But even in the 1950s, popular literature still discussed the canals in all seriousness and eagerly awaited the moment when the emerging space age would finally settle the matter once and for all.
EVERYTHING BECAME CLEAR
Space exploration has indeed given Mars considerable attention — and it proved fatal for the canal hypothesis. Since then, more than 30 spacecraft have been sent to Mars — most missions ended in failure, but not all. In 1965, the American probe Mariner 4 transmitted to Earth more than 20 high-quality images of the Martian surface. They showed no canals whatsoever — only rocky deserts, lifeless valleys, and not a trace of the nearly flawless straight lines once seen by Schiaparelli and Lowell!
True, even photographs from space sometimes gave rise to strange hypotheses about life on Mars. In 1976, the Viking probe sent back a number of unusual pictures in which one could discern something like Earth’s pyramids, and in one image — even the likeness of a human face! But it turned out that this was the work of onboard software processing space data, and what looked like a face was simply a formless pile of rocks.
It didn’t stop at photographs — to date, eight rovers have successfully landed on Mars. The first, the Soviet Mars-3, operated for exactly 14.5 seconds, but the American rovers worked for decades (two of them, Curiosity and Perseverance, are still operating), traveled dozens of kilometers across different areas of Mars, and sent back thousands upon thousands of images — and in none of them is there anything even remotely resembling the once-so-prominent Martian canals.
Unless we assume something utterly far-fetched — such as the Martians themselves burying the canals to avoid unwanted attention from their unhinged neighbors on the third planet — we must admit that there are no canals, and it’s unknown when, if ever, there will be.
SO WHAT WAS IT?
Hardly anyone accuses Schiaparelli (incidentally, a confirmed color-blind observer) and other canal watchers of deliberate deception — most likely, they fell victim to the illusion described by Maunder, seeing what they wished to see rather than what was really there.
An Italian, Truvelo, once thought he saw the color of spots on Mars change with the seasons — could they be plants? After all, it happens on Earth, too! The Soviet astronomer Gavriil Tikhov even argued that Martian vegetation had blue leaves — but where are those plants now, and the canals with them? Yet there is nothing tragic about this. People make mistakes, and so does human science; what matters is not the errors themselves, but the fact that diligent and talented scientific work can uncover and correct them.
Moreover, the hypothesis brought considerable benefits to human civilization — it became a powerful incentive to study our neighboring planet and, perhaps even more importantly, inspired magnificent works of art that left in the memory of almost all of us that enchanting voice from the depths of space: «Where are you, where are you, where are you, Son of Heaven?»
LITERATURE
- Sh. Edson, D. Sparrow. Mars. Secrets of the Red Planet. Moscow, Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2021, 80 p.
- A. Bronshtein. Planet Mars. Moscow, Nauka, 1977, 96 p.
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