M2K4 Roaming the Red Planet -Why Mars
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Humans have been fascinated with Mars for thousands of years. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, Mars embodied their god of war, perhaps because of its red appearance. In the late 1870s, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported using a telescope to observe "canali," or channels, on Mars. Perhaps a mistranslation this word as "canals" fired the imagination of Percival Lowell, an American businessman with an interest in astronomy. Lowell founded an observatory in northern Arizona, where his observations of the Red Planet convinced him that the "canali" were dug by intelligent beings -- a view that he energetically promoted for many years.
Science fiction writers have made the Red Planet a mirror in which to observe humanity. H.G. Wells' novel, "The War of the Worlds," published in 1898, described a martian invasion of Earth. The assault ultimately fails, thanks to terrestrial microbes, but the threat from another planet forces the narrator to reconsider the inhuman way some Earthlings treat others, especially the way industrial nations had conquered and colonized so many other regions. Perhaps, the narrator speculates, people from many nations will one day join together to explore space. Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" depicts Mars as a world that is not quite dead, powerfully affecting the Earthlings who settle there. In the end, as nuclear war destroys the Earth, the humans who have colonized Mars realize there is no going back -- they have become the real martians.
For the past 40 years, NASA spacecraft have been turning our vision of Mars
from fantasy and remote astronomy toward science fact, sometimes at human scales.
The Mariner 9 and Viking missions, for example, showed that Mars indeed has
channels, perhaps cut by the waters of ancient martian rivers. Spirit and Opportunity,
the Mars Exploration Rovers, will continue our exploration of Mars as it really
is . . . which may turn out to be more fascinating and even bizarre, in its
own way, as those tales of little green men.