Life on Mars: Cultivating a Planet--and Ourselves
Mars is one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Its reddish color, now known to be causedby the prevalence of iron oxides in its soil, perhaps accounts for its identification by the Greeksand Romans with the bloody god of war. Its astronomical symbol is the same as the circle-and-arrow symbol of the male and of the metal iron. Like all planets--"wanderers"--it does not makean orderly circuit of Polaris, as do the fixed stars, but pursues an odd looping trajectory throughthe sky, and waxes and wanes in brightness as it does so. The orderly astronomical mind,intrigued by this irregularity in the orbits of planets, arrived after some ten thousand years of speculation at the present model of the solar system, wherein Mars circles the Sun in the sameplane as the Earth, but at about one-third again the distance away (about 228 million kilometers).From Mars the sun would look about two thirds of the size it looks from here. Mars is smallerthan the Earth, and its surface gravitation is about three eighths of ours. Its year--the period inwhich it revolves about the sun--is about twice as long as that of the Earth, but the inclination of its poles is almost identical to Earth's, and thus its seasonal variations are analogous: it has aspring, a summer, an autumn, and a winter. Its day--the period in which it spins on its own axis--is almost exactly identical to Earth's.We have always projected upon the stars the images of our own archetypes: and Mars has been arich field for such imaginative colonization. Indeed, the twentieth century mythology of theplanet is perhaps richer than at any prior period. The eyes of the astronomers Lowell andSchiaparelli, straining against the distortion of the Earth's atmosphere as they peered throughtheir telescopes, interpreted the orange blur into a surface webbed with lines. The planet of canals they hypothesized became in turn the evocative basis of the Mars many of us grew upwith: the Mars of the great deserts, the dying planet of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells,with its thin air, its ancient despairing civilizations eking out the last precious water from themelting poles, its envious glances at the blue water-planet between them and the sun. In theextraordinary panic that followed Orson Welles' radio dramatization of
The War of the Worlds
Mars became the great American symbol of The Other--ancient where we were young, in wantwhere we were surrounded by natural fertility, subtle and incalculable where we were simple: likethe Europeans, perhaps, or the orientals, or, in Burroughs' fantasy, like the North AmericanIndians we had dispossessed and driven into the deserts.Nevertheless we yearned for there to be life on Mars, and the evidence for a while looked good:Mars clearly had an atmosphere, and weather, and changed color at different times of the year.For these and other reasons Mars became a major focus of NASA's planetary explorationprogram, and their efforts were rewarded by the spectacular success of the Mariner and Vikingprobes, which photographed, landed on, and sampled the Martian surface. But the result wasbitter disappointment; Mars was biologically dead, and our almost religious hope for a sister
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