Little Green Men and their Canals

One sad effect of science is that it can sometimes destroy stories that have been around for a long
time, stories that we have come to love and cherish. Nowhere is this more so than the tales about
Martians. There was something attractive about the idea of the little green men making along the
banks of the canals of their beloved planet – Mars – before they attacked Earth.

Myths are usually so old that nobody knows how they began. With the myth of the Martians,
though, it is possible to trace how the stories came about. For millenia, the fiery colour and erratic
movement of the planet across the night sky had been a fascination. It terrified ancient Greeks and
Romans so much that they named the planet after their god of war. Later, over one hundred years
ago, an Italian astronomer (his name was Schiaperelli) mapped the planet with the features he saw
through his telescope. He thought he saw streaks on the Martian surface, and referred to them in his
publication as canali, the Italian word for channels. That word was, however, mistranslated into
English as “canals”. Before long, theories of an inhabited Mars irrigated by melt-waters from the
polar ice-caps began to flourish. It was simple to create the myth from there. If there was water,
there could be life, what would creatures living on Mars be like? H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is
perhaps the best remembered story of how such Martians – the little green men of many
imaginations – threatened Earth.

Imagine the disappointment when,, in 1965, Mariner 4, the first space probe to fly past the planet,
revealed that Mars was a place with a surface that appeared to have been static for billion of years.
The atmosphere was thin, dry, and mostly made of carbon dioxide. Life could not have existed there
in any form – let alone little green men so intelligent that they could attack Earth.

Scientists could not let the matter rest there, though, for it is on the nature of the scientist to
question constantly. Some pointed out that the discoveries of Mariner 4 were by no means definite
or conclusive. These scientists became excited six years later when a further mission, Mariner 9,
showed that the surface had extensive sand dunes, massive craters and huge lava flows. Mars, it
seemed, was prone to dust storms. Better still, this probe found that the planet did have canyons and
what appeared to be a network of valleys. It was not Schiapelli’s canali (a product of his telescope
and his imagination, alas!) but it did suggest that maybe millions of years ago, water had flowed and
carved these geological features.

The hunt for water on Mars was on again. (Water is so important because water can sustain life of
some kind, even if only in the form of microbes.) The signs did not look good. The Martian
atmosphere is so thin, and the temperature so low (averaging -60 °C