Intelligent life on Mars
The most popular location of extraterrestrial life has been Mars, the ‘red planet’. It has a number of similarities with Earth: it revolves on its own axis every 24 hours, give or take a few minutes, just like the Earth. Shapes were identified by nineteenth-century astronomers which resembled continents, polar caps and seas. In the late nineteenth century the meticulous Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, director of the Milan Observatory, discovered a complicated network of dark lines, which were interpreted as canals. In fact, Schiaparelli employed the Italian word canali which can be interpreted as channel, which is suggestive of natural causes, but it can also be interpreted as ‘canal’ which is suggestive of intelligent design. Some of his contemporaries chose the latter interpretation. In 1892 he observed an apparent doubling effect on several of the lines which many of his contemporaries interpreted as evidence of massive engineering works, and so began the 30-year-long saga of the Martian canals, which raged until Eugene Antoniadi, working with a more powerful 33-inch refractor telescope at Meudon Observatory, established that the ‘canals’ were an optical illusion.
In the first decade of the twentieth century the ‘discovery’ of men on Mars by Percival Lowell, the astronomer, was portrayed in his best-selling books, Mars and its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1909). In these books Lowell outlined details of the Martians’ canal system and their agricultural methods. Some 437 canals, ranging in length from 250 miles to 3,450 miles were reported to be linked with populated oases. Subsequently, popular fiction books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which sold in their millions, encouraged expectations of Martian life. In 1904 a planet-wide dust storm was observed and it produced a shape identified as the letter W, which gave rise to speculation that the Martians were preparing for war. Science and fiction (Lowell and Rice Burroughs) had thus united to produce a climate in which the public mind was prepared for Martian encounters. During the twenty or so years of the Martian canal controversy, scientific opinion covered an entire range of views from those who endorsed Lowell’s theory of intelligent construction to those who rejected the reality of the canals. The saga of the Martian canals is an interesting example where indefinite scientific results invite a broad role for speculation and preconception. An excellent survey of the canals’ controversy and the process of scientific reasoning from observation to theory is found in Steven J. Dick (1996).
We now have a different truth. The ‘canals’ were optical illusions partly fostered by the fertile imaginations of astronomers. Explorations of Mars have been underway for over thirty years, beginning with the Mariner 4 spacecraft which flew past in 1965 taking twenty-one pictures of 1 per cent of the surface. Mariner 4 dashed hopes of revealing Mars as Earth’s twin when it detected neither canals nor habitation. Space probes have, however, revealed great natural canyons, one of which is 2,500 miles long and 150 miles wide. The ‘seas’ are the result of dark basalt rock swept by violent winds, but there are said to be dry
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beds of ancient rivers. During the 1970s the Viking spacecraft found the planet rich in oxygenated compounds, but found no signs of primitive biological life immediately below the surface. Mars is extremely cold and inhospitable. Its average daily temperature is around -60ºC; its atmosphere is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, and there are winds of up to 450 kph with vast global dust storms. Nevertheless, Mars still manages to generate scientific controversy. The current debate over alleged fossils of Martian micro-organisms is a long way from claims of intelligently designed canals, but it still captures the public imagination.
The popular image of ETI
Popular interest in ET contact is strong, as seen in the reception of films like Independence Day, Close Encounters and ET: The Extraterrestrial (three of the most commercially successful films ever made), and the success of the TV series, The X-Files, as well as thousands of books on the subject and tabloid attention to even the wildest accounts of ET encounters. ET fever has been known to grip whole towns. In 1988 Tom Weber founded a group in Wisconsin called UFO Site Center Corp, with the objective of building a landing site for ET spacecraft. The American journalist, Howard Blum (1990), tells the story of Tom Weber’s attempt to raise $50 million for the landing site outside a small US town. To attract the ETs it was considered necessary to communicate the peaceful intentions of the locals by means of a larger-than-life illuminated picture of a human greeting an alien in a spirit of friendship. No aliens were encountered but the townspeople were exposed to a familiar philosophical problem. How does one depict friendship to ETs? One suggestion, which was rejected, involved a large model of a man and a woman copulating. Those who supported this suggestion argued that the primal scene depicted peaceful intentions. Eventually they chose a handshake. The human, tall, slim and Aryan, and the alien with two solid feet and a head shaped like a watermelon. Blum reports from a meeting of the townspeople:
Still, there was still some concern after a mock-up of the pair of figures at one Wednesday meeting. Is it possible, someone asked, that a hand-shake might not mean the same in the Andromeda Galaxy as it does in Chippewa Falls? Suppose, it was suggested, a handshake is a vulgar gesture to an alien? That we’re illuminating a cosmic ‘screw you’ to the first visitors from another world? Or perhaps a handshake could mean ‘Let’s fight’? Or even ‘Good Bye’? But Tom Weber was undeterred. ‘If they’re smart enough to get here, they’re smart enough to figure everything else out’, he ruled. The handshake would remain.
(Blum, 1990: 185)
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