The Martian Chronicles

(image from Wikepedia's article about The Great Moon Hoax)
(I know the moon isn't Mars, but it's such a cool picture... and gee, if the public
was so easily convinced that there was life on the moon...?)

When I was in college I took an English class that required I read an excerpt from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, which of course I had already read; Ray Bradbury being one of my childhood's beloved heroes. So when, in class discussion, a middle-aged student took issue with the story it made me mad. He told me that giving Mars a breathable atmosphere and actual martians was unforgivable and that the story was, "tripe". I tried to explain to him that we haven't know all that long what Mars is really like, but he would have none of it and I left that class so boiling mad that it still makes me angry to think about.

Now, in retrospect, it doesn't matter to me quite so much if Ray got his science just right or not. It's still a great read, written as nobody but Mr. Bradbury could have written it. Still, who was right in that argument? When did we know that Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere?

It seems like people have been speculating about life on Mars since telescopes were invented.

In the 1600's the light and dark spots were observed on the surface of the planet, along with white spots at the poles... it was assumed that the color variation was land and water and the white spots were polar ice caps. The day was calculated to be about the same length as ours. We have life... a planet like ours probably does too? It was the obvious assumption to make.

In the 1800 an Italian astronomer notices some lines on the surface and the Italian word for groove sounds an awful lot like the English word canal. The popular myth that these were canals built by Martians sprang up and proved to be persistent.

In 1907 a guy named Alfred Russel Wallace measured light coming from the surface of the planet and used it to determine that the temperature was negative 35 degrees F... way to cold for liquid water. (A bummer for my argument, because Bradbury's story had liquid water on the surface.)

Still, the book was published in 1950 and the atmosphere wasn't discovered to be made up of mostly CO2 till 1952, and the canal theory wasn't totally debunked until we got a probe close to the planet in 1964.

So, who was right in that long ago argument? I guess the other guy wins, sort of, but fiction, even science fiction, isn't measured entirely by its scientific veracity.

Links

Nasa's chronology of Mars Exploration

An Observational History of Mars: Going back to before it was even called Mars.

The abstract of a scientific paper that mentions blue clearing

Word(s) of the Day

Blue Clearing: also violet clearing. If you use a blue or violet lens to look at the surface of Mars, usually you don't see much, but during one of these blue clearing events certain details become very visible. It seems to have something to do with ice clouds and the refraction of light.