Ever since we watched Away, Ryan and I have a new toast: “To Mars”. Unlike that fictional crew, we have no hope of ever reaching the red planet. But there are an increasing number of days when I think it would be nice to leave humanity’s mess behind and start afresh on a new world. But the prospect of forming a colony elsewhere in the solar system is a long way off, and when people talk about life on Mars they’re usually referring to alien life.
In The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson explores our history with the red planet. Our journey started when the realisation dawned that the reddish speck of light in the sky was another world. The development of telescopes allowed us to get a better view of Mars – but not a good one. Pretty much everything early astronomers saw – or thought they saw – turned out not to be true. In the late 1800s, for example, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli famously saw straight lines across the Martian surface. At this point in Earth’s history, our engineering skills had developed to the point where we were building large canals, including the Panama Canal. Schiaparelli’s ‘canali’ (channels) were therefore assumed to be the irrigation canals of an intelligent Martian civilisation. But although other astronomers jumped on the bandwagon, Schiaparelli’s linear features never really existed.
Our view of Mars shows seasonal changes, and for a long time we believed that what we were seeing was the growth of new vegetation in spring, which died back in the winter, as it does on Earth.
Stewart Johnson is an assistant professor of planetary science at Georgetown University. She has worked with three Mars rovers – Spirit, Opportunity,
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