Lecture Notes for the Final
Human-environment interaction: Mars of the imagination
-
Science fiction imagines Mars:
- Science fiction has rather a long history in literature:
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus of 1818,
the first example of modern science fiction, which tells the story of a
disastrous outcome of a scientific experiment.
- Voltaire wrote a short story in 1752 called "Micromégas," which
entailed the visit to Earth by two enormous aliens, one from Sirius and the
other from Saturn, after deciding not to stop at Mars because it was too small
for them, but the reference to Mars includes a comment that it had two small
moons (which would not be discovered until 1877!). You can read it here, if
you're curious about Voltaire's short foray into science fiction/fantasy: http://www.accuracyproject.org/t-Voltaire-
Micromegas.html.
- Some themes in science fiction, such as visits to alien planets, go back
as far as the True History of Lucian of Samosata back in the 2nd
century, though, as with Voltaire's "Micromégas," there's no attempt to
incorporate a scientist or a scientific outlook. You can read that story
online, too: http://www.lucianofsamosata.info/TheTrueHistory.html.
You may enjoy his smart-aleck and rather modern sensibility!
- Mars became a focus of Victorian science fiction:
- The findings of the Geographic Era caught the imagination of the reading
public.
- The earliest novel set on Mars was Percy Greg's Across the Zodiac: The
Story of a Wrecked Record
(1880), which presented the first use of the word, "astronaut" (referring to
the spaceship), the concept of anti-gravity propulsion ("apergy"), Mars
confidently
described with seas, clouds, thin but breathable air, and a martian society
clearly drawn to rant about quirks of human society! You can read it here: http://www.fullbooks.com/Across-the-Zodiac.html (optional --
beach reading in the summer?).
- Something that made Mars, specifically, of great interest among all the
planets was Schiaparelli's canali and Lowell's promulgation of the
canals craze, which led to the vision of Mars as a dying, drying planet,
occupied by an intelligent species trying to prolong its existence by heroic
hydraulic engineering.
- The poignancy of this imaginative scenario flavors Earth-focussed
theories about the beginnings of the Neolithic Revolution in a similar process
of desiccation in the Middle East, leading to irrigation and domestication.
-
It
seems the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were receptive to
notions of the fall of civilizations, both on Earth and on Mars.
-
This might have had to do with the growing scientific realization that
there had been drastic climate change on Earth, e.g.,
- Louis Agassiz's work on the Pleistocene ice ages starting in the
1840s
-
Henri Schirmer's 1893 work suggesting the Sahara had progressively dried
up
-
Raphael Pumpelly's proposal in 1908 that domestication occurred when the
Middle East dried up after the pluvials believed co-eval with the European
glaciations and forced plants, animals, and people together on fewer and fewer
oases.
- It didn't take long for fiction authors to incorporate the theme of a
desert Mars, a dying hydraulic civilization, and an excitingly exotic
locale that had the thin veneer of scientific credibility, in the light of
the scholarly discourses of the day.
- Themes pursued in martian science fiction and fantasy:
- Space opera: adventures of a (nearly always male) hero, featuring
almost cartoon-like evil characters, lots of fighting often against the kinds
of odds that only a mythical hero could (im)possibly overcome (swords, guns,
exotic weapons, such as stun guns, death rays, dematerializers), evocations of
exotic society but without much attention to their sociology and psychology,
descriptions of wondrous physical and cultural landscapes, and, sometimes, a
damsel-in-distress love interest (very chaste and Puritan in the early decades
of science fiction, sometimes more erotic in contemporary space opera). In
some cases, space opera resembles classic Western movies but in a martian or
outer space setting. Contemporary space opera is generally set in the space
between the stars (e.g., Star Wars, Star Trek), while the earliest
space opera
often picked Mars as a destination far enough out and little enough known to
be an almost plausible exotic setting.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter (Barsoom) series from 1912 to 1943
(here's the trailer for the 2012 movie: http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2340397337
- Garrett Putnam Serviss' Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898), written
by an astronomer trying his hand at science fiction and doing so well with it
he later became a professional, full-time science fiction author. You can
read it here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19141.
- Xenophobia: the Martians are hostile to us and want to invade us
and take over our beautiful planet. There are all sorts of explorations of
this fearful Other in science fiction ("Independence Day"), including that
dealing with Mars and Martians (right down to Marvin the Martian in the Bugs
Bunny cartoons!). This strand in science fiction seems to draw on the
psychological substratum powering recurrent anti-immigrant sentiment in the US
and many other countries. It is sometimes coupled with a more beneficent
representation about how confronting the truly Hostile Other brings squabbling
humankind together, kind of the kumbaya counter-narrative (e.g., the
movie,
"Independence Day").
- H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (and the Orson Wells radio
broadcast, the 1950s movie, and the Tom Cruise edition a few years
back). Here's the trailer to the 1951 movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046534/
- "Mars Attacks!" (1996)
- "Cowboys and Aliens" (2011)
- Hard science fiction: This is fiction set in the near future,
focussing on extrapolations of technologies and scientific knowledge available
at the time of writing. Characterization is usually more nuanced than in
space opera, as is extrapolation of contemporary social structures and
politics. Sometimes the author is a scientist moonlighting in the creative
arts, so the science of the day shows that training and the aversion to
bringing in supernatural fantasy elements may reflect a scientist's
temperament. This genre evolves with the science of the author's day, so the
hard science fiction of the 1950s may seem almost quaint or comical when
judged by contemporary science, as, indeed, contemporary hard science fiction
will quickly show its age. To enjoy the older variants, you need to make a
double suspension of belief, not just the suspension any fiction requires but
a second suspension of the inner critic of the science gotten so wrong. I
think it is fair to judge it by how well it extrapolates from and is grounded
in the science of the time it was written.
- Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars (1951)
- Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue
Mars (1993, 1995, 1997)
- Gregory Benford The Martian Race (1999)
- Robert Zubrin How to Live on Mars (2008)
- Andy Weir's The Martian: A Novel (2011)
- Soft science fiction: This is fiction set in the near or distant
future, generally with a grounding in contemporary science and technology
extrapolated into the time of the story. The focus, however, is on
anthropology, social structure, politics, and psychology, and characterization
is often intricate and engaging. The intent is to sketch out alternative ways
of organizing human society in the here and now and draw out their
implications. Sometimes the tenor is utopian; other times dystopian. The
social issue of interest to the author will vary drastically, depending on the
author's agenda of exploration.
- "Two Women of the West" Unveiling a Parallel (feminist science
fiction from 1893, set on Mars). Available on Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org/files/42816/42816-h/42816-h.html
- Alexander Bogdanov's 1905 Red Star (Soviet science fiction written
before
the success of the Russian Revolution)
- Kurd Laßwitz: Two Planets (1897)
- Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950)
- Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
- Philip José Farmer's Jesus on Mars (1979)
- Maybe "Mars Needs Moms" fits in here, a rather underappreciated film! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1305591/
- Science fiction fantasy: May or may not build a world that is a
credible extrapolation of the author's time. It incorporates elements that
are metaphysical, occult, or supernatural and may really bend timelines, often
playing with the themes of alternative timelines or time travel and its
paradoxes.
- The Doctor Who special "The Waters of Mars" (2009)
- M.E. Brines The Queen's Martian Rifles (2011)
-
Dead, dry Mars and its effect on science fiction
-
The Mariner 4, 6, and 7 flyby missions brought back imagery that showed a
crater-battered ancient surface that looked, at first, much like the Moon: No
canals, no flowing water, bone-dry, dead.
-
The Mariner 9 and Viking orbiters and landers confirmed the impression of a
planet long since dead and now completely unsuitable for life but also
possessed of spectacular landscapes on a scale unimagined on Earth:
- Planet-covering dust storm on the arrival of Mariner 9
- Olympus Mons and the other gigantic volcanoes of Mars emerging as the
1971 dust storm abated and the dust settled down.
- Valles Marineris emerging from the dust as a gash utterly dwarfing the
"Grand" Canyon.
- Intriguing, if ancient, dendritic drainage networks
-
The Viking landers biological chemistry experiments did provoke reactions, but
those reactions turned out to have possible abiotic explanations, which is far
and away the consensus interpretation: Mars is singularly inhospitable to
"life as we know it, Jim" -- indeed, a sterile dead world that may have had
more water a long, long, long time ago, which it then lost.
- The impact of these missions on the popular conception of Mars was
tremendous. This was the sudden end to any lingering fantasy the public had
about canals and romantically desiccating civilizations. The scientific
community had known Mars had a thin atmosphere, comprised of gasses we can't
breathe, no canals, no possible civilization for decades, since the advent of
remote sensing and spectroscopy. Lowell and Tesla and others kept alive the
hope that there was someone there, at least in the public's perceptions, and
that public image is what informed decades of science fiction. The drying
planet with its canal building civilization was a trope of science fiction
well into the 1960s (e.g., the 1950s-era "War of the Worlds" draws
on that in the opening sequence). Indeed, the 1996 "Mars Attacks!" opening
sequence has a nod to that, too.
- The new, dead, dry Mars then had to be worked into somewhat plausible
science fiction, which was dutifully done. The New Mars is the setting for
stories about colonizing Mars and maybe terraforming it, not
about interacting with Martians.
- Indeed, as Dr. Parker noted in his talk in the Spring 2012 Mars class,
it's possible that the Viking
lander experiments, which failed to find unequivocal evidence for even
microbial life, may have set Mars missions back for decades. There was a
hiatus in American missions to Mars from 1976 to 1992 (NASA Mars
Observer, which failed) and then until the Mars Pathfinder/Sojourner
lander/rover combination in 1997.
-
Popular crazes about Mars that spin off from scientific mistakes:
-
Canals on Mars
- As you remember from the midterm notes on the history of Mars
exploration, light and dark variations had been repeatably observed on Mars as
far back as 1659 (Huygens' drawing of Syrtis Major).
- Jesuit monk Angelo Secchi drew a map of light and dark areas in 1863 and
is believed to be the first person to use the Italian term, "canali,"
for the darker areas.
- Giovanni Sciaparelli, a professional astronomer in Italy, used the
excellent 1877 opposition to map light and dark patterns on Mars pretty
systematically, giving a lot of them names we use even today. As you
remember, he mapped lineations, which he also called "canali."
- Translation is an inexact art, and his maps came into the
English-speaking world showing "canals," rather than "channels."
- Percival Lowell, himself a prominent amateur astronomer and rich patron
of astronomy, took the canals far more literally than Sciaparelli could have
imagined.
- At the time of his first book in 1895, he was still within the bounds of
speculation in the scientific community to raise the issue of canals.
- While science is tolerant of new ideas, it expects them to be treated as
hypotheses to be tested against data.
- Powell erred in going way past the available data, becoming convinced of
his interpolations, and parting company with science by not being willing to
change his mind when observational data began to undermine his ideas: He
would not and could not let go.
- He marked his increasing alienation from science by turning to the public
and shunning the peer-review process, essentially becoming a
pseudoscientist.
- The result of leaving peer-review behind and arousing public interest
with his books and talks was an enduring popular craze, one that ignited
decades of science fiction based on a drying, dying Mars, clear up to the
Mariner era.
-
In other words, like Percival Lowell himself, the popular craze (and literary
trend) was (were) unaffected by the improving telescopy, remote sensing, and
spectroscopic evidence for an intensely cold Mars with a very tenuous
atmosphere that could not support water in canals, civilized or otherwise.
- The canals craze, then, had its origins in scientific speculation but
then became completely unmoored from science.
- Radio communications from Mars
- Nikola Tesla was the inventor of Alternating Current, various
systems for wireless (radio) communication (possibly with higher claim to
inventing radio than Marconi), X-ray generators, robotics and the electronic
logic gate that underlies computing. He claimed that he had picked up unusual
radio signals (clicks in groups of 1-4) that he thought had come from Mars or
maybe Venus and might represent intelligent communication. You can read an
article he wrote in 1091 about the episode for Collier's Weekly here:
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1901talk.htm.
- This is another idea that has fueled a minor craze (but nothing on the
scale of the Lowell canals craze).
- Tesla's great rival in the invention of the radio, Guglielmo
Marconi, claimed that he received anomalous radio transmissions in 1921,
but he didn't say anything about Mars specifically.
- In 1924, David Todd at Amherst College, persuaded the US government to
request all governments to shut off all radio broadcasts for 5 minutes each
hour for 24 hours when Earth was nearest Mars: National Radio Silence
Day. An elaborate system of radio imagers and film reels were set up to
record every incoming radio signal. Sixteen reels had pulsed signals in
clusters, separated by 30 second pauses. Like Tesla's signals, these might
have been from the then unknown quasar phenomenon in the outer fringes
of the detectable universe.
- There are occasional blips of people claiming to be in radio
communication with someone on Mars or deep space, most recently Gregory
Hodowanec in the 1980s.
-
Radio communication with Mars (or elsewhere) is another of these persistent
crazes that started from a scientific observation that takes on a popular life
of its own.
-
The latest craze: The Face on Mars
- Like the others, this craze started out from a scientific observation.
- The Viking 1 orbiter was being used to scout for a good potential landing
spot for the Viking 2 lander (back then, location analysis was done nearly in
real time!).
- The "Face" popped up in imagery of Cydonia Mensæ, where northern
Arabia Terra transitions into the Northern Lowlands in a series of mesas.
- People at JPL passed the image around, commenting that it looked like a
face.
- Someone issued a press release, which you can see here: http://www.msss.com/education/facepage/pio.html,
sharing the image with the public and commenting that it resembled a human
head.
- And we were off and running: A smart aleck comment on Lab, followed by a
press release intended to engage the public ... did!
- One of the people to run off with this is Richard Hoagland.
- Early in his career, he had ties to space science:
-
curating a space science program for a small science museum in western
Massachusetts
-
serving as assistant director for another one in Connecticut
-
working as a consultant to CBS News during the Apollo Program
-
consulting for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on public communications about
an Earth science observation program
- He grabbed onto the Face on Mars and wrote a book, Monuments of Mars:
A City on the Edge of Forever, which argued that the mesa is, in fact, a
human face and the mensæ nearby have various mathematical ratios in
shapes and angles you get by connecting them with lines.
- This was not well-received by NASA, and it has cost Mars Global Surveyor
and the Mars Orbiter Camera teams a lot of time and money to get higher
resolution images of the mensa to satisfy the public interest and silence the
conspiracy theorists, instead of pursuing their science objectives.
- Such chilly responses have annoyed Hoagland into claiming that NASA is
part of conspiracies to hide and classify evidence of alien
civilizations on Mars and elsewhere, that Phobos is artificial, and other
conspiracies having to do with secret worship of Egyptian deities.
- I can't do justice to it all. Grab some popcorn and visit his web site:
http://www.enterprisemission.com/.
- People who, like Hoagland, are really into this are unswayed by the more
detailed imagery that the Malin Space Science Systems group half killed
themselves to get ("of course, they altered the image to make it LOOK that
way."), even when ESA's Mars Express later took equally devastating images of
this feature.
- Here's NASA's comments on the whole thing: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2001/ast24may_1/.
- Late breaking news: Nuclear war on Mars
- The person who proposed that perhaps Mars had experienced a natural
nuclear reactor similar to the one that developed on Earth about 2 Ga in the
African state of Gabon, the Oklo natural reactor, John E. Brandenburg, has a
long history of serious publication in peer-refereed journals about such
topics as the carbonaceous chondrites and Mars (Geophysical Research
Letters 1996)), the physics of plasmas (IEEE Transactions on Plasma
Science 1998), cratering rates on Mars (Earth, Moon, and Planets
1995), and the possibility that Mars had had an ocean (Geophysical Research
Letters 1986).
- Since his natural reactor paper at LPSC in 2011, he's followed Lowell's
transition away from refereed science into a variety of speculations about
interstellar alien races wiping out Mars civilization with nuclear weapons,
trying to prove that the Face on Mars is an alien artifact, that the aliens
may come back and nuke us here on Earth, and completing Einstein's theory...
He's appearing on Coast to Coast and biblical media and, essentially, trying
to start a new craze. The way the usual suspects on the Internet are
reacting, he may be succeeding at this.
- I am quite baffled at what would make someone like this go right over the
edge of the world late in his career.
|
![[ orthographic image of Mars on a black background ]](https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/mars/marsblackbg.jpg)
![[ Olympus Mons seen at oblique angle that gives a 3-d sense ]](https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/mars/olympusmons3d.jpg)
![[ Mars explorer ]](https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/mars/marsexplorerpainting.jpg)
|
|
![[ image of Mars ]](https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/mars/marsatlas.gif)