How On Earth Was 'Life' Found On Mars?

And This Time, It's More Than Science Fiction

August 08, 1996|By Louise Kiernan, Tribune Staff Writer.

The possibility that Mars once harbored some primitive form of life might be a giant leap forward for science, but it's just a small step for the imagination.

Earthlings' fascination with the Red Planet began at least 3,000 years ago when the Babylonians named it Nergal, after their god of death.

It has thrived ever since, despite--or perhaps due to-- such quirky points on the popular-culture orbit as "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" and "Mars Needs Women."

Indeed, so powerful is the Martian lore that even the NASA scientists had to half-jokingly discount the possibility of "little green men" in their announcement this week that they had discovered organic compounds in a meteorite that left Mars some 15 million years ago and eventually fell to Earth.

Whatever the ultimate judgment on these first hints of life beyond Earth, they fit the imaginative vision, at least, of Mars as a cracked mirror of our own watery orb.

"I'm just glad to see the rest of the world is catching up with us," pronounced veteran science fiction author Frederik Pohl.

Much angst about life here, from the frustration of the dateless to the evils of imperialism, has found an allegorical home 34.6 million miles away (at its closest to Earth). We have also projected our hopes and nightmares about extraterrestrial creatures on this small, arid planet. What makes Mars such a tabula rasa is not its differences from this world but its meager similarities to it.

Like Earth, Mars has seasons, with temperatures ranging from a rare high of 63 degrees to more than 225 below zero.

The misinterpretation of a word describing a feature of Mars--making it sound like one familiar to Earth-bound 19th Century tourists--helped spark the quest for life there.

In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli noticed some lines on the planet's surface. He called them "canali," the Italian word for channels, but it was changed in translation to "canals." This image, particularly coming from a native of the land of gondoliers, prompted the idea that the canals might be man-made waterways.

For centuries, Mars, like much of our solar system, puzzled people. Its reddish-brown areas provoked associations with war and bloodshed, hence its being named for the Roman god of war. Observers noted its polar caps and colorful clouds, but explanations remained enigmas.

So convinced of the canal theory was American astronomer Percival Lowell that he built a private observatory in 1894 in Flagstaff, Ariz., and dedicated his energies to its study.

Lowell believed the Martians had built an irrigation system using water from the ice caps. The canals, he theorized, were strips of vegetation. (Lest you write Lowell off as a crank, it must be noted that he predicted the discovery of the planet Pluto.)

Long discredited, Lowell's theory did not officially die until a spacecraft photographed Mars in 1965 and proved the canals an optical illusion.

Meanwhile, the world of illusion about Mars flourished.

"Canals on Mars? What a godsend for science fiction," said Alison Scott, head librarian of the popular-culture library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.

"There's something about the fictional imagination in writers that can seize upon something like canals on Mars and do wonderful things with it. But the wonderful things don't have to be optimistic things."

In 1898, H.G. Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds," which would gain lasting renown 40 years later as the infamous radio broadcast by Orson Welles. The book depicted Martians as invaders, each of whom looked like a "purse fringed with tentacles," one review noted.

Yet, others, among them Ray Bradbury, viewed Mars as a quasi-Utopia, populated by creatures who were, in some respects, superior to humans. Edgar Rice Burroughs sent Civil War hero John Carter to Mars in his series of Martian novels.

Of course, science fiction often reflects more about our world than those it portrays, and much of what happens was intended as a commentary on current and imagined political realities.

As science intruded on the fantasies of life on Mars, people who cared about such things adapted their stories to the new realities. The makers of "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" and other "little green men" fare did not.

By the time spacecraft were voyaging out to the Red Planet, the most popular cultural incarnation of Mars was as a colony or an outpost, not as a planet fertile with its own life. That was the basis of "Total Recall," the 1990 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Purveyors of the planet's fictional life cite 1976, when two probes landed on Mars and found no signs of life, as a low point for the imagination.

"I thought Mars was dead," said Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote a sci-fi trilogy about Mars.

Yet, as Robinson notes, even this week's tentative discovery of long-ago life on Mars was presaged in a book by Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sands of Mars," that talked about low-level forms of life.

From his Palatine home, Pohl had one more wish.

"Now," he said, "if we can only find life in some other places, it will be a lot more exciting."