The Mars of our making
We’ve recently harnessed oxygen from its atmosphere and managed a flight on it. But the red planet holds sway over our imaginations in wild, wonderful ways too. Check out how Earthlings’ ideas of Mars have changed over time
On Earth, at the moment, it feels like everything’s falling apart. The virus is tearing through the population. Governments are teetering. Climate change is making things worse. On Mars, meanwhile, all is going according to plan. Last month alone, Earthlings produced breathable oxygen out of its thin atmosphere and got a helicopter to fly, multiple times, without ever setting foot on the planet. Two other craft are hovering in orbit, hoping to touch down in the coming months and study Mars’s seismic activity, internal heat flow, geology, atmosphere and minerals.
Mars has been Man’s escape plan and obsession for decades. The fiery red planet has been part of human imagination for as long as we’ve watched it hover in the evening sky. We’ve been making calculations and measurements for over 2,000 years.
But it took a translation error to really spark the idea that there might be life on Mars. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, looking through his telescope in 1877, noticed channels on the planet’s surface. He called them canali (channels). The rest of the world, then in awe of Egypt’s new manmade Suez Canal, misinterpreted the term as canals — similar feats of engineering, perhaps achieved by sentient beings.
Humans hadn’t even invented airplanes yet, so Mars was close enough to see, but never visit. Overnight, it went from being a distant dot in the sky to a playground of possibility, a place to project human hopes and fears.
In the real world, since the 1960s, orbiters, landers and rovers across 49 missions launched by the US, Russia, the European Union, China, Japan, India and the UAE, have helped demystify this desolate red terrain. We know that Mars, half the size of Earth, has dust storms that can sweep across the planet. We’ve marvelled at its canyons, craters, ice clouds and oversized volcanoes. The planet, 3.03 light minutes away, is now less than a year’s journey by spaceship.
And yet nothing we’ve dispatched to Mars has ever returned. Our machines were intended to die there. We have a measly 45-odd meteorites that represent tangible gifts from our neighbour.
So the best Martian gifts (so far) are the ones we’ve given ourselves: books, stories, films, games and TV shows.
By 2025, seven more missions, from India, Japan, Russia and the EU, are expected to fly past or land on Mars. We’ll keep scanning our neighbour for signs of life, just in case.