Why we are so fascinated by Mars?
Science broadcaster and writer Jay Ingram has a fascination with how we’ve understood the planet Mars over the past 125 years. He’ll trace that history Saturday at Cameco Spectrum, the science exhibition hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. Three peo
The story of Percival Lowell, the astronomer
It’s kind of hard to avoid the fascination people seem to have with Mars these days. As I think back, I’m not sure I can remember exactly how it hooked me, but I did know in the late 19th century there was a big fuss and furor over the possibility of canals on the surface of Mars. There were some astronomers, a couple in particular, who when they turned their telescopes on Mars saw these long straight lines, almost like cobwebs, running across the planet.
One guy in particular, Percival Lowell, concocted a story, a saga really, about the planet, arguing the planet Mars was dying — because there was an old theory at the time, that the planets got older the farther out in the solar system they were — and there were intelligent civilizations that were undertaking this heroic infrastructure project, if you want to call it that, of building canals to pipe water from the polar caps, which people knew about at that time, closer to the equator where these so-called civilizations lived.
He was a great storyteller; it captured people’s imaginations. But then, as the years passed and nobody saw the canals, this story kind of died out. But my argument is it might have died out in the sense that nobody today believed there are canals on the surface of Mars, but it gave rise to an absolute flood of pop culture stuff ... People like Carl Sagan, in turn, were fascinated by these books and so that’s just a little taste of what I think has happened, in that there’s science and there’s imagination, and the two are feeding back to each other all the time.
The story of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author
Burroughs did nothing for about 30 years of his life, then made a decision, apparently quite suddenly one day, when he’d been reading the pulp fiction of the late 1800s, early 1900s and decided if people could get away with writing bad fiction, he could too, and he could do it better than they could. Really, there is a quote not far from that. They tend to have a very Western sort of flavour. John Carter was a Civil War sort of guy who ended up fighting Apaches and hiding in a cave somewhere in Texas and got mysteriously transported to Mars.
I think Burroughs just saw an employment opportunity, and the canals were a big deal then, and the idea of civilization and the canvas was empty. If there was an intelligent civilization, we knew nothing about them except that they built canals. So he was free to write anything he wanted and he basically did it to make money. So it’s not very romantic, but who cares? Everybody acknowledges, whether they like it or not, that Burroughs influenced a lot of people.
The story of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist
He was a Nazi, and he was designing and building V2 rockets for Hitler that were launched in the latter part of the Second World War on England. And they killed five or six thousand citizens. At the end of the war he made a deal with the U.S., brought 100 rocket scientists plus a bunch of rockets to the U.S., and he eventually ended up running NASA’s manned space program, and he designed the rocket that took the first astronaut to the moon. He then was an American hero.
So here you have this guy that until 1944 was a Nazi ... and then there he is on the cover of TIME magazine and on the Walt Disney TV show talking about going to Mars. So in one sense it’s the most amazing transformation of the image of a man from hated to loved.
The lesson
Engineering is not just a rigid system of plugging in equations, building bridges, welding pipelines. In fact, engineering and science in a broader sense doesn’t just have imagination as part of its machinery, but it borrows ideas from outside science. Carl Sagan, as I said, was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is on the face of it a little bit unusual.
Imagination doesn’t just exist in the arts — it exists in the sciences, and scientists and engineers should be open to some of these crazy ideas that at first might not seem like they have any foundation but in fact might be inspirational.