Mars, Mars, Mars:
Mars in History and Culture
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As noted on the page of this site about the exploration of Mars, our knowledge of Mars--and all celestial bodies--can be divided into three eras: naked-eye observation, instrumented observation, and actual visitation of the place. That is also a convenient way to divide up information on Mars in the human imagination, for our imaginings ultimately derive from our current information--even if the path from information to imagining is, at times, rather twisted. Here, we will look at "first-era" imaginings, mythology and folklore; then the fierce "second-era" arguments, first over the shift away from the old belief in Earth as the center of the universe, then the later battles over the likelihood of life on Mars; and finally, we'll see how all those issues look today, now that we have entered the "third era" and landed mobile robots on Mars itself.
Overview
[forthcoming]
Throughout the "first era" of astronomy, Mars--like everything else in
the night sky
save
the Moon
and
the Milky Way--was
just a bright point of light that didn't hold a steady position relative to the
"fixed
stars". While different cultures interpreted the nature and significance of Mars each in their own way, there was a
common thread,
doubtless derived from the visibly reddish coloration of Mars. That thread was the assigning of some identity between the visible Mars and a culture's god of war:
Nergal
of the Babylonians,
Ares
of the Greeks (see illustration at left),
Mars
of the Romans, the Norse
Tyr (arguably, anyway), the Hindu
Kartikeya,
the Pawnee Indians'
"Morning Star",
and probably others. The Egyptian
Horus
associated with Mars ("Red Horus") is actually a catch-all name pertaining to several Egyptian deities, but at least
one--Anhur--was
a war god (the city name
"Cairo"
derives from القاهرة [Al Qahira], the old Arabic name for Mars).
Whether any of those civilizations thought that the red light in the sky was an actual manifestation of the associated deity or just had some symbolic or magical connection is unclear, and
may vary from case to case. But what was common to all of the ancients (and to the midiaevals, and--sad to say--even to
some today)
was a firm belief that the objects seen in the night sky had real and potent
powers
over humans and human destiny. The best-known such scheme of belief is the collection of
superstitions,
whose exact content varied widely from time to time and place to place, known as
astrology, in which the planet has (naturally) the
same significances and associations as any "warrior god" would. But the heavenly bodies, including Mars, figured large in other magical belief systems. In
the Tarot,
a fortune-telling system based on a special deck of cards, Mars is generally linked to the card called
the Tower
(or the Thunderbolt--the card traditionally shows a tower being struck by a lightning bolt, often with a human figure falling from it--see image at left), a "malefic" indicator of
rack and ruin. In
the Kabbalah
(קַבָּלָה), an esoteric mystic
Jewish
system of belief, the "sphere of Mars" is--again--a "malefic" and "destructive" principle. The equation seems simple and universal: red = blood =
war/anger/danger/harm/evil.
That the ancients believed celestial objects to have magical powers must not be taken to signify that they were foolish; they were merely ignorant. The ancients believed in magic for the simple reason that they did not yet have evidence that a system of laws ruled nature. They were well enough aware that many natural events seemed to correspond to certain configurations in the sky--the annual flooding of the Nile river in Egypt is one famous example--which was true because the skies appear to change configuration on an annual basis; so it was not then unreasonable to assume that the coincidence suggested a cause-and-effect relation, nor to extend such relations from events in nature to events in human life. (It is interesting that what is perhaps the world's first scientific measuring instrument, the "Nilometer", was devised to obtain greater accuracy in both predicting and historically recording the Nile's annual flooding.)
On the page of this site dealing with the exploration of Mars we refer to the early systems of belief about the physical nature of the universe, but let's expand on that here, because those views, and the reasons for them, become critically important in the "second era" of astronomy. The goings-on in that era were not specific to Mars, but--as they affected all human understanding of "the heavens"--are important to a history of Mars in human thought.
To a naive human--a child, perhaps--considering the appearance of the sky through the progress of a full 24-hour day, it seems "obvious" that the sky is a large globe encircling the
Earth, with the various celestial bodies (Sun, Moon, stars) affixed to the inner side of it. This globe--which the ancients thought of as real and solid, but which we use as a visualization
tool--is commonly called
the celestial sphere.
(The figure to the right should give you an idea of how that view naturally arises.) But even a little thought--or further observation--shows that this simple view is inadequate, because (for
just one thing) the Moon moves relative to the "fixed" stars, and the Sun moves relative to the Moon and to the "fixed" stars.
(The celestial sphere always appears to be rotating about an axis that passes through the
"North star" or
"pole star",
as the time-exposure photograph at the left, showing the night sky with the pole star at the center of the star "tracks", clearly demonstrates; in reality, the pole star is directly above the
Earth's north pole, so the rotation of the earth about its axis makes all apparent motion center on that star, thus named
Polaris.
There is a corresponding
"South star"
in the southern hemisphere,
Sigma Octantis
though it is much dimmer than Polaris.)
The next step, which was not long in coming, was to think of the Earth as surrounded by several concentric spheres of varying diameters, with each but the last made of some clear
crystalline substance (so it would be perfectly transparent): the Sun was affixed to one such sphere, the Moon to another, the planets (those five bodies that even the naked eye can tell move
relative to the "fixed" stars) each on yet another, and finally the outermost with the stars on it. (The conventional order of the spheres, going out from the Earth--which they supposed was
necessarily at the center--were the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and finally the fixed stars, as the cross-section plan in the sketch at the right
shows.) Such a scheme will serve for a while, but in time, if observation is careful (and the ancients were always careful with at least their actual celestial observations), it will
be seen that not all apparent celestial motions are accounted for. The concentric-spheres view thus exfoliated to ever-more-complex variations. The number of spheres (known as
deferents)
multiplied to fifty-five; but that still didn't properly account for the seemingly bizarre apparent motions of the five planets, so they introduced the concept of smaller spheres (called
epicycles)
attached
to the major spheres. This mind-bogglingly complicated system was known as the
Ptolemaic system, after the man who
was chiefly responsible for systematizing it,
Claudius Ptolemy (or
Ptolemaeus).
That is all interesting, but its chiefest point from our perspective here is that it was a view or belief that automatically, almost unthinkingly, placed our Earth at the very center of the cosmos. (It is perhaps noteworthy that the Ptolemaic system assumed a spherical Earth; the idea that the Earth is not flat but round--spherical--was generally accepted by all but the most ignorant by as early as two thousand years ago--Ptolemy was using the concepts of latitude and longitude in the 2nd century A.D.) Such views of the universe are collectively referred to as geocentric: centered on the Earth (geos).
In earliest times, the assigning of the Earth to a central role simply seemed natural, as the human viewpoint is necessarily from that Earth, and, as we have noted, it seems to us as if everything else is rotating around us. Some of the ancients, notably the Greeks and most notably Aristarchus (circa 200 B.C.), actually had realistic ideas about the size of the Earth, and even the literally astronomical distance of the Sun from the Earth; but those ideas--never widely accepted--had been forgotten or were being ignored by the time of the Roman Empire and Ptolemy, and again the Earth was "naturally" seen as the center of the universe.
But, with the swift rise to prominence--indeed, to virtual universality in the Western world--of the
Christian Church,
geocentrism assumed a new dimension, that of Church doctrine. That doctrine did not at first assume much importance, or necessarily even the nature of "doctrine", because in those early days
practically everyone in and out of the Church took it for granted that the Earth was indeed the center of the universe. Systems that placed the Sun at the center, with the Earth and the
other celestial bodies revolving around that central Sun--a class of schemes generically called
heliocentric,
meaning Sun (Helios) centered--had been suggested (especially among the early Greeks, as with the
Pythagoreans
in the 4th century B.C. and the above-mentioned Aristarchus in the third century B.C.); but
Aristotle
(depicted at right), whose writings were virtually sacred writ to the intellectuals of the middle ages, had disagreed, and so the idea went into eclipse for many
centuries.
The heliocentric concept came back to life in 1543, with the publication by Nicholas Copernicus of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ("On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres"). Copernicus had actually finished the book in 1530, but held off publishing it for 13 years, possibly for fear of the consequences. As published, the book includes a preface, now known to have been penned not by Copernicus himself but by the Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander, who apparently generally oversaw the book's publication. Osiander's preface carefully explains that the book is intended as, in essence, an abstract speculation, not an actual explanation of the true motions of the celestial bodies--in effect, some mere mathematical sleight-of-hand to make certain calculations easier to perform. That bit of fakery seems to have accomplished its purpose, for the book's publication caused few ripples, even though if taken at face value it was directly opposed to established Church doctrine ("few" is not "none": there were some expressions of dudgeon--the Dominican Giovanni Maria Tolosani in particular wrote denouncing it).
To properly grasp the historical context, one must remember that in Copernicus' time the Protestant Reformation, originating in 1517, was now coming into full swing, and the Catholic Church, in reaction, was taking a stern and strict view of any expressed differences with established doctrine. The Council of Trent (see illustration at right) sat from 1545 to 1563, setting forth definitive definitions of many Church doctrines. In its pronouncements, we find this declaration:
[N]o one relying on his own judgement shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which holy mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held or holds, or even contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers...
To the Church, it was doctrinally essential that the Earth be at the center of Creation, because doctrinally Man was necessarily the centerpiece of that Creation: clearly, the centerpiece of Creation cannot be off on a wing table, so to speak, for such a condition would cast doubt on its being the centerpiece.
To openly contravene Church teachings in any way at this moment in history was fraught with sheer, literal danger. In 1600, for example, the scholar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake; among the charges against him was his belief in the Copernican system (though that was far from the full rap sheet, and Bruno was unapologetic and unrepentant about his various beliefs).
Copernicus himself probably got by with no scrapes or bruises in large part because of Osiander's disingenuous preface to his work, but also because the heliocentric concept was, to the Europe of that period, so radical that it took a while for anyone to notice that the idea was actually on the table. The classic Ptolemaic geocentric system had recently been displaced by a modification called the Tychonian system, after its creator, astronomer Tycho Brahe; in this newer system, the planets other than the Earth orbited the Sun--but the Sun (with those other planets orbiting it) itself orbited the Earth. Thus, geocentrism remained firmly fixed in this "new" system.
But in 1609, Johannes Kepler published Astronomia Nova, in which he substantially improved on Copernicus' work and propounded a heliocentric system that agreed excellently with actual observation--far better than did the Tychonian system or any of its variants. Now the issue of a heliocentric versus a geocentric universe was clearly up for debate.
The first of these two great arguments was the clash of the geocentric and heliocentric systems, in which--in 1616--the Catholic Church, reacting to writings of Galileo, set itself firmly against the heliocentric view, and thus more generally against scientific knowledge. We deal with the general topic of science and religion on a separate page of this site; the particular topic of Galileo's famous clash with the Church is too complex (and somewhat to the side of our discussions here) to document on this page, but we strenuously recommend you to the rich treatment of it available at the Galilean Library web site under the heading The Galileo Affair. For our purposes here, we need note only two points about the matter.
First, the Church's actions were not necessary--that is, there was no established Church doctrine requiring literal interpretation of every word of Scripture, and much well-known authority (notably that doctrinal pillar, Saint Augustine) arguing against such literalness where it clashed with obvious worldly fact. But Galileo, and the dawn of science, had the misfortune to come along, by historical accident or coincidence, at a time when the Church was threatened on several fronts, both doctrinal (as by the Protestant Reformation) and physical (as by the obvious approach of what was to be called the Thirty Years' War); and in times of stress most organizations react conservatively.
Second, by its rushed and ill-considered response--the Holy Office (formally the "Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition") "debated" only four days before branding heliocentrism heretical--the Church effectively placed itself in a position of opposition to knowledge of the physical world--knowledge soon to expand explosively--a position that would progressively further and further isolate and alienate the Church from mainstream intellectual currents for centuries to come (for it was a position easily adopted but virtually impossible to surrender afterwards)--all needlessly.
The second great clash of this era was over the notorious "canals of Mars". And, looming right behind them, the question of life on Mars--which also some see and some don't.
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First, let's quickly recapitulate the salient points of the history more fully covered on this site's page on the exploration of Mars. In 1609, in a very early use of the then-new telescope, Galileo discovered that Mars was a distinct world--a sphere in space, not a mere point of light. By the mid-1600s, telescopic observations determined the length of the Martian day, and in 1672 an eye-opening (and plausibly accurate) estimate of its distance from the Earth was made. Over the next century or so, investigations--culminating in the work of Sir William Herschel--had determined not only key planetary data (size, distance, year length, day length, axial tilt), but the existence of a thin atmosphere and of large features on the planet's surface (see the series of historical mappings at the right). The concept of life on worlds other than our own is, in varying forms and manners, ancient, though it was quiescent during the Middle Ages. But after the accumulating discoveries from 1609 on, the idea quickly rose anew. At first, speculations were what we might call "intellectual" or "arm chair": that is, the newly realized plurality of worlds inspired philosophical conclusions, along the lines that since the Earth holds no priviliged position in the universe it would be unreasonable to assume that it holds a priviliged position as to the existence of life. Some of the highlights of this period:
By the middle of the next century, though, speculations shifted their grounds from armchair theorizing to an observationally grounded basis. In 1853, the eminent British philosopher and amateur astronomer William Whewell (who coined the term "scientist"), in his work On Plurality of Worlds: An Essay, inveighed--from religious considerations--against the general idea of life on other worlds, but expressed the thought that Mars might well be an exception; he, like many then, believed Mars to possess seas (green) and land (red)--such that it might resemble the early Earth, even to possessing a population of dinosaur-like creatures. His essay initiated a lengthy period of intense debate on the possibilites for extraterrestrial life. Only a few years later, in 1858, the Italian Jesuit priest and astronomer Angelo Secchi, director of the then- and now-respected Vatican Observatory, prepared a map of Mars; significantly, he labelled a major feature (now thought to have been Syrtis Major) the "Atlantic Canal". Later on, in 1873, the renowned French astronomer Camille Flammarion, an immensely popular writer (his book The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds of 1862 was being reprinted even on into the 20th century) and energetic advocate of the idea of extraterrestrial life, attributed Mars's reddish color to vegetation. (We will soon hear more from Flammarion.) But, though the public showed some mild interest in these various speculations, it turned out that the orchestra had just been tuning up. The real performance began with a mighty blast of brasses in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli issued an intricately detailed map of Mars, derived from his own extensive observations. What made this publication so critical to human ideas of Mars was its today-famous use of the Italian word canali--which simply means "channels" or "grooves"--for certain linear features he had noted; when his work was translated into English, the word was wrongly rendered as "canals", and so the infamous "canals of Mars" were born. The popular belief that Schiaparelli was describing an inhabited, Earth-like world was augmented by his use of Earthly river names for some of those canali, plus his use of the term "seas" for certain large areas (regrettably, in astronomy, the term "sea" is often used for any large, apparently open or flat area--such as the maria on Earth's Moon--even if they are thought or known to be utterly waterless.) Though Schiaparelli made some faint noises about a neutral point of view about life on Mars, it was clear that he, like so many of his observational predecessors, thought it likely to be both habitable and inhabited. |
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The cat was now out of the bag: a prominent scientist had effectively claimed to have directly observed definite evidence of advanced intelligent life on Mars. Had Beetlejuice been around, he might well have announced: It's showtime!
Despite their fame deriving from a simple translation error, Schiaparelli was not inclined to back off from his canals. in 1879, taking advantage of an unusually close approach to the Earth by Mars, he made further observations and consequently issued an updated version of his earlier map of Mars. He reported apparent evidence of the feature Syrtis Major being a sea, and also for the first time reported an apparent doubling--or, as he put it, "germination"--of a previously observed "canal". The "canals" remained controversial, but Schiaparelli confidently announced that "It is [as] impossible to doubt their existence as that of the Rhine on the surface of the Earth."
In 1880, the flamboyant Flammarion re-entered the scene, penning Popular Astronomy, in which he described Mars as "an earth almost similar to ours [with] water, air ... showers, brooks, fountains ... This is certainly a place little different from that which we inhabit."
In 1892, Flammarion--now immersed in the issue of Martian life--continued with La planè Mars et ses conditions d'habitabilité. While slightly less lush than his earlier work, it continued to take the existence of advanced life on Mars as a certainty; of the newly reported "canals", he said "they may be due to superficial fissures produced by geological forces or perhaps even to the rectification of old rivers by the inhabitants for the purpose of the general distribution of water..." (At left: imagined canal from Flammarion's book) And of Martian life, he opined that "the actual habitation of Mars by a race superior to our own is in our opinion very probable".
Not to be left behind in his own sphere, Schiaparelli in 1893 published yet another article about Mars, in which he held it to be a planet clearly manifesting seasonal changes, including a temporary annual sea around the north polar cap (which we now know does not exist), relying on Vogel's 1867 claims of detected water vapor (by 1894, proved erroneous) to bolster his position. And the "canals", he asserted, form "a true hydrographic system" and perhaps "the principal mechanism ... by which water (and with it organic life) may be diffused over the arid surface of the planet." He again took no absolute position on the nature of the "canals", saying he was "inclined to believe" them natural [emphasis added], but hedged his bets with a remark that a belief that they are manufactured "includes nothing impossible."
In 1894 surfaced a man who was to long be another major player in the game of "Life, life, who's got the Mars life?" This was Percival Lowell, a Boston Brahmin, who made up his mind in that year, seventeen years after being graduated from Harvard, that he was going to be an astronomer, and one specializing in Mars at that (in fairness, he did show some interest as early as 1890). In consequence, using his own money, he hurriedly established--not wanting to miss the observational opportunity to be afforded by the close approach of Mars to Earth due to occur later that year--an observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona (a highly desireable observatory location, owing to its altitude and clean air).
Meanwhile, however, the "canals" plot was thickening. In that same year of 1894, Edward Emerson Barnard at Lick Observatory reported bluntly that he has found no evidence of canals on Mars, beginning a dispute that, as we will see, would last for decades.
Lowell, after just a few months of actual observations, published in 1895 the book Mars, the first in a series of three he would pen to strenuously argue his fixed belief in the existence of intelligent (indeed, advanced) life on Mars. Lowell rapidly emerged as (and long remained) the foremost proponent of the belief, which caught the public fancy and became very well known--and very controversial, for (as we have already seen) many thoroughly well-qualified astronomers not only did not believe the "canals", or any other valid data, proved the existence of life, but argued that the very "canals" themselves did not exist, and were optical illusions or wish fulfillment fancies. This extended controversy went on, often with close and fascinated public attention, till the third era of space exploration reached Mars.
Lowell and his observatory staff continued to beat the Martian-life drum. In 1905, C.O. Lampland at Lowell's observatory took a photograph of Mars that purported to show some 38 Martian canals (in 1909, Lampland would receive an award for the photo from the British Royal Photographic Society); but outside experts evaluating that image, and others Lampland took later, were unable to agree as to whether there were or were not any visible lines--the images being only about a quarter-inch in size.
A year later, in 1906, Lowell--fueled by Lampland's work--published Mars and Its Canals, the second of the three books he would eventually pen in his never-ending quest to solidify public and scientific opinion behind his views.
Point-counterpoint: The year after Mars and Its Canals, 1907, saw English scientist and co-discoverer (with Darwin) of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, respond to Lowell with his own book, Is Mars Habitable? His answer was a resounding No. Wallace dismantled Lowell's supposed evidences one by one with grinding thoroughness. For example, Wallace strongly disputed Lowell's calculations of the albedo of Mars, a critical determinant of surface temperature, Wallace (correctly, as we now know) reckoning the temperatures far lower than Lowell's estimates, also theorizing that the polar ice caps were frozen carbon dioxide, not frozen water (actually, we now think them a mix of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide). He consequently railed against the ridiculousness of constructed "canals"; but the great public, especially the American public, prefers to keep on believing in its fancies of superior intelligences on Mars, and continued to fill (and overflow) Lowell's lecture appearances.
In 1908, Lowell struck again, publishing the book Mars As the Abode of Life, which was to be the last of his three crusading books advocating the reality of intelligent life on Mars.
Marsmania rampant: a 1911 page from The New York Times, inspired by Lowell's pronouncements (note the prominent illustration of Lowell and of his observatory's
interior).
(There is an interesting
collection of
then-contemporary comments
on Lowell's work on line at the web site of the Department of History at UC Irvine.)
The intellectual tennis match continued. In 1912, noted Swedish chemist and Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius disagreed with the spreading belief that apparent seasonal changes on Mars represented vegetation, and suggested that some straightforward chemical reaction triggered by the cyclical melting and refreezing of the polar caps was a rather more likely explanation. His dubiety was especially interesting in that Arrhenius was an outspoken advocate of the so-called "panspermia" theory, which holds that life on Earth derived from spores of extraterrestrial origin floating through space and landing on the early Earth (a theory today thought by reputable scientists to be unlikely but by no means impossible).
With the death of Lowell in 1916, some of the fire went out of the public exchanges on the question of life on Mars. Though the public remained at least somewhat engaged--as we will see shortly--outside of fiction, little of real note went forth after that till we finally reached the "third age" of astronomical observation.
Schiaparelli's "canals" seized the public imagination. Just three years after his announcement came the first novel set on or primarily concerned with Mars, and it was followed by an increasing flow of others that eventually, in the twentieth century, became a veritable flood. Here are most or all of those (this excludes short stories and the like) from the nineteenth century:
Few of those--the Wells, perhaps the du Maurier--had or have any literary merit.
Though several of these were popular in their time, of them all today only Wells's classic is remembered by any other than specialists. But most of these books had this in common: they were thinly disguised social tracts, done up as novels to make them more readable. From Greg's utopian vision through Welch's socialist paradise, from Genone's ideal society to MacColl's hyper-rational, conflict-free quasi-Victorian Mars, from Flammarion's world of spiritual reincarnations to Leggett's quasi-Christian one, from Cromie's ZPG two-hours-work-a-day paradise to Jones and Marchant's feminist paradise, from Pope's five-races-in-harmony wickedness-free society to Cowan's Christian messages, on up to du Maurier's spiritualism--read any discussion of those works and the word "utopian" almost invariably pops up.
Lasswitz's 1897 novel was the first to break this soporific tradition of bland utopias fading into sterility or equally bland spiritual paradises: in Lasswitz's tale, the Martians are still an idealized conceit--the cookie-cutter "humanoids who come to Earth as benevolent culture-bearers [from a] home world ... presented as a technological and social utopia with a truly democratic decision-making process and an evolved sense of personal freedom and public responsibility based on the Kantian imperative." (Ingo Cornils, Comparative Literature, Winter 2003). Nonetheless, there is conflict with us agressive, warlike Earthlings, and the Martians end up defeating the British Royal Navy (thus ending the arms race between Britain and Lasswitz's native Germany). This novel can be seen as a transition from the earlier pedantic and tract-like tales to something like a real story.
But it was H. G. Wells, then not yet the famous author he was to become (his first "best seller" didn't come till 1901), who really broke the mold. Though his Martians were still an "advanced" race, they were almost evil personified. Few today do not know at least the bones of Wells's tale, but we must not forget, amidst all the adventure and action, that Wells was Wells, and the story intended a moral or two--thus keeping some at least contact with the existing tradition of using "Martians" as didactic devices. Nor should we forget that however well known the book is today, in its time it was not a major event: it was the 1938 affair (which we will discuss later) that catapaulted it to real fame.
Still, though not huge in its day with the general public, it essentially established the rules--one is tempted to say the clichés--for the immediate future of
science-fiction writing: aliens as super-scientific evil monsters intent on invading/pillaging/destroying the earth.
(To be continued...)
(Why not look in at Is it a blog yet?)
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Site Directory:
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(introducing this site) |
Introductory Material: | ||
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Please do take a moment to look over the Introduction page--it's helpful. |
Front Page:
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(the hard-core Mars information) |
Scientific Mars: | ||
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You can read these pages in any order, but the way they're listed here is clearest. |
Planets:
· what they are and where they come from |
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Life on Mars:
· the possibilities there, and elsewhere |
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Exploring Mars:
· who did what when, and what's next |
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(Mars in human perspective) |
Human Mars:
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No technical information about Mars here, but lots of interesting Mars-related things. |
Mars in History and Culture:
· a history of beliefs about the heavens and the objects in them |
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What If We Find Life on Mars?:
· speculations on the consequences of proven extraterrestrial life |
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Science and Religion:
· a brief look at how they do or do not conflict |
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Further Mars Resources:
· where to find more Mars-related information |
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NASA Online Resources:
· there's so much, it needs a page of its own |
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Mars-Related Books: | ||
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