In the early 20th century it was widely thought that there was intelligent life on Mars, and that we actually knew something about the inhabitants. Fringe theorists and yellow journalists spread this view, but so did respected scientists and the New York Times. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world had Martians on the brain. The mania could be summed up by the philosophy of Fox Mulder, the paranormal investigator played by David Duchovny on \u201cThe X-Files\u201d: \u201cI want to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n
How this came to pass is the subject of \u201cThe Martians.\u201d David Baron\u2019s deeply researched and witty book explores what happened when \u201cwe, the people of Earth, fell hard for another planet and projected our fantasies, desires, and ambitions onto an alien world.\u201d As Baron writes, \u201cThis romance blazed before it turned to embers, and it produced children, for we \u2014 the first humans who might actually sail to Mars \u2014 are its descendants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well before there was Elon Musk, there was Percival Lowell. A disillusioned, admittedly misanthropic Boston Brahmin, Lowell came to see himself as a scientist with the soul of a poet, or a poet with scientific instincts. He was also filthy rich, and he poured much of his money into equipment and research that might help him prove there was life on Mars.<\/p>\n
He was hardly alone. Other movers and shakers in the Martian movement included French astronomer and philosopher Camille Flammarion, who brought missionary zeal to the task of convincing the world of extraterrestrial life; and Giovanni Schiaparelli, the colorblind Italian astronomer who observed \u201can abundance of narrow streaks\u201d on Mars \u201cthat appeared to connect the seas one to another.\u201d He called these \u201ccanali,\u201d which in Italian means \u201cchannels.\u201d But in English the word was translated as \u201ccanals,\u201d and it was quickly and widely assumed that these canals were strategically created by agriculturally-inclined Martians. Lowell, Flammarion and Schiaparelli collaborated and communicated with one another throughout their lives, in the interest of spreading the word of life on Mars.<\/p>\n
Baron, a Colorado-based science writer, approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive, focusing on the social currents and major figures of his story rather than scientific concepts that might go over the head of a lay reader (including this one). The Mars craze unfolded during a period defined by the theory of evolution, which expanded our conception of gradualism and inexorable progress, and tabloid journalism, which was quick to present enthusiastic postulation and speculation as fact, whether the subject was the Spanish-American War or life on other planets. Science fiction was also taking off, thanks largely to a prolific Englishman named H.G. Wells, whose widely serialized attack-of-the-Martians story \u201cWar of the Worlds\u201d piqued the Western imagination. All of the above contributed to Mars fever.<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/b> Hiltzik: Elon Musk’s dumbest idea is to send human colonists to Mars<\/a><\/p>\n One by one Baron introduces his protagonists, including Musk\u2019s hero Nikola Tesla. An innovator in wireless communication and what would now be called remote control, Tesla won over the press and public with his enigmatic charm, which led his pronouncements to be taken seriously and literally by those who should have known better. \u201cI have an instrument by which I can receive with precision any signal that might be made to this world from Mars,\u201d he told a reporter<\/a>. Tesla briefly had a powerful benefactor in Wall Street king J.P. Morgan, who funded Tesla\u2019s wireless research<\/a> before deciding the Mars obsession was a bit much and cutting him off.<\/p>\n Baron comes not to bury the Mars mania, but to examine the reasons why we choose to believe what we believe. Lowell, spurned in his romantic life and treated as a black sheep by his dynastic family, found in Mars a calling, a raison d’\u00eatre. As Baron writes, \u201cMars gave his life purpose; it offered him the means to prove himself a success worthy of the Lowell pedigree.\u201d The Mars believers were dreamers and misfits, all with something to prove (or, in the case of some publishers, papers to sell).<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> H.G. Wells’ alien-invasion novel is night-before-Halloween scary. But it’s a lot more too<\/a><\/p>\n As Baron points out, the scientific method often fell by the wayside amid the hullabaloo. An acquaintance of Lowell\u2019s bemoaned the habit Lowell had of \u201cjumping at some general idea or theorem,\u201d after which he \u201cselects and bends facts to underprop that generalization.\u201d Lowell himself once advised an assistant, \u201cIt is better never to admit that you have made a mistake.\u201d Or later, as he sought photographic evidence of the Mars canals: \u201cWe must secure some canals to confound the skeptics\u201d \u2014 which, today, carries eerie echoes of \u201cFind me the votes.\u201d<\/p>\n None of which should denigrate the dreams of space exploration. Nobody, after all, imagined we would actually walk on the moon. Carl Sagan, the great science popularizer and member of the Mariner 9 team that captured groundbreaking images of Mars in 1971, concluded that those canals were, as Baron puts it, \u201cmere chimeras, an amalgam of misperceptions due to atmospheric distortion, the fallible human eye, and one man\u2019s unconstrained imagination.\u201d But that imagination, Sagan added, had value of its own: \u201cEven if Lowell\u2019s conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabled canals, turned out to be bankrupt, his depiction of the planet had at least this virtue: it aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility, to wonder if we ourselves might go to Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n L.A. Times contributor Vognar recently joined the staff of the Boston Globe.\u00a0<\/p>\n Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. <\/a><\/p>\n