The fake news that helped put us on a path to Mars

The richest person in the world is obsessed with creating a city on Mars.

Elon Musk would like to see a million people living in a self-sufficient Martian settlement by 2050, both as a plan B for Earth and because it gives us something cool to get excited about.

Traveling to Mars has been a recurring theme of spacefaring fantasies for decades, from the German rocket innovator Wernher von Braun to science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson. Human exploits on Mars have also been the subject of countless movies, TV shows, and comic books.

There are many good reasons to explore Mars. The discovery of water deep below the surface and ice at its poles suggests that the conditions to sustain life may have existed on the Red Planet, and perhaps still do. Studying Mars could teach us about how life emerged on Earth. While rovers have made great strides in uncovering the planet’s secrets, human explorers could accelerate the pace of discovery.

Living on Mars would bring many challenges for humans, among them cosmic and solar radiation exposure, an asphyxiating atmosphere, lower-than-Earth gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic soil, and no ready supply of food, drinkable water, or breathable air.

But our cultural and scientific fascination with Mars lives on. And if Musk’s SpaceX or a competitor lands humans on Mars in the coming years, it will be the realization of an ancient dream. To think that it all started with an optical illusion that tricked some astronomers into believing that Mars was riven with canals flanked with vegetation and carved by wise, peace-loving extraterrestrials.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke with David Baron, author of The Martians: The True Story of An Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, about the belief in intelligent Martian life and the fixation on Mars that has gripped generations of scientists, science fiction writers, and tech billionaires.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Why do we all care about Mars?

As a culture, Mars has seeped into our collective psyche. There’s this sense of mystery and romance. A little more than a century ago, the public believed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Before Martians were staples of science fiction, they were believed to be a scientific fact.

You could open the New York Times in 1906 and read in all seriousness about the civilization on Mars, what the Martians might be like, how we might communicate with them, and what we might learn from them. In 1907, the Wall Street Journal said the biggest news of the year was proof of intelligent life on Mars.

Where did the fact that there were Martians come from?

It all started in 1877. In the 19th century, all we knew about Mars was what we could see through earthbound telescopes. But in 1877, when Mars came especially close to Earth, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli decided he was going to make a detailed map of Mars. And so, night after night, he studied the planet and saw what he thought were oceans and continents. But he also saw this network of thin, exceptionally straight lines that he imagined were waterways.

He called them “canali,” which in Italian means channels, but when it was translated into English, it was mistranslated as canals. And so, as soon as 1877, people were joking about these canals on Mars and wondering what they were, but people didn’t think they were artificially constructed.

In 1894, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, came along and said, yes, these were irrigation canals that Martians were using to survive on a planet that was running out of water. All of Mars’s moisture was locked up in the polar ice caps at the north and south poles, and for the Martians to survive, they had created this global network of irrigation canals. That’s what these lines supposedly were. They would come and go with the seasons. They tended to appear in the spring and summer, and they would fade in the fall and winter.

Lowell theorized that vegetation along the irrigation canals would appear in the spring and summer, and fade in the fall and winter when the leaves presumably died off.

This was also a time when people were looking for hope in outer space. In the late 19th century, at least in the West, there were a lot of reasons for despair. There was anarchism in Europe. There were heads of state being assassinated. President William McKinley was assassinated in the United States early in the 20th century. There was a feeling that society was running down. There were wars, including the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century.

The idea was that the Martians were these advanced beings who were what we hopefully would become in the future. The fact that they had this global network of irrigation canals meant that they had pulled together as a planet and evolved beyond war and divisive politics.

Because it looked like they were cooperating across a planet.

Exactly. So there was a real desire to believe in the Martians.

Was there anyone out there saying, “Guys, just because we see some canals, it doesn’t mean there are Martians”?

Absolutely. In fact, the astronomical community divided into the canalists and the anti-canalists. Lowell was a self-made astronomer. He was an extraordinarily wealthy and articulate human being from a very prominent family in Massachusetts. And so he was able to write articles for the Atlantic Monthly promoting his ideas. He was out there giving lectures about the Martians. And so he was able to convince the public, even if there were a lot of astronomers he couldn’t convince.

When was peak obsession with Mars in this era?

That was 1908 and 1909. By 1908, the idea was so widespread, you had pastors in church sermonizing about the Martians and expressing to their congregations that we should emulate the Martians and look to our neighboring planet for the kind of society that we should be.

Alexander Graham Bell, who of course invented the telephone, was convinced that the Martians were real. He saw no question that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings.Nikola Tesla, a great inventor who came up with our modern system of generating and distributing electrical power, was convinced that he picked up radio signals from Mars. And when he announced that to the world at the beginning of 1901, it set off an absolute craze.

Martians invaded popular culture. They showed up on the vaudeville and Broadway stages. There was a popular show called “A Yankee Circus on Mars.” You had a Martian that became a comic character in the newspapers. They showed up in Tin Pan Alley songs. In fact, I have an original wax cylinder recording of a song called “A Signal From Mars” from back then. The Martians were just everywhere in popular culture.

Astronomers by the 1910s had pretty well convinced themselves that this whole canal theory was bunk. But the idea had so taken hold in the brains of the public that the idea of canals on Mars persisted until the 1950s and 60s.

In 1938, there was the famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast by Orson Welles. And there were people who actually believed, listening to the radio, that the Martians were invading. I actually found a letter to Orson Welles that was written by one of those listeners who was fooled, who was angry about it. And what she wrote was, well, haven’t astronomers found canals on Mars? Don’t we know that there are Martians there?

The idea persisted well into the 1960s when NASA sent its first Mariner spacecraft flying by Mars to take the first close-up pictures of the surface. And there was not only no sign of a civilization, there was no sign of straight lines. It just looked like a dead world.

Thinking back to what you said earlier, when people were first enchanted by this idea of Martians in the early 20th century, it was this idea that we could all work together that really captured imaginations. And it’s still a nice idea. Do you think there’s still a chance that we could get together as a human race to unite in an effort to get to Mars? It doesn’t look that likely.

I think what will inspire the United States to get to Mars more than anything is competition, because the Chinese want to get there. But there is still this dream of Mars as this techno-utopia that will be better than Earth, that will be more egalitarian, where we can start over again.

I think there are two lessons from the Mars craze. On the one hand, it’s a cautionary tale. We tend to project onto Mars what we hope is there, not what’s really there. A hundred years ago, we believed in Martians because we wanted to believe that there was a better world next door. Today, I think a lot of the talk about Mars is that we’re going to create this utopia next door. That’s going to be so difficult: technically difficult, and, as you said, getting humans together to make this possible, Lord knows if that’s ever going to happen.

On the other hand, a lot of good came out of that craziness of a hundred years ago. It was the excitement about Mars and the imagination that spurred the next generations to say, well, maybe we can actually go there, and how would we do it? And they built the rockets, and they had the enthusiasm. And I think the same is true today. And if we’re going to get there, we might as well start now.