David Grinspoon

So therefore, it's probably a swamp planet.

That makes sense.

Yeah, so they thought they saw all these linear features, which couldn't possibly be natural because there are all these straight lines going across Mars.

Of course, Percival Lowell popularized this, and he was a very persuasive guy around the turn of the beginning of the 20th century.

And he was so persuasive that a lot of other people saw the canals, too.

They were like, oh, yeah, we see them.

And it took years to realize that the canals weren't there, basically from close appearances of Mars and better telescopes and cameras.

But the interesting thing is that even after the canals went away, the idea of life on Mars sort of scientifically supported did not go away.

And people thought there was evidence for vegetation.

You know, Mars' surface changes with basically what we now know are seasonal patterns of windblown dust.

But you see these changes in color and brightness, and they thought, oh, that's seasonal vegetation patterns.

And then even in the late 1950s, there was an observation of chlorophyll in the atmosphere of Mars that was published in Science magazine.

Turned out to be wrong, but there's so much wishful thinking that people would say, aha, there is plant life on Mars.

And again, it was pretty recent.

It was really once we started going there with spacecraft that these visions kind of vanished in favor of the more realistic, very alien conditions that you find on these planets.

Makes sense.

Yeah, well, you know, the other thing that H.G.

Wells was really influenced by, definitely Percival Lowell, but also the recent stories he had heard about the Tasmanians basically being wiped out by Europeans from Australia.

What had happened when a, quote, you know, technologically superior civilization encounters a, quote, more primitive civilization and it's not good for the natives.

And so that also led to this trope of the evil invading superior aliens that, you know, that you don't stand a chance against.