Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For centuries, humans have looked up into the night sky and wondered, are we alone in the universe? The possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos remains one of the great mysteries and one that I don't expect to see resolved in my lifetime.
But for a brief period headed into the 20th century, much of the Western world believed that this question, are we alone, had finally been answered.
Chapter 2: What historical beliefs surrounded the existence of life on Mars?
Because we had discovered evidence of an advanced alien civilization living on Mars. Alexander Graham Bell wrote that he thought there was no question that there was intelligent life on Mars. There were professors at Harvard and Yale and Brown, Ivy League institutions, who were totally on board with this.
To the point where in the end of 1907, the Wall Street Journal said the biggest news of the year was proof of intelligent life on Mars. This is David Barron, a science journalist and author of a new book called The Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured turn of the century America. David says that news of extraterrestrial life at that time permeated the culture.
Martians were everywhere.
Chapter 3: Who was Percival Lowell and what role did he play in the Martian craze?
You'd see Martians depicted in Broadway plays and vaudeville skits. There were songs about the Martians in Tin Pan Alley music. There were Martians in advertising. There was a Martian in the comics, a guy named Mr. Skygack from Mars who was in newspapers across the country.
I recently spoke with David about his book, and so much of it still resonates with debates that we're having today about science, expertise, and truth. The story he tells is one of mass delusion, about the dangers of unchecked speculation seeping into public discourse.
And it's a drama that centers around the misplaced ambitions of one wealthy amateur astronomer who convinced the world Martians were real.
Chapter 4: What were the advancements in astronomy during the 19th century?
Here's my chat with David Barron. So your book centers on a character named Percival Lowell, and he's sort of the engine powering this idea of life on Mars. Could you talk about who Percival Lowell was? Well, so Lowell was an interesting man psychologically. Now, obviously, I never met him, and I'm not a psychoanalyst. But, you know, he clearly had a big ego and a fragile ego.
Chapter 5: How did the misunderstanding of 'canali' lead to the Martian canal theory?
So Percival Lowell came from one of the most prominent families in New England. The Lowells of Massachusetts were incredibly wealthy, were big philanthropists, were big in... culture of Massachusetts and the United States. Percival graduated from Harvard, like all the men in the family did. He was the eldest son. And he had a lot of weight on his shoulders. He was a Lowell.
His father had told him and his brother that they had to do something important with their lives. And so for a while he traveled. He was a writer. He was one of the very first Americans to go to Korea. He wrote a book about it. So he really made quite a name for himself as this kind of roving anthropologist. But as he approached the age of 40, he decided he wanted to become an astronomer.
And he had the wealth to do it in a big way. And he really, he became, in essence, the most famous astronomer of that time in America. And so when Lowell takes up astronomy, like, what is going on in the field? And maybe more specifically, what was going on with Mars?
Chapter 6: What challenges did astronomers face when observing Mars in the late 1800s?
So there were big advances in astronomy in the 19th century. Telescopes were now getting quite large and sophisticated. And so astronomers by the late 19th century were getting a really good view of the surface of Mars. Now, Mars, of course, is right next to us in terms of its orbit. But Earth and Mars only come close together once every 26 months.
And about every 15 years, Earth and Mars come especially close together. And that's the time when you can really get up through your telescope, see Mars in relatively good detail. Well, 1877 was one of those years. And there was an astronomer in Milan named Giovanni Schiaparelli who decided he was going to create a new map of Mars.
And night after night, he studied the planet and he drew what he saw with precision. And when he came out with this map, Mars, first of all, looked very Earth-like. It had dark areas that were assumed to be oceans and light areas that were thought to be continents. But Schiaparelli also saw these fine lines crisscrossing the light areas. And he imagined that they were waterways of some sort.
So he called them canali, which in Italian means channels. They were water channels of some sort. Well, canali was translated or mistranslated into English as canals, which has a very different meaning. Yeah, like a channel or waterway is naturally occurring in the landscape. But a canal, like that's made by something or someone. Right. They were a mystery.
No one knew what these lines that looked so straight that they seemed artificial might be. And it was Percival Lowell, when he decided in 1894 to dedicate the next stage of his life to studying Mars, to becoming an astronomer, and he was going to solve the mystery of the canals. Right. And Lowell ultimately comes up with this grand theory.
He says not only are the canals real, but in fact, they're a massive planet wide system created by an advanced alien civilization living on Mars, which is like crazy. But could you explain his thinking at the time?
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Chapter 7: How did the media contribute to the popularity of the Martian theories?
Right. So I know that today it sounds ridiculous. How could anyone take this seriously? But I actually give him credit. It was a coherent theory that fit with a lot of ideas about Mars at the time that at least was worth investigating. So here was the theory. Mars, it was widely believed, was an older planet than Earth. So Mars hardened and became habitable before Earth did.
So you might imagine that there was life on Mars before on Earth, that life on Mars became intelligent before life on Earth. So now Mars, it was thought, was in its dying phases. And it was known that Mars had polar ice caps.
So if, in fact, there was intelligent life on Mars and the water was running out, well, what you would need to do was tap the melt water from the ice cap and bring the water down to where your cities and your farms are. That's what he thought the canals were. This was a worldwide irrigation network that allowed the Martians to survive off the water from the ice caps.
So it was a coherent theory, but he went into it wanting to prove himself right, which is kind of a mistake in science. And Lowell, of course, has a lot of time and money at his disposal to prove himself right. So one of the first things he does is build this state-of-the-art observatory out in Flagstaff, Arizona.
And he starts looking at Mars through his big, expensive telescope and then drawing what he sees. But for Lowell, could you describe what are the obstacles of trying to look at the surface of Mars back in the 1800s? Yeah, I mean, we have to put out of our minds everything we know about Mars today, because we've all seen high-resolution photos and videos of the surface of Mars.
We know what it looks like. But cast yourself back into the late 19th century. All we knew about Mars was what you could see through an Earth-bound telescope... of a planet that at its closest is 35 million miles away. But more than that, you're looking through the Earth's atmosphere. It's like looking at the sky from the bottom of the ocean. This ocean of air distorts the light as it comes in.
And so looking at Mars, even through a fine telescope, it tends to go in and out of focus. It wobbles. So you only have often just split-second glimpses of clarity.
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Chapter 8: What led to the decline of belief in Martian canals?
So you have to stare at the planet over long, long periods to get these moments of clarity and then remember what you saw. And so those canals, it's not like you could stare at the planet and you would just see this whole array of canals. No, you would see this fuzzy orange-red orb in your telescope. Mm-hmm.
Wobbling around and then suddenly you'd see a little bit came into focus and I saw some lines and you draw those and then you stare some more and you see more of these lines. So it was very, very difficult to really get a sense of what was there. And in the book, you actually write about going to Lowell's Observatory yourself. I did, actually.
So in 2018, I went to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff to look through Lowell's very telescope at a time when Mars and Earth were exceptionally close. And just staring at this apricot-colored orb in the telescope... It really sort of hypnotic. You just you stare and you stare and you stare.
And it's it's sometimes hard to know what you've seen and what you thought you saw, what you imagined you saw. And is he is he working with other folks that are sort of buttressing his claims or what is how is he alone in this field?
Well, so when he established the Lowell Observatory, he actually hired away a couple of Harvard astronomers to help him first found the observatory, and then he kept one on his staff. And so this assistant of his, who was a fine astronomer named Andrew Ellicott Douglas, A.E. Douglas— You know, he went along with his boss. He saw the lines, too. He mapped the lines.
But over time, he started to question whether the lines were real or if they were illusory. And as soon as he expressed any doubt about it, Lowell summarily fired him, which says a lot about Lowell, that he did not like to be questioned. Yeah.
So when Percival Lowell sees these channels, which he posits are canals, are they immediately accepted as a thing in the scientific community or is there a debate about them? Oh, there was huge debate. So these lines on Mars, these canals on Mars, were very hard to see. You know, there were astronomers at other observatories with excellent telescopes who didn't see the lines.
And even Schiaparelli said they're not always there. You don't always see them. You have to have the right viewing conditions. And to make it even more complicated, the lines came and went. So it seemed that they came and went with the seasons on Mars. It was all very mysterious.
But, you know, when you have one astronomer saying, I don't see them, and another who says, I do, well, the one who doesn't see them, you can say, well, your eyesight isn't good enough. Your telescope isn't good enough. Your observatory is located in a place with bad air overhead that you can't really get a clear view of Mars.
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