Flagstaff and Percival Lowell played a big role in America’s obsession with life on Mars

Earthlings have been interested in Mars and the potential for life on the Red Planet for more than a century.

NASA’s acting administrator said in September that a sample collected from a rover last year is “the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars.”

Science writer David Barron explores the initial interest in whether there was life on Mars in his latest book, “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.”

He joined The Show to talk more about this.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: David, what role does Arizona play in this story from the early 1900s?

DAVID BARON: Arizona is central to this tale. Percival Lowell, the astronomer from Boston who established the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff — which is still there — was the main proponent of the idea that there was a civilization on Mars. He was not the only one, but he was the person who really took this idea and ran with it and convinced the public, including such notables as Alexander Graham Bell, that there really was a civilization on Mars to the point that there was attempts to communicate with the Martians.

It all started in Arizona.

BRODIE: And what was Lowell’s evidence for this? Why did he think that there was life on Mars?

BARON: Well, you have to put yourself back into the late 19th century. All we knew about Mars was what could be seen through an earthbound telescope. We didn’t have, of course, rovers up there looking at the actual surface.

But through a telescope from Earth, even a large telescope, you have to contend with the Earth’s atmosphere, which kind of blurs the image. It comes in and out of focus.

But the telescopes were good enough that they could see patterns on the surface of Mars, dark areas and light areas that looked like oceans and continents. But some astronomers, including Percival Lowell, also saw this strange network of lines so straight and narrow that they looked drawn with a ruler.

And it was a great mystery what these things were. And Percival Lowell came up with a theory — which at the time was actually kind of an interesting one — that these lines were irrigation canals that the Martians were using to survive on a planet that was running out of water.

And so that was the basis for his speculation about Mars, these strange lines that didn’t seem to be explainable, he said, by any other theory.

BRODIE: And as you say, this gained a fair bit of traction. It sounds like it wasn’t dismissed out of hand as being crazy or something at the time. People seem to think this might actually be what was going on.

BARON: Well, again, there was this mystery. What were these lines on Mars? And they seemed to come and go with the seasons. And so Percival Lowell said, well, you’re not actually seeing the water in the canals, because the canals would have to be enormous to be seen from Earth. But you were seeing vegetation, he said, growing on the banks of these canals that would green up in the spring and then fade in the fall.

It was a consistent theory. And there were reasons to think that Mars might be inhabited. Mars was thought to be an older planet than Earth that had solidified first, that had become potentially habitable first. So if there was life there, perhaps it had become civilized and even was more advanced than we are.

So it fit with ideas at the time. But, yeah, over time it went from an interesting theory to something that really was embraced to the point where the Wall Street Journal — this is not some tabloid newspaper. The Wall Street Journal in 1907 said the biggest news of the year was proof of intelligent life on Mars.

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BRODIE: Well, so I guess at what point did it become clear that these lines were not, in fact, irrigation canals on Mars?

BARON: Well, so this was widely debated for a good decade and a half in the 1890s and through the first decade of the 20th century. There were astronomers who all along were saying they didn’t believe these lines were really there, or at least they weren’t as straight and clean as Lowell depicted them. That, you know, we all know that our eyes are prone to optical illusions.

But that too was just a theory. And the question was: Who was right? Well, Lowell really was taken down finally in 1909, in a year when Mars came especially close to Earth, and so astronomers were keeping a close eye on it, because it was a good opportunity to see the surface.

And it was an astronomer in France — who actually had previously believed in the canals, he had drawn maps of the canals — who on one especially clear night in 1909, looking through the largest telescope in Europe, he looked where the lines should have been, where he had himself drawn them, and they weren’t there.

It was just a natural landscape of just meandering shapes and speckling and so forth. But the eye looking at something that isn’t clear will tend to connect up dots and see lines that aren’t there. And that was the beginning of Lowell’s downfall.

BRODIE: What do you think this episode with Lowell and predicting, trying to prove that there was life on Mars, what does that say about this planet’s interest in Mars and the possibility of life there?

BARON: Oh, a heck of a lot. So, I mean, I got into this, I decided to write this book because I grew up in the 1960s when I just — I was surrounded by Martians when I was a kid. There was Marvin the Martian in the “Looney Tunes” cartoons. There was a TV sitcom called “My Favorite Martian.” There were Martians in comic books and Martians in sci-fi novels.

And I wanted to get to the bottom of what is it about Mars that has captured our imagination? And it all goes back to Percival Lowell. It all goes back to Flagstaff in 1894, when he founded the observatory.

And on the one hand, it could be seen as a cautionary tale. And it is about how easy it is for us to fool ourselves into believing things that aren’t true. That’s true for the individual, like Percival Lowell. It kind of was true for all of America, because people really wanted to believe that there was a better society on the planet next door.

So it’s a cautionary tale, but it’s also actually an inspirational one, because Lowell inspired a whole new generation of people to imagine life in outer space. And it was the excitement about Mars that he started that launched science fiction as we know it in the 20th century and actually got us into outer space.

BRODIE: It’s so interesting that the conventional wisdom at the time was that the Martian society was so far ahead of ours, because it just seems like that kind of goes against the conventional wisdom of we currently, at whatever era you’re in, are at the pinnacle of civilization and technology and innovation, that it seems almost like a sense of humility back then that we don’t seem to have now. That there could be this society that’s so much more advanced than ours.

BARON: Oh, that figured in very much to why the public wanted to believe this. We think of the late 1800s as the Gilded Age, this glorious time. It was not a glorious time to live. There was, of course, the great divide between the rich and so many poor who were poor.

There was violent labor unrest. There was anarchy in Europe. Heads of state were being assassinated. That included William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901. There was a sense that things were falling apart on Earth.

And in fact, people said quite directly, “We hope that there is a civilization more advanced than we are that is more moral than we are, that has learned to live in peace.” And those were the Martians.

Because Mars was thought to be an older planet than Earth, the Martians were in advance of us. And we hoped, the humans here hoped that the Martians would be our saviors.

BRODIE: So in theory, then, we would learn from them. They would show us the way to make our society more evolved and just generally better.

BARON: There was a wonderful, wonderful newspaper article that ran in many papers across the country in 1909 when, again, there was talk of communicating with Mars. And this newspaper article was headlined: “Questions Mars Might Answer.” And you would think it would be things like how do you build a canal? Or how do you perfect the airplane? Because the Wright brothers had just started at that time.

No, the list of questions, they were the most existential questions. What is the purpose of life? How can we prevent human suffering? What is the right way to live? The Martians had become almost stand-ins for God. That’s why people wanted so much to believe in the Martians.

And when Percival Lowell said there was this advanced society there, the public was ready to believe.