In the late 19th century, some very well respected astronomers produced some very detailed maps of Mars. Schiaparelli (who made a career out of observing Mars) produced a “map” showing the so-called “canals”-as did Percival Lowell. Other astronomers could not see them, or else mentioned them in reference only.
My question: when you compare modern high resolution photographs of Mars with these “maps”, do the “canals” relate to anything actually on the surface? there were all sorts of theories about the “canals”…Lowell thought that they were actual waterways-others believed them to be cracks in the surface, canyons, etc. In any case, were the canals totally fictional? Or were they actual features on the Martian surface?
I wouldn’t say the images were “totally” fictional. They were his interpetation of what was probably optical abberations in the telescopes of the time. The wiki on the subject has a decent approximation on the Mars that he might have seen, and an experiment that gave similar results back in 1903.
A 1903 experiment recently recreated for the BBC show Stargazing showed how we tend to see lines where there are none at a certain level of blurryness: Drawing Mars in Greenwich: recreating an experiment for Stargazing Live | Mars | The Guardian
Which makes me wonder why writers like Heinlein and Bradbury were writing about Martian canals in the 1940s and 1950s when the canals had already been discredited for decades by that time.
Two possible reasons: They weren’t up to speed on the latest info. They were writers, after all not scientists. And even if they were, the general public they were writing fore was probably not up to speed. Win-Win!
More interesting than not having canals on Mars? From the POV of a writer.
I don’t know.
I recall science book of the times - 1950’s and early 60’s - with those carefully created maps showing details of green spaces north and south surrounding the seasonal polar ice caps, and “canal” lines connecting green spots on the martian globe, all in green against a light reddish orange equatorial zone.
this was accepted as “normal” until the first fly-by of a interplanetary probe revealed basically (in black and white, IIRC) that Mars was just a version of the moon, mostly craters no lines or significant contrasts, colour or other, to be found.
You are quite right-there were dark areas, which showed up as green/blue tones on the color photographs of that era. But the canals were said to be very narrow lines,criss-crossing the orange/red “desert” areas of the Martian globe. As late as 1955, a large number of astronomers believed the green ares to have vegetation of some type. Of course, the probes sent to Mars show no green areas.
<sigh> The “canals” were nothing but a stupid mistranslation. Schiaparelli named them “canali” meaning ‘channels’, natural watercourses. His not-unreasonable assumption was that the Martian surface had, or used to have, surface water. The ancient-water hypothesis was eventually confirmed as correct. Schiaparelli was right about the surface water, albeit for the wrong reason, because his illusory canali weren’t it. Lowell (or whoever) mistook that word for “canals,” implying artificial construction by an intelligent species, and from there spun a whole fantasy world of a dying Martian race (which was perpetuated in science fiction all the way through Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles).
I grew up with popular science books from the 1950s and early 1960s thatg still showed those green straight-line canals (sometimes doubled) connecting larger areas of green on a rust-red Mars. I was surprised to learn much later that this had been discredited in the scientific press much earlier, but it persisted in the popular press until the time of the Mariner 4 mission in 1964, which finally sent back close-up pictures from Mars. I was surprised – where the heck were the canals? I had read speculation that the apparent canals might simply be unlinked surface features that people were misinterpreting into straight structures, but the pictures we saw from Mariner seemed to lack even such misinterpretable features – the surface of mars was covered by craters, and looked an awful lot like the moon. (The significant differences and characteristic features became clear later and after repeated missions; the initial impression was “that looks like the Moon!”)
Science fiction writers were, I think, still captivated by the romance of canals, if not by the whole mystique of the “inhabitanbts saving the dying desertifying world of Mars by using canals to send water where it’s needed” thing. You can understand Stanley G. Weinbaum putting canals on Mars (Burroughs didn’t actually use them, much, in his stories), but by the time Heinlein and Bradbury wrote, you’d think they’d get more realistic about it. But Bradbury had co-written Lorelei of the Re Mist with Leigh Brackett, who had written a lot of classic old canalized Mars stories. (Even though LotRM isn’t one of these). Heinlein was still holding out for life on Mars in his 1980 expanded Universe, that update of the Worlds of Robert Heinlein where he updated his 1950s predictions yet again.
But I can’t blame the sxcience fiction writers – the pop science crowd had failed to educate the public… and possibly themselves… about the Martian canals.
A few articles for your enjoyment:
Aim of [Mariner 4] Probe: Mars 'Canals December 2, 1964
Mars Canals Clear[ly visible] July 23, 1939
Mars Gives Tantalizing Wink at Earth for Telescope Eyes September 7, 1956
Mars Canals, Oases Sighted December 30, 1965
I always thought they were tectonic plate boundaries. But come to think of it, they’re too random to be spreading boundaries and ridges and transcurrent faults.
I am pretty sure that was still widely believed well into the 1960s. Canals were generally scoffed at by then, but vegetation of some sort was considered more likely than not. I am sure I heard this on Patrick Moore’s BBC show, The Sky at Night, back then. Moore himself was not a real scientist, but he had real scientists on his show. It must have been the '60s. I am not old enough to remember such things from the 1950s.
At some time in the early '60s or late '50s I also remember hearing somewhere that there was a serious scientific hypothesis that Venus might be covered in oceans of carbonated water.
Cecil’s article from 1985: Whatever happened to the canals of Mars?
For Heinlein, that was on an alternate time-line, not sure which one. And, his Mars had plants and martians on it.
It’s very weird watching the miniseries version of The Martian Chronicles which was made in 1980 and even features the Viking probe.
So, what were the canals? Did they exist at all? Or simply the eye playing tricks on the brain? I still don’t see how the blue/green regions disappeared.
They never existed. It was a combination of low resolution telescopes and the brain combining tiny variations into larger patterns.
Photo of Mars at recent apparition showing nothing but fuzziness.
Science fiction writers were including canals long after science had discredited them simply because Martian canals were part of the popular culture and they made Mars interesting. Fiction writers don’t necessarily feel obliged to check science before writing a story.
Mars really does have lighter and darker regions, and the darker patches can shrink and grow seasonally due to dust storms covering and uncovering darker areas. Pre-space probes, it was possible to theorize that the darker areas were vegetation greening up in summer when the polar caps melted. Note that this wouldn’t have implied intelligent life on Mars, just vegetation. This was never a well-supported theory, just speculation, and was debunked definitively by the probes.