Percival Lowell was an American diplomat and oriental scholar who became an astronomer for the express purpose of studying Mars. He established the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the planet, and eventually mapped more than 200 canals that he thought he saw on the Martian surface. Lowell developed a theory that the canals were constructed by an advanced civilization for the purpose of delivering water from the Martian polar caps to the parched deserts of the arid world.
Lowell's popular books and articles on the subject of Martian life, such as the one reprinted here, had a great influence on the public image of Mars and on the work of countless science-fiction writers. This excerpt is from his third book on the subject. What are the differences between this account and the ones from the 1800s?
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Mars as the Abode of Life
By Percival Lowell - 1909
(United States of America, 1885-1916)
Beautiful as the opaline tints of the planet look, down the far vista of the telescope-tube, the deserts represent a really terrible reality. To the bodily eye, the aspect of the disk is lovely beyond compare; but to the mind's eye, its import is horrible. That rose-ochre enchantment is but a mind mirage. A vast expanse of arid ground, world-wide in its extent, girdling the planet completely in circumference, and stretching in places almost from pole to pole, is what those opaline glamours signify. All deserts, seen from a safe distance, have something of this charm of tint. Their bare rock gives them color, from yellow marl through ruddy sandstone to blue slate. And color shows across space for the massing due to great extent. But this very color, unchanging in its hue, means the extinction of life. Pitilessly persistent, the opal here bears out its attributed sinister intent.
To let one's thoughts dwell on these Martian Saharas is gradually to enter into the spirit of the spot, and so to gain comprehension of what the essence of Mars consists. Without such background always omnipresent in the picture, the lesser and more pregnant features fail of effect in their true value for want of set-part of the surface there is none to quicken vegetation or to support life. Only here and there by nature are possible those processes which make our earth the habitable, homelike place we know. In our survey of Mars, then, we behold the saddening picture of a world athirst, where, as in our own Saharas, water is the one thing needful, and yet where by nature it cannot be got. But one line of salvation is open to it, and that lies in the periodic unlocking of the remnant of water that each year gathers as snow and ice about its poles.
The evidence of observation thus bears out what we might suspect from the planet's smaller size: that it is much farther along in its planetary career than is our earth. This aging in its own condition must have its effect upon any life it may previously have brought forth. That life at the present moment would be likely to be of a high order. For whatever its actual age, any life now existent on Mars must be in the land stage of its development, on the whole a much higher one than the marine. But, more than this, it should probably have gone much farther if it exists at all, for in its evolving of terra firma, Mars has far outstripped the earth. Mars's surface is now all land. Its forms of life must be not only terrestrial as against aquatic, but even as opposed to terraqueous ones. They must have reached not simply the stage of land-dwelling, where the possibilities are greater for those able to embrace them, but that further point of pinching poverty where brain is needed to survive at all.
The struggle for existence in their planet's decrepitude and decay would tend to evolve intelligence to cope with circumstances growing momentarily more and more adverse. But, furthermore, the solidarity that the conditions prescribed would conduce to a breadth of understanding sufficient to utilize it. Intercommunication over the whole globe is made not only possible, but obligatory. This would lead to the easier spreading over it of some dominant creature,-especially were this being of an advanced order of intellect,-able to rise above its bodily limitations to amelioration of the conditions through exercise of mind. What absence of seas would thus entail, absence of mountains would further. These two obstacles to distribution removed, life there would tend the quicker to reach a highly organized stage. Thus Martian conditions themselves make for intelligence.
Our knowledge of it would likewise have its likelihood increased. Not only could any beings there disclose their presence only through their works, but from the physical features the planet presents, we are led to believe that such disclosure would be distinctly more probable than in the case of the earth. Any markings made by mind should there be more definite, more uniform, and more widespread than those human ones with which we are familiar. More dominant of its domicile, it should so have impressed itself upon its habitat as to impress us across intervening space.
What the character of such markings might be, we shall best conceive by letting the pitiless forbiddingness of the Martian surface take hold upon our thought. Between the two polar husbandings of the only water left, stands the pathless desert-pathless even to the water semiannually set free. Only overhead does the moisture find natural passage to its winter sojourn at the other pole. Untraversable without water to organic life, and uninhabitable, the Sahara cuts off completely the planet's hemispheres from each other, barring surface commerce by sundering its supplies. Thirst-the thirst of the desert-comes to us as we realize the situation, parching our throat as we think of a thirst impossible of quenching except in the far-off and by nature unattainable polar snows.
To interpret now the successive growth of the canals latitudinally down the disk is our next concern. We saw that it started at the edges of the polar cap. Now, such an origin in place at once suggests an origin of causation as well, and furthermore precludes all other. For the origin of time was after the melting of the cap. First the cap melted, and then the canals began to appear. Those nearest to the cap did so first, and then the others in their order of distance from it, progressing in a stately march down over the face of the disk.
Thus we reach the deduction that water liberated from the polar cap and thence carried down the disk in regular progression is the cause of the latitudinal quickening of the canals. A certain delay in the action, together with the amount of darkening that takes place, seems to negate the supposition that what we see is the water itself.
On the other hand, vegetation would respond only after a lapse of time necessary for it to sprout,-a period of, say, two weeks,-and such tarrying would account for the observed delay.
Vegetation, then, explains the behavior of the canals. Not transference of water merely, but transformation consequent upon transference, furnishes the key to the meaning of the cartouches. Not the body of water, but the quickened spirit to which it gives rise, produces the result we see. Set free from its winter storage by the unlocking of the bonds of its solid state, the water, accumulated as snow, begins to flow and starts vegetation, which becomes responsible for the increased visibility of the canals.
Part and parcel of this information is the order of intelligence involved in the beings thus disclosed. Peculiarly impressive is the thought that life on another world should thus have made its presence known by its exercise of mind. That intelligence should thus mutely communicate its existence to us across the far stretches of space, itself remaining hid, appeals to all that is highest and most far-reaching in man himself. More satisfactory than strange this; for in no other way could the habitation of the planet have been revealed. It simply shows again the supremacy of mind. Men live after they are dead by what they have written while they were alive, and the inhabitants of a planet tell of themselves across space as do individuals athwart time, by the same imprinting of their mind.
Thus, not only do the observations we have scanned lead us to the conclusion that Mars at this moment is inhabited, but they land us at the further one that these denizens are of an order whose acquaintance was worth the making. Whether we ever shall come to converse with them in any more instant way is a question upon which science at present has no data to decide. More important to us is the fact that they exist, made all the more interesting by their precedence of us in the path of evolution. Their presence certainly ousts us from any unique or self-centered position in the solar system, but so with the world did the Copernican system, the Ptolemaic, and the world survived this deposing change. So may man. To all who have a cosmoplanetary breadth of view it cannot but be pregnant to contemplate extra-mundane life and to realize that we have warrant for believing that such life now inhabits the planet Mars.
A sadder interest attaches to such existence: that it is, cosmically speaking, soon to pass away. To our eventual descendants life on Mars will no longer be something to scan and interpret. It will have lapsed beyond the hope of study or recall. Thus to us it takes on an added glamour from the fact that it has not long to last. For the process that brought it to its present pass must go on to the bitter end, until the last spark of Martian life goes out. The drying up of the planet is certain to proceed until its surface can support no life at all. Slowly but surely time will snuff it out. When the last ember is thus extinguished, the planet will roll a dead world through space, its evolutionary career forever ended.
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