red vegetation and
reasoning beings
Despite the skeptical (and correct) views of late-twentieth-century experts concerning the primitive, 1860s spectroscopic “detections” of water in the Martian atmosphere, by 1870 an overwhelming consensus had developed among the Martian cognoscenti. Mars has water and the expert astronomers of the era (seeing very clearly what they wanted to see) had proven that fact. This consensus may have been quite wrong, based as it was on the over-zealous interpretation of the data in-hand, from both images and spectroscopy. Nevertheless, astronomers in the late nineteenth century felt quite certain they had proven that Mars has considerable amounts, not just wisps, of water in its atmosphere. These astronomical results, which apparently had been confirmed by spectroscopy, meshed completely with the expectations of astronomers based on two centuries of visual observations of Mars. In fact, astronomers were certain about two important facts pertaining to Mars: it has water and it has vegetation. Having proven the former, all they had to do was prove the latter.
Based on the consensus conclusion that the Martian atmosphere was humid, Professor Huggins, or someone else with his knowledge about astronomy who was also a huge supporter of Huggins, used the pages of the relatively new but wildly successful English magazine, Cornhill, to turn Huggins into a celebrity (Huggins was born in Cornhill, a traditional division of the City of London). The first edition of the monthly Cornhill had a publication date of January 1860. The magazine cost only a shilling and featured leading authors, including works of fiction as well as nonfiction. Published on publisher’s row of Victorian London, Cornhill almost immediately became one of the most influential and widely read magazines of its time. The first issue sold more than 110,000 copies, and Cornhill remained popular and influential for decades.
In 1871, Cornhill published an anonymously authored piece entitled “Life in Mars,”1 which described Mars as “a charming planet . . . well fitted to be the abode of life.” With its seasons, days, clouds, and continents, “that Mars is a world like ours can be recognized most clearly by all who care to study the planet with a telescope of adequate power.” After a discussion of some length about the likely oceans and seas on Mars, about the beings on Mars who might be 14 feet high because of the planet’s weaker gravity, about the likely greater powers of “Martial beings, and the far greater lightness of the materials they would have to deal with in constructing roads, canals, bridges, or the like, we may very reasonably conclude that the progress of such labours must be very much more rapid, and their scale very much more important, than in the case of our own earth.” Surely, though, readers are informed, proving any of this must be a hopeless enterprise, “unless the astronomer could visit Mars and sail upon the Martial seas.”
But no! shouted the author. Astronomers, the most heroic of them, possess a tool, the “ally of the telescope,” the spectroscope. With a spectroscope, deployed by “our most skillful spectroscopist, Dr. Huggins, justly called the Herschel of the spectroscope,” Mars cannot retain its secrets. Huggins, readers learned, pulled back the curtains on Mars, once and for all. His research about Mars
removes all reasonable doubt as to the real character as well of the dark greenish-blue markings as of the white polar caps. We see that Mars certainly possesses seas resembling our own, and as certainly that he has his arctic regions, waxing and waning, as our own do, with the progress of seasons. But in fact, Dr. Huggins’s observation proves much more than this. The aqueous vapor raised from the Martial seas can find its way to the Martial poles only along a certain course—that is, by traversing a Martial atmosphere.2
From other observations, in particular those reported by Norman Lockyer,a the author of the Cornhill article reported that we now know that “the Martial mornings and evenings are misty.” Also, “winter is more cloudy than summer.” The article concluded by noting, “we seem to recognize abundant reasons for regarding the ruddy planet which is now shining so conspicuously in our skies as a fit abode for living creatures. It would seem, indeed, unreasonable to doubt that that globe is habitable which presents so many analogies to our own.” With this conclusion, the dots had been connected, directly, explicitly, and publicly, between the discovery of water on Mars and the assertion that life on Mars is not just probable but likely, all because Mars has water.
The unknown author of the Cornhill article knew his astronomy well. He communicated the ideas of astronomy to lay readers with enthusiasm, and he turned Huggins into something of a folk hero, a mid-nineteenth-century example of how astronomical discoveries that prove the similarities of Earth and Mars lead to fame, if not fortune. He also took the cutting-edge astrophysical work of Huggins, along with Huggins’s opinions about life on Mars, and moved those ideas from the dusty pages of a prestigious professional journal into the living rooms of hundreds of thousands of educated Londoners. Prior to the publicity surrounding Huggins’s work, the debate about Mars and life on Mars had been kept within the small, quiet domain of the astronomy community. Those days were over. The life on Mars debate, fueled by the apparent proof of the presence of abundant water on Mars, was now part of the public conversation.
The London Reader, an inexpensive London newspaper, published a short article in 1873, titled “The Planet Mars—Is It Inhabited?” in which, once again, “the eminent physicist Huggins solves the problem.” Mars, Huggins proved, has seas, clouds, snow, ice, fog, and rain. “Reasoning from this basis, we can trace the presence of winds which shift the masses of vapour from place to place, of aerial and oceanic currents, of rivers flowing to the seas, of a climate tempered in the same matter as our own, and of copious rainfall which must nourish the land and cause the production of vegetation.” Mars is, in fact, “a miniature of our Earth. Here then, millions of miles away in space is another world, a small one, it is true; but it has water, air, light, winds, clouds, rains, seasons, rivers, brooks, valleys, mountains, all like ours.”3 These facts, in this laundry list of assertions about conditions on Mars, all arose from Huggins’s spectroscopic discovery of proof of water on Mars. In truth, no astronomer at that time could see winds or rain or rivers or brooks or valleys on Mars, but actual facts were not going to get in the way of certainty about what Mars must be like.
The author of the London Reader article then put forward a number of arguments related to the amount of heat Mars receives from the Sun and the thinness of the Martian atmosphere. From these, the author concluded that
the weight of evidence, it seems to us, is against the existence of beings of a nature with which we are familiar. No terrestrial creature could live even in the torrid zone of Mars, so cold and dismal it must be. Even vegetable life, however hardy, would not survive a single hour. If inhabitants there be they must be of different form from us, to correspond to the decreased attraction of gravity; if red vegetation exist, their eyes must be different from ours; to live in such an atmosphere their respiratory organs must be totally unlike our own.4
Cornhill returned to the subject of life on Mars with another anonymously authored article in 1873, titled “The Planet Mars: An Essay by a Whewellite.”5 The title would have immediately informed readers that the author was skeptical about the idea that life could exist on Mars. The Whewellite who wrote this Cornhill essay was none other than Richard Proctor who, in his Charts of Mars, had named the Martian continents and oceans. Proctor first presented arguments in support of the thesis that Mars is very different from Earth and consequently is unsuitable for life as we know it. The atmospheric pressure must be less than one-tenth that of Earth because the mass of Mars is, similarly, less than 10 percent of the mass of Earth. In addition, Mars must be much colder than Earth since it is 50 percent farther from the Sun than Earth. The clouds of Mars, the author argued, are likely cirrus rather than cumulus, and so might not be rain clouds. The author concluded that “Mars is quite unlike the Earth, and unfit to be the abode of creatures resembling those that inhabit our world. Neither animal nor vegetable forms of life known to us, he argued, could exist on Mars. Our hardiest forms of vegetable life would not live a single hour if they could be transplanted to Mars.” Such conclusions sound depressing for those who imagined that life exists on Mars. Yet, the author drew exactly the opposite conclusion: “Life, animal as well as vegetable, there may indeed be on the ruddy planet. Reasoning creatures may exist there as on the Earth.” Martian life will simply be different from terrestrial life, so different that “to reasoning beings on Mars, the idea of life on our Earth must appear wild and fanciful in the extreme, if not altogether untenable.” If this very knowledgeable astronomer and skeptical Whewellite had capitulated, forced by the apparently overwhelming evidence to conclude that Mars is populated by both animals and plants, then the scientific debate was essentially over.
Meanwhile, on the continental side of the English Channel, via the popular writings of Camille Flammarion, the idea that Mars was not only Earthlike but likely inhabited by some kind of living things, even if perhaps different from us, became deeply rooted in the minds of many Europeans in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In 1873, Flammarion followed up his own 1869 and 1871 studies of Mars with new observations, which he presented to the Academie des Sciences in Paris in July. He described to the members of the French Academy “a polar sea around the north pole,” which he was able to identify as such “because a dark patch is constantly visible there.” Flammarion’s polar sea extended from 80° north, where it touched the polar ice, to as far south as 45° north latitude. There, this “long, narrow Mediterranean” joined “a vast sea which extends from beyond the equator into the southern hemisphere.” Flammarion pointed out an important way, in his view, in which Mars differed from Earth: on Earth, “three-quarters of the globe is covered with water; with Mars, on the other hand, there is more continental than maritime surface.”6 “Nevertheless,” he continued, “evaporation on Mars produces effects analogous to those in terrestrial meteorology,” and, referring now to the work of Huggins and Janssen, “spectral analysis shows that the atmosphere of Mars is charged with water vapour, as is ours; also that the seas, snows, and clouds are composed of the same water as our own seas.”
Flammarion then felt compelled to speculate about the red color of Mars. He and others had by now developed arguments that allowed them to attribute this color to the surface rather than to the atmosphere of Mars. Flammarion took these arguments one step further: “Since it is the surface which we see, not the planets [sic] interior, the red colour ought to be that of the Martian vegetation, since it is this species of vegetation which is produced there.” The continents of Mars, he concluded, “seem to be covered with reddish vegetation.”7
A debate ensued over the following year among some members of the French Academy as to whether the near-invariability of the reddish color of Mars was an indication of the presence of life or proof its absence. One Academy member, Dr. Hoefer, argued that the nearly constant color of Mars was a strong argument in favor of the absence of life; soil, he argued, does not vary in color with the changing seasons. Others, like Flammarion, argued that the doctrine of the plurality of worlds offered a strong argument against the sterility of Mars. A sterile planet, especially one as capable of hosting life as Mars clearly is, would be “contrary to all known effects of the forces of Nature. There must be something,” he argued, “on the lands, whether it be moss or even less.” The arguments in favor of life on Mars were easy to muster: Mars has “species of vegetation which do not change [color with the seasons],” in the same way that on Earth “olive-trees and orange-trees are as green in winter as in summer.”
By 1879, Flammarion had become a popularizing voice of astronomy on both sides of the Atlantic. In an article he authored in the Scientific American Supplement, titled “Another World Inhabited Like Our Own,” he explained that he was motivated by his “persistent desire to find in practical astronomy a direct demonstration of this great truth of the plurality of worlds.”8 From his perspective, the detection of water in the atmosphere of Mars by Huggins and Janssen had been a game changer. “Water vapor identical with that which produces our fogs, our clouds, and our rains” had been discovered on Mars by “spectrum analysis,” he explained. With this new knowledge, Flammarion asserted that astronomers now understood that the best time to study Mars, if we are to learn what is happening on the surface, would be when the atmosphere was not filled with clouds. “In other words, it must be while the inhabitants of the latter planet are enjoying fine weather.” Flammarion explained to his readers that the Martian seas “are Mediterranean” with the color of Martian water “the same as that of terrestrial water.” As for the red colors of the continents, “can it be,” he wrote, “that this characteristic color of Mars . . . is due to the color of the grass and other vegetation which must cover its plains? Can there be red meadows and red forests up there?” Putting all the pieces of information about Mars together, Flammarion asked, “Is the red indeed terra firma, is the green really water, and is the white indeed snow?” “Yes!” he excitedly concluded.
Nineteenth-century ideas on the evolution of planets also led to interesting ideas when comparing Earth and Mars. Astronomers insisted that Mars was older than Earth. According to a then increasingly popular theory of cosmic evolution, one based on absolutely no physical evidence but a great deal of imaginative speculation, as a planet ages the seas are progressively absorbed by the solid, planetary core. Slowly but surely, according to this (now discarded) theory of cosmic evolution, a planet loses its oceans to its own interior while simultaneously the surface dries into desert. Thus, according to then-current theory, the observational facts of Mars reveal it to be a dying planet, far closer than Earth to the end of its lifetime.
Together, a handful of astronomers transformed their beliefs about Mars into established Martian facts. They proved that Mars has water; they proved that the red patches on Mars were vegetation. They proved what they wanted to prove, and they didn’t let any of their observational data get in their way. Thus, a wet, lush planet became the intellectual legacy about Mars that would inform the next generation of Mars professionals and enthusiasts.
a The association with the work of Lockyer was strategically wise. Lockyer had, in 1869, founded the journal Nature, which quickly became and remains one of the most influential professional science publications in the world.