Love, Fly with me to Utopia:
three majestic snow-cowled volcanos
poking up through the sockeye dust.
Like Sherpas astraddle our mechanical
goats, we’ll guide parties
all across the chapped terrain,
early seacliffs and ocher pastures,
tending our rock-leeches that suck
mineral and water till, gorged,
they thud like geckos to the ground.
—Diane Ackerman, “Mars”
Charles Cockell is a man of two poles. In the northern summer he heads up to the Arctic to work on the biology of Haughton crater; in northern winter he heads down to Antarctica to look at other sorts of extreme biology, including sensitivity to UV radiation. He’d like to go further. He’s been fascinated by Mars since the age of seven. If a mission were heading off to Mars today, Cockell would be a good choice for the mission’s biologist; he’s easy to get along with, bright and enthusiastic, but with reserves of restraint and experienced in the ways of exploration. However, no mission is heading off, so the Martian adventures he would love will remain imaginary—or simulated. In the summer of 2001 he was in the crew at Flashline.
On the wall of his office at the British Antarctic Survey, on the outskirts of Cambridge, sits one of the most recent triumphs of terrestrial cartography. It is a strangely unfamiliar map of Antarctica: a map of Antarctica without the ice, compiled through radar measurements of the bedrock. In a pallet of greens, yellows, and blues similar to those of the MOLA maps of Mars, though more muted, it reveals secrets that have been hidden for as much as thirty million years. It shows the subglacial highlands and lowlands, the blanketed mountains, the basins that now contain lakes trapped beneath the ice, the broad swathes of rock that sit well below sea level, the vast channels cut by ice streams that so intrigue Baerbel Lucchitta. There are evocative names—the Gamburtsev Mountains, the Aurora Basin—but nothing more. No boundaries, no territories, no true places.
Cockell, who is boyish in a very British way, finds the map’s mixture of fidelity and inaccessibility fascinating. He imagines its secret mountains and plains as the settings for stirring stories, “a sort of mixture between Lord of the Rings and Swallows and Amazons.” Maps of Mars demand stories in much the same way; the difference, odd as it may seem, is that stories based on the maps of Mars are far more likely to come true. The East Antarctic ice sheet, which covers the largest part of the hidden continent, has been in place for many millions of years. It will remain there for many millions more, shutting off access to the lands below other than through boreholes. Mars may be farther off, but millions of miles of empty space are less of a barrier than a few miles of solid ice. Mars is closer to us, in this way, than parts of our own planet are, and far more likely to become part of the human world. What are now stories about Mars could, conceivably, become histories. The Mars of the future may be different. The maps of Mars may have to change.
In one respect the maps of Mars are already changing, as more and more data from more and more sources are added, and this will continue for some time. Spectrographs, cameras, and magnetometers will map more and more of the planet at better resolution. Orbiting radars will begin to map the subsurface, as may seismometers on the ground; Robert Haberle’s little weather stations may chart the weather. But though these processes will make our representations of Mars richer in data, they will not necessarily become richer in symbols. Maps of the Earth are covered with symbols to indicate where cities and borders and roads and airports and any number of other things are. On almost every map there is a key on one side explaining what these symbols mean. The only things worth their own symbols on general-purpose maps of Mars today are the landing sites, the only things on the surface other than its gross characteristics that everyone can agree on. The 1:15,000,000 USGS maps on my wall pick out the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landing sites with delicate reticules. (The less precisely known locations of the failed Soviet Mars landers of the 1970s are left off.)
In the years to come the landing-site symbols will proliferate, as more Martian locations become places. In early 2004 two little crosses will be added for the landing sites of two NASA rovers. By late 2001 four sites were short-listed, one in the hematite region of Terra Meridiani, one in Gusev crater, one in Athabasca Vallis, a channel in the very young part of Elysium, and one on the floor of Valles Marineris. Another cross, if all goes well, will mark the landing site of Beagle 2, a British-led European project similar to Pathfinder but with no rover and more instrumentation, which should land in the middle of the Isidis basin on 26 December 2003. In 2007 the four seismometer-bearing “Netlanders” of a French-led European mission are due to spread themselves around the planet.* In the same year the first of a new generation of smaller and cheaper (in principle) “Scout” missions should arrive. The year 2009 is expected to see a new, more capable American rover (it might get there earlier), and the same year or 2011 might see more Scouts and maybe even more Netlanders. The year 2011 might also see—at last—the first leg of the deeply deferred American-French sample return mission.
Not all the missions will be easily represented by landing sites; some may be airborne. Though the Martian atmosphere is thin, engineers have designed aircraft and balloons that should be able to make use of it, providing a new way to do science (for radar and magnetometers, performance from an aircraft could be far better than from orbit) and a new way to turn bits of the surface into something like places. An aircraft’s cameras would not just look down at the surface of Mars. They would look across the surface; they would look out to the horizon; they would insert changing perspectives into the view in a way that orbital images never could. And they would capture movement. They would see new features rise over the horizon and slip beneath and behind them. They might see the aircraft’s own shadow sliding along the rocks below. They would catch the dip of the wing toward the ground as the aircraft carrying them slowly banked on to a new heading. There could be little better way to turn Mars from a planet being studied from afar to a world being experienced from within—if only briefly, if only vicariously. Not a little sandbox world like that of a rover, but a world of scope and scale and speed, a world like the one that can still impress the most jaded frequent flyer when it catches him off guard through the window of an airliner.
Mars might receive other visitors too. Russia might launch an independent Mars mission, if its planetary program is not fully integrated into the wider European program. The Japanese launched a Mars orbiter in 1998 that, due to a malfunction, is taking rather a long time to reach its destination (it should make it in 2004). A lander might be a logical follow-on. The Canadians have announced Martian ambitions. The Chinese might conceivably try their hand; so might the Indians. All in all, the coming decade could see at least a dozen missions to the Martian surface. Even assuming—as we probably have to—that a third of them will fail, that still means a handful of new landing-site symbols scattered over the maps. When networks of little weather stations and seismometers start to get dispersed over the surface by the dozen, their sites might even stop being marked on whatever passes for a general-purpose map in the GIS age. Getting to the stage where an earthly presence on Mars can be passed over will be an achievement in itself.
Around the same time more detailed reconnaissance might lead to a new sort of symbol being added: places notable not for a landing but for a landscape. Wind erosion carves some fairly remarkable features on Earth and it can be expected to do much the same on Mars. Indeed, Martian wind forms might be much more impressive in some places than the Earth’s, given the low gravity and the lack of rain, chemical weathering, and earthquakes. Pamela Lee, an artist who worked with Bill Hartmann and Ron Miller on Out of the Cradle, a sequel to The Grand Tour that dealt with human exploration, has imagined a Martian version of Grand Arches National Monument, with sandstone spans like the ribs of a fallen titan. If such wonders are happened upon by aircraft, we might expect to see them starting to crop up on some maps as sites of special scenic interest—virtual tourist attractions.
And some day a new sort of symbol will be needed to mark the most historic spot: the site of the first landing by humans. Mars Society optimists are sure that day could come within ten years of the decision to go, and so in their best-case world it could be ten years from today. Pessimists argue that—if it ever happens at all—it will not happen until revolutionary technological advances in other fields (automation, perhaps, or the harnessing of fusion power) have made a radical difference to the costs involved. My own suspicion is that it will be sometime in the 2020s; failing that the 2030s are a bit more likely than the 2010s.
Putting “when” a long way off makes “where” fairly hard to guess, too. The stories we tell ourselves when looking at the maps may not be a very good guide. In post-Viking science fiction, early expeditions to Mars have almost all landed in the tropics of the western hemisphere. The landing sites in Frontera by Lewis Shiner, Voyage by Stephen Baxter (an oddly nostalgic book that imagines what a mid-1980s Mars mission would have been like if the ongoing program had not been canceled after Apollo), Mars by Ben Bova, Terry Bisson’s Voyage to the Red Planet, Stan Robinson’s Red Mars, Geoffrey Landis’s Mars Crossing, and Zubrin’s own novel, First Landing, are all within a thousand miles or so of each other.
The reason for this clustering is obvious: Valles Marineris. Its huge chasms are the most obviously exciting Martian landscape on offer, so writers converge on them. Bova’s explorers head off to the canyons almost as soon as they land; Hebes Chasma is the first scientific objective explored by Robinson’s crew. Landis’s characters, who have gone on a Mars Direct-like mission, actually have to rappel down one side of Valles Marineris and climb up the other in order to get to a return vessel after their own ERV is lost. The great canyon even turned up in the films Mission to Mars and Red Planet, both released in 2000. The films were woeful in almost every particular, scientific, geographic, and artistic,* and had no clear or consistent view of what Mars looks like. But they both made use of vast canyons to spice up the surface scenery.
Landing near the rim of a canyon allows the explorers—or readers, depending on which way you look at it—to experience a discoverer’s epiphany on first looking down. (In Red Planet the landing vehicle actually rolls off the plains and over a vast cliff, making the discovery particularly dramatic.) This is good story-telling but it is hardly practical. If Valles Marineris contains scientifically interesting sediments, or, as Baerbel Lucchitta and Mary Chapman have suggested, recent volcanism, it would surely be better to scout out a safe landing site as close to the science as possible, rather than set yourself down on the wrong side of a three-mile cliff. Besides, the interior of Valles Marineris has higher air pressure, which would probably make the landing easier. But for writers, space travel simply can’t deliver the charge as travel across a landscape: If their characters arrived in Valles Marineris directly from orbit, without seeing it from the rim and climbing down its rifted cliffs, it would feel like cheating. And as Pat Rawlings showed in his picture First Light, the edge of the abyss has a special power; in narratives of exploration the emptiness beyond can stand for a planet’s worth of unknowns.
The floor of Valles Marineris might be the first landing site, but so might all sorts of other places; all one can say for sure is that it’s unlikely to be on one of the great dull volcanic plains such as Syrtis or Hesperia or Daedalia; it will probably be somewhere where there is either remote sensing evidence of ancient water, or of an aquifer, or of ground ice. That could be more or less anywhere, as far as we know today. Wherever is chosen, the site will surely be commemorated with a new symbol on the maps.
It is less clear, though, that that symbol will see much further use. Barring catastrophe, it’s a little hard to imagine humans never choosing to visit Mars. But it would be quite possible for humanity to visit, inspect, and not return. We can’t know what precise mixture of science and symbolism will drive the first exploration in person, but the agenda may be one that can be perfectly well fulfilled with a limited series of missions, or even one. We would leave our robots there after us as we sent them on before, and maintain whatever relationship with Mars we may have come to want from a distance.
On the other hand, it may be that the first missions will be followed by the construction of permanent bases and, thus, the addition of a new symbol to the legends on the maps. Perhaps discoveries will be made that warrant protracted in situ inspection: a complex ancient stratigraphic system recording Mars’s warm-wet past and the life it held, for example (or an Inca City, if one can be found). It’s conceivable that earthly political rivalries will make it impossible for whatever powers reach Mars to quit it without being perceived as failures. Whatever the reason might be, it is quite easy to imagine Mars becoming the new Antarctica, a hard-to-reach location set aside for science under a dispensation flexible enough to permit both political rivalries, such as those of the Cold War, and political cooperation, such as that being seen today. While it would not satisfy Zubrin, something along these lines is probably what most scientists who give serious thought to a protracted human presence on Mars would want.*
With a number of bases, one might expect maps of Mars to acquire yet more new symbols, such as lines representing the transit routes that link them together. But this is not a foregone conclusion. Rock-strewn surfaces like those seen at the three landing sites would be quite a challenge to long-distance rovers. If Mars bases have landing sites, rockets, and the energy with which to make propellants—and if they don’t, their inhabitants will have a problem—then their crews may well choose to travel almost exclusively in aircraft, as they do in Antarctica. It’s a usual assumption that air travel is expensive; but without a lot of travel it could work out far cheaper than putting capital into the construction of roads through the rubble. On a Mars modeled after Antarctica, we would expect people to hop from point to point in suborbital rockets; heavy equipment might be transported by means of stately dirigibles.
Long-distance surface travel would not be unheard of, but it would be restricted to journeys of experience and exploration, journeys designed to help people discover aspects of the planet—and of their lives on the planet—not captured in the ever-growing databases. People would want to take the measure of Marineris and climb Olympus, to follow the Deuteronilus shore, to cross the deep desert of Hellas. Though one suspects little will be done on foot, fat-wheeled bicycles—first suggested as ideal Martian transports in the 1950s by Robert Heinlein—might offer a way to travel while keeping in tune with the terrain. Some explorers would surely want to trek to the poles; indeed, Charles Cockell is sure they will and has even set up a foundation to encourage such endeavors (currently funding expeditions on Earth only, though). While it is an unreliable guide, it’s worth noting that Mars fiction has been taking a turn to the polar recently, a reaction to the increased emphasis on ice in Mars studies and the fashion for things Shackletonian on earth.*
If technology allowed, more ambitious traverses might be attempted, perhaps over the course of a whole Martian year: a circumnavigation of the great dichotomy between north and south; a trip from pole to pole through Argyre and the Chryse trough and back again over Elysium and the Cimmeria highlands. Though Carol Stoker likes to inspire audiences with a slide that shows the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition superimposed onto the western hemisphere of Mars, these treks across Mars would not be comparable discoveries; the great reconnaissance would already be over. Nor would they become part of the geography of Mars, any more than the routes of the great nineteenth-century crossings of America, Australia, Africa, and Asia have become freeways. But they would become part of its history.
More permanent surface routes between camps and bases seem likely to be traced onto the maps only if the settlement of Mars becomes an economic affair as well as a scientific one. Zubrin has suggested that Mars might have resources of strategic minerals worth shipping to the Earth, if the costs of extraction and shipping were low enough. There is no reason to think that Mars does not have ore bodies just as the Earth does, and some might be peculiarly rich. While shipping things from Mars to the Earth would be expensive, it would be much cheaper than shipping things from the Earth to Mars. Launching a rocket from Mars is easier than launching one from the Earth and, once you’re off Mars, it’s downhill all the way. So if the richness of an ore body made the costs of extraction on Mars very low indeed compared with costs on Earth, there might be the basis of an export trade.
Such a trade would not necessarily lead to the creation of a surface transport infrastructure; for a big mineral strike the necessary refineries would probably be built on site, and the refined product launched straight into orbit. It’s possible, though, that it might make sense to bring ore from various sites to central refineries, which might be best done across the surface, since ore is heavy stuff. And because mines would have to be built where the minerals were, they would not be able to choose the sorts of sites where self-sufficiency is possible. A mine in a ground-ice-free zone might need shipments of water from the north or south. A mine in the Prometheus basin close to the south pole would need food shipments during the months of darkness when its greenhouses would have to close down.
If, for these reasons or others, things need to be moved in bulk, then one might imagine roads or railways starting to spread across the map. For various reasons, science fiction has concentrated on railways; they turn up in all sorts of Mars fiction as the natural way to move from place to place, and sometimes even become the focus of the story. In part, this is just another facet of the Mars-as-the-West trope; the railway is a defining if paradoxical symbol of the frontier West, since it is with the coming of the railways that the frontier becomes accessible and ceases to be the inspiration it once was. The railway fixation is also part of science fiction’s more general tendency to re-create the infrastructure of the early twentieth century. To make Martian land transport railwaylike is part of the same approach to the universe that makes spacecraft ocean linerlike. (This must have been a very natural approach for early American science fiction writers, many of whom were second-generation immigrants with a clear understanding of what sort of transport got you to a new world.) Railways lend themselves to shared experience more obviously than private automobiles, and they appeal to the machine-minded in a more thoroughgoing way. They turn a landscape and the society that inhabits it into something comprehensively mechanical, surveyed and synchronized; it was a nineteenth-century commonplace that the railway network as a whole was a single machine, the individual trains components of something greater, like shuttles in a loom. The railway abolished distance, as the Internet is said to do today—and the abolition of distance is a prerequisite for certain forms of escapism, even though, in the end, it makes true escape less feasible than ever.
There may come a day when railways replace rockets as a way of getting around the surface of Mars. There may also come a day when railways, of a specialized sort, start to compete as ways of getting off the planet. Rockets are essentially wasteful ways of getting into space, because they expend so much more energy in lifting themselves and their fuel than they do in lifting their cargo. More efficient launch systems would accelerate the payload up to orbital speeds while keeping the heavy propulsive hardware on the ground. In the 1860s Jules Verne imagined firing men to the moon from a vast cannon; in the 1950s Arthur C. Clarke came up with the rather more practical idea of using an electromagnetic catapult based on similar principles to those used in magnetic levitation trains. The amount of acceleration required would depend on the length of the catapult; if it could be made long enough, the acceleration might be kept low enough to avoid killing the passengers, which is normally seen as a plus in railway management. This approach might be well suited to Mars; among other things, the ideal site for such a catapult is on a steady upward slope at the equator, and Mars has just the thing at the top of the Tharsis rise. An electromagnetic railway track that accelerated its cargo at two Earth gravities across a couple of hundred miles of Tharsis and up the gentle western incline of Pavonis Mons would be able to throw things right into orbit. If such a catapult significantly undercut the costs of rocketry it would make sense to ship all the planet’s exports overland to Pavonis, and Mars might have the railways its chroniclers have always wanted.
Another even more ambitious idea was thought up by Russian engineers and American oceanographers in the 1960s. Imagine a satellite in synchronous orbit around a planet—that is, in an orbit that takes it round the planet in exactly the same time as it takes the planet to rotate, so that the satellite seems to stay fixed over a particular spot on the equator. Now imagine reeling out two very long cables from this satellite, one down to the planet, one out toward the stars. (You need two cables to keep the whole thing balanced.) When the cable going down hits the surface, wrap it around a very strong cleat. You now have a physical bridge into outer space—a “cosmic funicular,” as some of the idea’s Russian pioneers put it. Instead of throwing things into orbit you could just drive them up the funicular.
The problem with such space elevators is that they must be able to support their own weight, so building them requires materials of incredible strength, such as single crystals of carbon, in prodigious amounts. These constraints put a space elevator for the Earth at the very edges of the conceivable. As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in his novel The Fountains of Paradise, though, a space elevator for Mars is comparatively easy. A synchronous satellite around Mars is in a lower orbit than one around the Earth, and the planet’s gravity (and thus the weight of the elevator) is lower. The biggest problem, as Clarke realized, is that the elevator would cross the orbit of Phobos, the inner moon. But this problem is not insurmountable. The space elevator, like a taut string, would have a natural tendency to oscillate, and it should be possible to tune those oscillations in such a way as to avoid Phobos. I don’t mean to belittle the problem of taking a twenty-five-thousand-mile-long structure made of millions of tons of something like artificial diamond and tuning it to harmonize with one of the hurtling moons of Mars. But any engineers in a position to build such a thing in the first place could surely take such a detail in their stride.
If Phobos offers the beanstalk builders a bit of a challenge, though, Pavonis Mons again offers some help. Its summit, right on the equator and well above the worst of the weather (it stuck out of the great storm of 1971), is a natural ground floor for a space elevator. If you built the elevator anywhere else, the vast asymmetric mass of Tharsis would endlessly be pulling it off balance; build straight down to the center of Tharsis and this problem would be minimized. So if the Martian economy ever grows large enough to justify the building of either a catapult or a space elevator, we can be pretty sure that Pavonis will come into its own as the doorstep to orbit and earn itself a pretty special symbol on the maps. It is one of those rare cases where geography is destiny and part of that destiny would be as the hub of the planet’s railway system. The railway lines, we can be reasonably sure, would be straight and dramatic. Indeed, they might look not unlike Lowell’s old maps. As some of Lowell’s critics pointed out, his straight lines were an unlikely arrangement for irrigation canals, since canals tend to follow contours of constant elevation. Railways, on the other hand, cut through contours with zest. Engineers with access to materials strong and light enough for a space elevator would be able to lift their lines over any obstacles with ease; in the Martian gravity one can imagine delicate bridges leaping the narrower parts of Valles Marineris in a single span.
A Martian railway network could be a work of art on a planetary scale. But it might not be the only one. The Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, perhaps most famous today for his furniture design, worked in his youth with Gutzon Borglum, the creator of Mount Rushmore; concerned with the possibility of planetary death after Hiroshima, Noguchi designed a stylized face several miles long called “Sculpture to be seen from Mars.” Though never built, it was, like some of Noguchi’s other grand ideas, a precursor to later attempts to see the landscape itself as something for artists to mold and shape, an idea that has since taken root in the American West in the form of strange earthworks, unnecessary jetties, fields of lightning rods, and James Turrell’s project to reshape Roden Crater, north of Flagstaff.
This is a peculiarly easy school of art to imagine on Mars, an art of simplicity in the wilderness, an art that seeks to evoke the planetary perspective. A single trench in the emptiness; a crater wrapped in foil, Christo-style; rocks formed into a drystone wall, or a circle of standing stones*: Any intervention could be art. How about a version of Noguchi’s face—a sculpture to be seen on Mars, not from Mars? Such art would not necessarily mean moving vast amounts of regolith (though it might). In 1980 the artist Tom Van Sant made the largest artwork in history with twenty-four two-foot-square mirrors. They were arranged in the desert north of Los Angeles (not far from the Goldstone antenna) in such a way that they would reflect sunlight up onto the camera of a satellite passing overhead. The result was the image of an eye a mile and a half long burned into the satellite’s detectors pixel by pixel, a work of art as transitory as it was vast, seen only for a fraction of a second by a single robot but recorded for all time.
If neither railway commerce nor avant-garde art rearrange the surface of Mars, though, scientists—the first Martians—might do the job themselves. Of all the experiments that might be performed on Mars in the next century or so, perhaps the most interesting and almost certainly the most spectacular would be to create a new crater. Not a little nuclear crater like Teapot Ess or Jangle U, but a decent crater a few miles across, bigger than Meteor Crater, smaller than Haughton. There would be various reasons to undertake such a project. One is that, in the long run, the ability to divert asteroids and even comets will become a near necessity regardless of what goes on on Mars. A significant asteroid impact can be expected on the Earth every couple of centuries and a truly cataclysmic one—one a fair fraction of the size of the Haughton crater and able to kill a season’s crops worldwide—perhaps every two hundred thousand years. To avert such catastrophes, humanity will need the ability to change the orbits of asteroids, and this is a skill that it would probably be best to practice in advance.
If one starts from the assumption that it will be necessary to push some asteroids around, then the idea of putting one on a course for Mars is natural. While a lot is already known about the processes of impact cratering, no one has ever actually seen a large crater being formed and such observations would be wonderfully instructive. And creating a crater is not a purely destructive act; it might be environmentally benign. One of Charles Cockell’s objectives of the Haughton Mars Project is to try to understand the high-temperature microbial ecosystems that colonize impact craters in the immediate aftermath of their formation, when the rock within and around them is as hot as a volcano. If there is any microbial life deep under the surface of Mars—or frozen, dormant, in its permafrost—it’s a fair bet that it knows how to take advantage of the pulse of warmth and melted water that undoubtedly follows all large impacts. Impact aftermaths may be transitory Martian oases.
The addition of a man-made crater or two would make a change to the Martian maps that went beyond the symbolic to the topographic. Other experiments might go still further. It’s not inconceivable that a human presence on Mars might eventually start redrawing the basic physical parameters of the map: flooding craters, shrinking ice caps, even recreating some of Tim Parker’s shorelines. A human presence could go beyond making Mars a new world. It could start to turn it into a new planet.
*Since most earthquakes are side effects of plate tectonics, one might expect there not to be any Marsquakes for seismometers to listen to; but any solid body will oscillate, if disturbed, and it appears that the Martian atmosphere, thin as it is, is capable of exciting these oscillations in the planet it encircles. The whole planet rings like an impossibly faint basso-profundo wind chime. On Earth such faint seismicity would be hard to measure, but on Mars things are a little easier. Earthly seismometers are limited in their sensitivity by the constant pounding of ocean waves on the Earth’s shores. Even those stationed in the centers of continents are constantly aware of the sounds of the seas. Sea-free Mars is silent.
*That said, there are degrees of woe: Red Planet—the one with Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Terence Stamp, and the firebugs weirdly referred to as nematodes—was far better than Mission to Mars—the one with Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, the “Face on Mars,” and the pixie-aliens from central casting. Matt Golombek was the blatantly ignored scientific adviser on Mission to Mars and has been stoically bearing the ridicule of his colleagues ever since.
*The science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, an enthusiastic proponent of the Antarctic model of a Mars preserved as a “planet for science” rather than exploited for gain, at the same time suggests that its unspoiled splendors also be made available to anyone willing to pay for passage through community service as a site for “silence and meditation and honeymooning.”
*Percival Lowell would not have approved. “Polar expeditions,” he wrote in Mars and Its Canals, “exert an extreme attraction on certain minds, perhaps because they combine the maximum of hardship with the minimum of headway . . . Except for the demonstration of the polar driftcurrent conceived of and then verified by Nansen, very little has been added by them to our knowledge of the globe. Nor is there specific reason to suppose that what they might add would be particularly vital. Nothing out of the way is suspected of the poles beyond the simple fact of being so positioned . . . Martian polar expeditions, as undertaken by the astronomer, are the antipodes of these pleasingly perilous excursions in three important regards, which if less appealing to the gallery commend themselves to the philosopher. They involve comparatively little hardship; they have accomplished what they set out to do; and the knowledge they have gleaned has proved fundamental to an understanding of the present physical condition of the planet.” After meeting Commodore Peary he changed his opinion, a little.
*In both Robinson’s Red Mars and Bill Hartmann’s novel Mars Undergound Martian artworks mimic Stonehenge.