Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [26]
Schiaparelli’s canali were longer and thinner than those Secchi had reported seeing, and they were more numerous. Schiaparelli saw about forty of them and included them on his map, giving them the names of rivers in ancient history and mythology.
Schiaparelli’s map and his canali were greeted with great interest and enthusiasm. Nobody besides Schiaparelli had seen the canali in the course of the 1877 observations, but afterward astronomers started looking for them in particular and some reported seeing them.
What’s more, the word canali was translated into the English word canals. That was important. A channel is any narrow waterway, and is usually a naturally formed body of water. A canal, however, is a narrow, artificial waterway constructed (on Earth) by human beings. As soon as Englishmen and Americans began calling the canali canals instead of channels, they began automatically to think of them as being artificial and therefore as having been built by intelligent beings.
At once there came to be enormous new interest in Mars. It was the first time (so it seemed) that scientific evidence had been advanced that strongly favored the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The picture created was of a planet that was older than Earth and that was slowly losing its water because of the weakness of its gravitational field. The intelligent Martians, with a longer history than ours and with a more advanced technology, faced death by desiccation.
Heroically, they strove to keep the planet alive. They built huge canals to transport needed water from the last planetary reservoir, the ice caps. It was a very dramatic picture of an ancient race of beings, perhaps a dying species, who refused to give up and who kept their world alive by resolution and hard work. For nearly a century, this view remained popular with many people, and even with a few astronomers.
There were astronomers who added to Schiaparelli’s reports. The American astronomer William Henry Pickering (1858–1938) reported round dark spots where canals crossed, and these were called oases. Flammarion, who was a great believer in extraterrestrial life, as I said before, was particularly enthusiastic about the canals. In 1892, he published a large book called The Planet Mars, in which he argued in favor of a canal-building civilization.
By far the most influential astronomer who supported the notion of a Martian civilization was the American Percival Lowell (1855–1916). He was a member of an aristocratic Boston family and he used his wealth to build a private observatory in Arizona, where the mile-high dry desert air and the remoteness from city lights made the visibility excellent. The Lowell Observatory was opened in 1894.
For fifteen years, Lowell avidly studied Mars, taking thousands of photographs of it. He saw many more canals than Schiaparelli ever did, and he drew detailed pictures that eventually included over five hundred canals. He plotted the oases at which they met, recorded the fashion in which the individual lines of particular canals seemed to double at times, and studied the seasonal changes of light and dark that seemed to mark the ebb and flow of agriculture. He was completely convinced of the existence of an advanced civilization on Mars.
Nor was Lowell bothered by the fact that other astronomers couldn’t see the canals as well as he. Lowell pointed out that no one had better seeing conditions than he had in Arizona, that his telescope was an excellent one, and that his eyes were equally excellent.
In 1894, he published his first book on the subject, Mars. It was well written, clear enough for the general public,