We ’ve seen so many Mars images in late age , our nearest neighbor might be starting to seem a shade familiar . Science fable authorJohn Updike aims to fix that , with some help from National Geographic .
Updike has an essay in the raw issue , all about the story of people study Mars , from its mythology to its elliptical area and topography . Written in Updike ’s typically florid style , the essay talks about the pull Mars has exerted on the resourcefulness of humans , from the ancient Babylonians up to the present .
There are some pretty cool revelation , like this one :
One of the cutting eyed map maker of the satellite was Giovanni Schiaparelli , who employed the Italian Logos canali for perceive linear connections between presumed body of weewee . The word could have been translated as “ channel , ” but “ epithelial duct ” caught the imagination of the world and in especial that of Percival Lowell , a rich Boston Brahmin who in 1893 took up the cause of the canals as artifacts of a Martian civilization . As an astronomer , Lowell was an amateur and an enthusiast but not a grouch . He built his own lookout on a mesa near Flagstaff , Arizona , more than 7,000 foot mellow and , in his own words , “ far from the smoke of men ” ; his lottery of Mars were regarded as superior to Schiaparelli ’s even by astronomers hostile to the Bostonian ’s theories . Lowell proposed that Mars was a dying planet whose highly intelligent inhabitants were combating the increase dehydration of their globe with a arrangement of irrigation channel that distributed and keep up the dwindle water store in the polar caps .
Did you know that Carl Sagan believed “ polar bear - sized wight ” could be roaming the Martian Earth’s surface , as late as 1965 ?
Updike also select in scientific discipline fabrication , from H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs , with obvious savor , particularly when he blab about manlike humans mating with Martian maidens . He resolve by read Mars is n’t really as dead as we thought in the 1970s , now that we ’ve assure how geographically combat-ready and varied it really is .
The accompanying illustrations , as you ’d expect from NG , are compelling and fresh — there ’s aMars gallery , but also a reallynice interactive Mars timelinedating back to the Soviet Union ’s failed 1960 Mars probes , Marsnik and Marsnik 2 . ( I did n’t bed about these . ) [ National Geographic ]
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