Mars Needs Electric Cars
Guest Post From Gary Mullinax, The Minister Of Culture
When Elon Musk starts up his self-sustaining Martian colony — he will because he says he will — he can use the many canals there to bring water to the new community.
Otherwise intelligent people a century ago did think there were Martians and that they built canals. But even the believers might have found it hard to believe in Elon Musk.
A new book about the former Mars craze has arrived the same week Musk managed to get his unmanned Mars rocket 124 miles of the 212.43 million miles he’ll need to cover. This followed many tries when he couldn’t even get it off the ground.
Nikola Tesla comes to mind here. The esteemed scientist thought he was receiving radio signals from Martians. Musk (not esteemed, at least here) is a Tesla admirer who named his electric car after him. They share a fascination with outer space and both have been considered at least a little crazy. Don’t forget: Musk is the guy who named one of his kids X AE A-Xii.
Percival Lowell is the most important name to remember in connection with the Mars fascination around the turn of the 20th century. He wasn’t the first scientist who believed there were canals on Mars (now considered optical illusions). One of his predecessors saw enough to extrapolate that Martians were the souls of dead Earthlings. But Lowell took the canal idea and ran with it.
Lowell had a science background and based his theory on research badly interpreted. Using the telescope he built, he determined that the canals carried water from the polar ice caps (real) to oases around the planet (not real).
Professional astronomers were skeptical, but a great portion of the world looked at this “evidence” and said, with Fox Mulder, I Want to Believe. Earthlings thought they needed guidance from somewhere and Mars would do.
David Baron is the author of the new book “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn of the Century America.” He said in an interview that people saw the Martians as “highly evolved . . . moral and peaceful beings” who were “keeping an eye on Earth. I think that gave people a great sense of comfort.”
Not every person intrigued by Lowell’s theory thought Martians would be comforting. H.G. Wells had them invading Earth in his novel “The War of the Worlds.” And they didn’t look like beings we could ever be friendly with. Wells described them as having a mouth like a beak with tentacles around it. And, oh yeah, a disembodied head.
Elon Musk does not (he says) believe these or any other creatures currently live on Mars. But he’s sure somebody will after he gets his rocket ship fixed.
