Clouds of blue-white water ice hang over the Tharsis volcano on Mars
NASA/JPL/MSSS
Mars was empty before we arrived. This does not mean that nothing ever happened. The planet froze, melted, shook and cooled, leaving its surface scarred with vast geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all this happened in the mineral unconscious, and without being noticed. There were no witnesses – except us, watching from an adjacent planet, and that only at the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars once had.
Now everyone knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all generations of prehistoric times it was one of the main lights in the sky because of its redness and intensity of fluctuations, and the way it stopped in its wanderings through the stars, and sometimes even went in the opposite direction. It seemed as if he was saying something with all this. So perhaps it’s not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a strange weight on the tongue – Nirgal, Mangala, Auquakuh, Harmakhis – they sound as if they’re even older than the ancient languages ​​in which we find them, as if they’re fossilized words from the Ice Age or earlier. Yes, Mars was a sacred force in human affairs for thousands of years; And its color made it a dangerous force, representing blood, anger, war, and the heart.
Then the first telescopes looked closer to us, and we saw the tiny orange disk, whose white poles and dark spots expanded and contracted as the long seasons passed. No improvement in telescope technology has ever given us more; But the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough bleakness to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people building canals to stop the last deadly encroachment of the desert.
This was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by orders of magnitude, we literally knew millions of times more about the planet than we knew before. And before us was a flight into a new world, a world that no doubt existed before.
However, it seemed as if it was a world devoid of life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, from microbes to doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence of any of this has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, as in Lowell’s time, or Homer’s time, or in caves or on the savannah – stories of microscopic fossils destroyed by our biota, stories of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, stories of the Big Man and all his adventures, stories of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these stories are told in an effort to bring Mars to life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still the animals that survived the Ice Age, and look at the night sky with wonder, and tell stories. And Mars has never been what it was for us from the beginning – a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.
And so we came here. It was a force; Now it has become a place.
This is a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars, The latest selection for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read with us Here.
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