The Canals of Mars
By Steve Challis
Discovery
In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli of Italy was looking at Mars through his telescope and saw what he described as canali. I cannot speak Italian, and would probably guess that this meant canals. This is what many English speaking people did at the time, but apparently it means channels, not specifically canals.
Percival Lowell
This meant that people looking at Mars tried to make out the network of canals. The most famous of those who succeeded was Percival Lowell. He was looking at Mars from Arizona. Mr. Lowell made maps of the canals. Not everyone could even see them, but some other astronomers confirmed the observations. In some cases, people who had not seen Mr. Lowell’s maps drew ones of their own with definite similarities to his.
It was realised that for the canals to be seen from the Earth, they would have to be huge. This was engineering on a vast scale, bringing water from the poles of Mars to the warmer equator where the water could be used for irrigation.
Alfred Wallace
Not everyone was convinced. Alfred Wallace was a man of many talents. He was the co-proposer of the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin in 1859. He also researched the border between predominately Asian animals and mainly Australasian ones. This line is called the Wallace Line.
Mr Wallace did calculations based on the knowledge of the time of the conditions on Mars. His conclusion was that all the water would have evaporated long before reaching the equator of the planet, and far from being the work of highly intelligent engineers; if the canal existed it would have been a work of insanity.
Micro-organisms
Mr. Wallace was excluding the possibility of canal building engineers, but was not commenting on the possibility of micro-organisms on Mars.
Mars Probes
The first successful flyby of Mars was in 1964 by Mariner 4, and the first successful orbiting of Mars (or of any planet other than Earth) was by Mariner 9 in 1971. These and other missions sent back much more detailed pictures of the Martian surface than had been obtained from the Earth, and there were no canals in the pictures.
How did it happen
For nearly a century, many astronomers had been reporting nonexistent canals on Mars. One theory about this is that they had been connecting up unrelated features into an apparent network. The trouble with this theory is that the Mars missions do not show features than could have been mistakenly joined together on the maps.
My Explanation
The Human Brain is very good at seeing patterns, and we frequently see patterns that are not even there. This applies to numbers as well as pictures. If you give untutored people a group of random numbers, they will often be able to see patterns in them.
The Astronomers, even the ones who had not seen Mr. Lowell’s maps, knew that there was a network of canals taking water from the poles to the equator, so they looked until they found it. The similarity to other people’s maps is probably just that these were logical places for canals.
Steve Challis has articles on a diverse range of subjects at http://www.bettatrading.com.au; these include Fish Fact Sheets, but there is also a rapidly expanding section on Astronomy and Space Travel. To see a short story involving space travel, see http://www.bettatrading.com.au/Tiffany-Rat.php.
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