Moon Over Barsoom

The full moon and Mars...together again

Well, August 27 has come and gone, and of course, once again, Mars did not appear in the sky side-by-side with -- and as big as -- the full moon. That particular urban legend -- which showed up this time on Facebook -- has been orbiting the Internet for ten years now, proving once again that when it comes to astronomy and outer space, people can be really stupid.

Here’s where it started: in 2003, Mars was in opposition, and due to the influence of Jupiter on its orbit, it was about to come within a little over 34.6 million miles of Earth, closer than it had been since 57,617 B.C. An e-mail was circulated about the phenomenon along with a photo that showed Mars and the full moon side by side at the same size. In the text was the sentence, “At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.” Since the idiot writer didn’t use a coma after the word magnification, most readers totally dismissed the whole first part of the sentence and only read, “Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.”

This more or less validates the 20th century linguistic philosophic notion that nothing can intrinsically be understood using language since every word spoken is open to interpretation. And being a dumb-ass that can’t read certainly enhances that notion, although I doubt Ludwig Wittgenstein would have put it that way. That’s a shame, too, since if he had, it would have been a great deal easier to stay awake in linguistic philosophy.

I’m thinking that it never occurred to most people that in order for Mars to appear in the sky as large as the full moon, it would have to be a helluva lot closer to us than 35 million miles away. Since Mars is roughly twice the size of the moon, and the moon is about a quarter of a million miles from us, Mars would have to be twice that distance to appear the same size as the full moon, say, half a million miles away. Unfortunately, were the Earth and Mars that close to each other, the gravitational pull would literally pull the surfaces of both planets apart.

I wonder how that would play on Facebook?   

Of course, I shouldn’t scoff at anyone just because they believe everything they see on the Internet or read

Heroes, monsters and babes!

four arms? No? Well then, did I also mention that the women were all beautiful, red, scantily-clad BABES?

I should have, ‘cause this, unlike the Mars H.G. Wells envisioned and Orson Welles scared the crap out of everyone with, was a Mars that was definitely worth going to.

H.G. Wells wasn’t the first person to describe a Martian. Percy Lowell, the man that inspired him to write The War of the Worlds, did a pretty good job of reasoning out what the denizens of the red planet might look like in his 1895 book, Mars. Percy thought the Martians would be extremely tall, really strong, but not particularly warlike. Another author of the era who was also inspired by Lowell took this to heart…sort of.  Like Wells, he was just enough of a fan of Lowell to believe in the possibility of the Martians Percy postulated.

But that’s the adulation ended.

This guy wasn’t an English gentleman, a scholar, scientist or a teacher as was Wells. He was the son of a Civil War veteran that graduated from the  Michigan Military Academy the same year Lowell published Mars. He was bent on a military career but he failed the West Point exam. So he enlisted in the army anyway and wound up in the 7th U.S. Cavalry at Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory. Unfortunately his career was cut short when military doctors diagnosed him with heart difficulties serious enough to drum him out of the service. So he wound up working as a hand on his father-in-laws farm.

But that didn’t last long.

This guy was a science fiction fan. Not just any science fiction, mind you, but the stuff they printed in the pulp magazines of the time. It was a pastime that would change his life.

After reading a bunch of the pulps, he reasoned that “If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those (pulp) magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten,” he said. “As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so that any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs

His name was Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he lived up to the claim. In 1912 he wrote his first story which was serialized in a pulp magazine called The All Star Stories. It was called Under the Moons of Mars. Five years later it was published as a hard cover book under the title A Princess of Mars.

A Princess of Mars was the first in a long series of novels set on Mars. These weren’t, however, about a super advanced species of extraterrestrials launching an ill fated invasion of the earth. Instead, Burroughs’ books were about an Earth man who accidentally invades Mars and ultimately becomes its warlord. Part the Lone Ranger, part Wolverine with a whole lot of Superman thrown, this strange man is a dark-haired, six-foot two-inch immortal who can’t remember a childhood, but has memories of always being around 30. As the book begins, it’s 1866 and our hero, a Civil War Veteran from Virginia, has struck out to the Arizona Territories along with a former confederate soldier pal named Powell to look for gold. They find a vein of gold-baring quartz forth a million at least. But before they can do much about it, Powell is killed by Apaches and, alone, our hero is forced to flee into the dry mesas. Wounded himself, he crawls into a cave filled with a strange, fragrant mist. He looks up into the night sky and sees the red planet Mars shining down on him. Despite his wounds, he feels as if the god of war himself is beckoning him forward. He faces the planet, spreads his arms, and feels himself being pulled towards it. The next thing he knows, John Carter is standing on the surface of Mars.

Okay, this sounds like a fairly unlikely means for interplanetary travel. But you never know. Maybe that

Carl Sagan and John Carter

year Mars was in close opposition bringing it so near that it looked as big as the full moon. And because it was that close, the gravitational force grabbed hold of John Carter and whisked him away through space. You never know. I tried the John Carter maneuver once. And I wasn’t the only one either. In a question and answer session about the Viking Landers in 1976, Carl Sagan, the JPL astrophysicist who spearheaded Viking for NASA, told how he was a fan of Burroughs and John Carter, and how he was so fascinated with Mars -- which the Martians called Barsoom -- that he tried the John Carter maneuver as well.

“I didn’t think it would work,” Sagan told reporters. “But you never know until you try.”









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