Where are the Little Green Men?

As you probably know, Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. Some say she is our sister world. If she is, then she's a cold-hearted little bitch, all right. Mars is only a third the size of the earth. There is an atmosphere, but it's 95 percent carbon dioxide, which would make it great if you were a tree. It's also very thin, the equivalent of being about 26 miles above the ground on Earth. So the surface air pressure is next to nothing. What's that mean? Well, the surface temperature at the equator is about 64 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn't bad. Unfortunately, there's so little air, and the air pressure is so low the atmosphere won't hold the heat in. So about six inches off the ground the temperature drops to a few hundred degrees below zero. Which means that on Mars you could lie flat on the ground and comfortably hold a Popsicle by its stick but not a lot else. Well, then again, maybe not even that. Since the boiling point on Mars is below freezing, you would explode and so would the Popsicle. And that would really suck, especially if it was a cherry Popsicle.

So fucking what is the first question to come to mind, and it's a valid question to be sure. The place is so cold and so dry and so barren that if life ever did exist there, it would certainly be no one you would want to know.

Where are the little green men?

This is definitely not the Mars I grew up with. This is like the flying cars we still don't have. It's a promise no one made good on. There aren't little green men on Mars. Hell, there aren't even little green rocks on Mars, which is a heck of a lot different that what I was lead to believe growing up at the Torrance Drive in. When NASA, bloated with money from John F. Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon before the Beatles broke up, sent Mariner 1 up to photograph the Martian surface, they didn't expect the pictures its crude cameras sent back. They didn't get overhead shots of the Martian cities everyone was breathlessly waiting for. They didn't even get canals. Instead, they got a rust-colored version of the moon. In fact, they didn't even get that since Mariner carried a black and white camera.

Nobody wanted this Mars. Even Carl Sagan tried to turn a bleak situation around while brainstorming experiments for the Viking probes to perform once they'd landed on Mars. Sagan suggested smearing nutrients on the surface of the landers just before they shut down for the night. That way they'd be able to see the tracks the next day of any roaming night creature that might have wandered by to lick it off.

Carl Sagan with the Viking Lander

Let's face it, Sagan wanted monsters. He didn't want a dead desert planet anymore than we do. We want the Angry Red Planet. We want the mysterious world that mystified the ancient Romans, befuddled the likes of Galileo, Christian Huygens and Percival Lowell and inspired H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Orson Wells, Howard Koch, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, George Pal, Sid Pink, Joseph Samachson, Joe Certa, John Tucker Battle, Tobe Hooper, Brian De Palma, Tim Burton, Steven Spielsburg, John Carpenter, Nicholas Webster, Walt Disney, Frank Frazetta, Jeff Wayne and scores of other writers and filmmakers, including me.

Mars, the god of war

Who are these other guys? The ancient Romans gave Mars its name. They named it after their mythological god of war, mostly because the planet's reddish color reminded them of blood. But even after ancient astronomers pretty much established that Mars was a planet and not a war god jetting around in the heavens, everyone still knew there was something very odd going on, they just didn't know what it was.

Then, one day in 1608 a glass worker in Holland named Hans Lippershey made a couple of crude lenses, stuck them on either side of a tube and called it "The Dutch Perspective Glass for Seeing Things Far Away as if they were Nearby." A year later a young Italian scientist named Galileo heard about Lippershey's invention, studied the concept, improved the design and made his own version. Most likely finding Lippershey's name way to long, he called it a telescope instead. In 1610, Galileo turned his new instrument on the heavens with unbelievable results. The most Galileo saw of Mars was a small red disk. But he did note changes in the intensity of the brightness of the planet as it moved through the night sky, leading him to the conclusion that Mars was an outer world and that its orbit was anything but circular.

Christian Huygens

Nearly 50 years later another astronomer named Christian Huygens, using a much better telescope than Galileo's,  made a startling discovery. He actually saw features on the surface of the planet that would later be called Syrtis Major. But these dark markings were features he and a whole lot of others thought might have be man-like-creature-made.  Unlike Venus, which is hidden beneath a shroud of thick clouds, the surface of Mars could be seen and studied. So for the next couple of hundred years every astronomer with a telescope trained it on the red planet. When it was discovered that Mars had a polar ice cap and a thin atmosphere the assumption was readily made that it must have life as well.

This idea really caught fire 200 hundred years after Huygens when another Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli saw some other odd markings on the Martian surface which he took to be some sort of canyons or channels. In his published works, he called them canalis, the Italian word for channels. Then another astronomer, an American from Arizona named Percival Lowell, who was not quite so clever but was very rich, misunderstood the word, and thought Schiaparelli was talking about canals like they were digging in Panama at the time and jumped to the conclusion that Schiaparelli had seen Martian canals, probably built to bring water from the pole to the dry desert areas of the planet.

Lowell's Mars, rife with canals

Everyone credits H.G. Wells as the father of science fiction. But if not for the fact that he was actually being serious with his work, Lowell could have challenged Wells for the title. He build the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, and after studying Mars through the largest telescope that money could buy, published his first book, "Mars," in 1895 based on his observations. His book contained drawings of the more than 400 canals he claimed to have seen and mapped (and which most astronomers said he made up).  But in his book Lowell drew certain conclusions from his observations. Mars, he said, is smaller than Earth, so it has lower gravity, which would mean that it would also have a thinner atmosphere with lower atmospheric pressure meaning it was likely that water would leak away into space. Therefore water, he speculated, would be a precious commodity on Mars and would need to be moved to lower regions.

Percival Lowell in his observatory

His speculations didn't end there, of course. He also believed that the scarcity of water would have caused life to leave the Martian oceans sooner than it had on Earth, so the Martians would be more evolved than humans. They would have to be smarter than us just to be able to deal with the global ecological catastrophe they were facing. Not only that, but because of the differences in gravity and atmosphere, Lowell felt that the Martians would the three times taller, 27 times as efficient, and 81 times stronger than we poor puny Earthlings.

The only thing he didn't do was put them in blue suits with red capes. The sad thing about Lowell was that he wanted this to be true so badly that he was willing to distort the facts to prove it, sort of like Carl Sagan and his smearing peanut butter on the Viking lander to attract monsters idea. At least Sagan was being partially whimsical. Lowell wasn't whimsical in the least. And his detractors were probably right...he most likely did make up the canals he swore he'd seen.

H.G. Wells

Nonetheless, his book did set a tone, one that was followed by fledgling science fiction father Herbert George Wells, who had already dazzled readers with his first novels The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man.  Wells, like a lot of other people of the time, believed in at least the possibility of what Lowell purported, that Mars was inhabited, that its inhabitants were more advanced than us, and that Mars itself was in the final throws of global exhaustion. Much more of a futurist that Lowell, Wells tried to imagine what a much more evolved species of super intelligent sentient beings would be like. Based on his own knowledge of science, psychology and sociology, H.G. departed from Percy in several significant ways.

Wells' Martian

Percival conceived of a race of benevolent giants whose evolved sensibilities had taken them beyond the need for violence and war since all their efforts and intelligence was obviously needed in the effort to save their world. H.G. took an opposite view. Wells imagined the Martians as a bunch of ruthless, emotionless, unfeeling pirates more interested in taking over another world than saving the one they were on. He didn't see them as super strong humanoid giants, either. Instead, he thought of them as advanced, technological geniuses. Wells believed that technology and machinery would replace the need for physical strength. So, since all a Martian really needed was brains to think up the machines and hands to build them with, that's what Wells' Martians became; huge brains with hands. But they didn't have stubby little fingers and thumbs like humans. Martian fingers were elastic, fluid and elongated so that they appeared much more like an octopus' tentacles. And since H.G.'s Martians didn't have bodies, only had heads, they didn't have many organs either. So instead of eating and digesting food, Wells made them vampires that injected blood directly into their veins.

And these are the creatures that invaded the Earth in H.G. Wells classic tale The War of the Worlds. The story is fairly simple. While people of Britain go about their business, serene in the notion that the British Empire will never fall,  the Martians, who have been looking for a new crib since they've pretty much figured that Mars has had it, launch a devastating invasion taking them all totally by surprise. The first Martian spacecraft -- referred  to only as a "cylinder" -- sort of crash lands in the sand  pits of Horsell Common outside of town. Course, that sort of landing would have killed everything inside, but then again, take off would have done them in first. Not a lot was known about rocketry in 1898. H.G. took the same tack as Jules Verne did in his novel From the Earth to the Moon.  They figured that the only way you could get up enough speed to reach escape velocity was by firing a projectile from a gun, which is what the Martians did to get here. They fired their "cylinders" from some sort of huge cannon aimed at Earth from the Martian surface.

Oh well. Buy the premise, buy the bit, right?

Anyway, everyone things its a meteor until the end unscrews and drops off. When the first of the Martians crawl out, blinking in what to them would be the very bright sun,  everyone is terrified -- they are described as being as large as a bear, after all. The first thing the humans do is approach the open cylinder carrying a white flag hoping for a parlay. The Martians, who either don't know what this means or don't care, fry most of the spectators in the pit -- starting with the guys carrying the white flag -- with some cool tech they brought from Mars, the coolest of which is an invisible heat ray.

Now this really pisses everybody off. So the English army surrounds the pit. But before they can go Wellington on the Martians, the Martians pull off a little surprise of their own. Seems they brought enough stuff with them to build three -- count 'em -- three shiny metal fighting machines standing on tripods.

Watercolor painting of a Martian fighting machine

 
 Next time: More Martians, More Monsters and the Media Takes Over!

One word of warning: THE WORST IS YET TO COME!

SAME MARS TIME...SAME MARS BLOG