The Mars Chronicles
FOR THE LOVE OF MARS: A Human History of the Red Planet, by Matthew Shindell
Tracing it back to its etymological origin, a planet is literally a wanderer – a point of light that wanders. Usually it moves in the same direction as the stars, but sometimes it stops and reverses. This retrograde motion, which occurs when Earth overtakes a planet in its orbit, is hard to reconcile with a geocentric model of the universe, but it was full of meaning for cultures that looked to the sky for messages. The systems of knowledge that slowly evolved into the natural sciences arose from the study of omens, abundantly supplied by the planets.
No planet apart from Earth has received more attention than Mars, where this apparent wandering is most pronounced. However, as Matthew Shindell points out in “For the Love of Mars,” this wasn’t always the case. For most of history, Mars – a less spectacular object in the sky than Venus – was rarely singled out for special attention, and we only learned to love it after the invention of the telescope. Observations by European astronomers, coinciding with printed accounts of the New World, encouraged people to see Mars for the first time as a place that could one day be visited.
Shindell, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, describes his book as “the history of human ideas about Mars,” and he thoughtfully traces its winding path through religion, literature, and pop culture. In the prologue, he explains that he initially conceived of the project as just one chapter in a general study of Mars exploration, and that he occasionally struggles to justify the expansion. The first chapter is devoted to societies—including ancient Babylon and the Han dynasty—that were interested in Mars as just a cog in ‘the cosmic state’, scanning the skies for ruling class approvals.
The story gains momentum in the Scientific Revolution. Shindell looks, perhaps too briefly, at Johannes Kepler, the first scientist to make a major discovery – the elliptical orbits of the planets – by specifically analyzing Mars. In the 19th century, astronomers identified networks of lines on the surface that many considered evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.
Shindell writes that the “channels” of Mars were exposed as an optical illusion, but he misses the chance to tell one of the most charming experiments in the history of science. When schoolboys were told to copy a model of Mars that hung in the classroom, the students in the front row drew precise drawings, while the students in the back row connected real features with imaginary lines.
Despite a plethora of material at his disposal, Shindell makes some surprising omissions. In his discussion of Mars in the literature, he never mentions that Jonathan Swift described a pair of Mars satellites in “Gulliver’s Travels”, the relative accuracy of which caused widespread excitement after the discovery of two true moons, Phobos and Deimos, in 1877. (The orbital periods and distances of Swift’s moons are within an order of magnitude of the true values, in what seems to have been a lucky guess based on the astronomy of the time.) Shindell instead dwells on more obscure authors such as Swift’s contemporary Miles Wilson, a Yorkshire clergyman who published a mystical travelogue of the solar system, including Mars, on which an angelic guide points out, in Shindell’s words, “nine million red, sexless intelligent beings that grow like trees.”
A more famous journey appears in the 1880 novel ‘Across the Zodiac’, which features a starship named Astronaut – most likely the first recorded instance of the word in English. Mars generally appears in early science fiction as the home of intelligent life forms, sometimes advanced enough to take on the British Empire, as in “The War of the Worlds,” or as a backdrop to the planetary novels for which Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. John Carter.
When it comes to more recent stories, Shindell spends more than three pages on “Total Recall,” but only casually references Kim Stanley Robinson’s ambitious “Mars” trilogy, and leaves “The Greening of Mars,” in which James Lovelock – best known for the Gaia hypothesis – and Michael Allaby put together a crash program for terraforming the red planet on a budget.
When Homer Simpson was told that men were from Mars and women were from Venus, he replied, “Oh, of course, give me the one with all the monsters.” In fact, as Elton John sang, Mars turned out to be decidedly hostile to life.
Instead of astronauts, exploration has been left to robots, which attract their own passionate fans. A wave of emotion greeted the latest transmission from the Opportunity rover, freely paraphrased by science journalist Jacob Margolis as “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” This tendency to anthropomorphize robbers makes it easy to forget that all their movements are controlled by humans, like puppets on millions of miles of invisible rope.
While Shindell acknowledges the “magic” of Mars in garnering support for the US space program, he spends less time discussing its appeal to authoritarian personalities who thrive on grand but empty promises. Donald J. Trump’s sporadic infatuation with a mission to Mars — “of which the moon is a part,” he once confusedly tweeted — may not have seemed worth mentioning, but it feels strange that Shindell only dedicates a few lines to Elon Musk, it has benefited enormously from the perception, correct or not, that it represents our best shot at a Mars expedition. As Shindell points out, a trip to Mars “always seems to be two or three decades in the future,” allowing policy in the present to be indefinitely justified or forgiven.
To his credit, Shindell argues convincingly that Mars is most instructive when it sheds light on how we see ourselves. Proposals for colonies on Mars are often confused with the language of capitalism and privilege, treating the planet as an escape hatch that minimizes the need to solve problems on Earth. It today fulfills the same imaginative role that America once played for Europe, highlighting the danger of exporting old assumptions to an undiscovered country.
“If Mars belongs to people, then it belongs to all people,” concludes Shindell. “Discussions about what to do with Mars should include as many voices as possible.” This may be hard to imagine on Mars, but no harder than it sometimes feels much closer to home.
Alec Nevala-Lee is the author of “Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller.”
FOR THE LOVE OF MARS: A Human History of the Red Planet | By Matthew Shindell | 238 pp. | University of Chicago Press | $27.50