How the Red Planet craze started 120 years ago: Interview with ‘The Martians’ author David Baron

David Baron: Absolutely. I mean, if I’m going to write a book about history, I want to make sure that it resonates with what is happening today. There has be some reason people will care about this story that happened more than 100 years ago.

I felt it resonated in a couple of ways. Firstly, there’s still a passion for Mars. We’re looking for life on the planet right now. That life is not going to be canal-building intelligent beings, but there may be microbes up there. But more importantly, there is serious talk of certainly sending astronauts to Mars and but also possibly colonizing Mars.

Secondly, the other way I think this book resonates, which I don’t make explicit, is because of all the excitement about exoplanets. The scientific community is actively looking for habitable, maybe inhabited planets. You know, there are more than 5,500 exoplanets that have now been found, and a number of them seem to be at least theoretically habitable. Right? So, we could see the same kind of craze about that that we saw for the Mars craze at the turn of the last century.

Another thing I highlight in this book is that I see the Mars craze both as a cautionary tale and an inspiring tale. It’s a cautionary tale because we have a tendency to see things that we want to see and convince ourselves that things are true when they’re not, because we so want them to be true. And I think that’s true today.

I’m very excited by Mars science and Elon Musk’s ideas. I think they’re very far out there, and I think the reality of getting to Mars and living on Mars is going be so much harder than we can possibly imagine. But at the same time, I do think ultimately it’s humanity’s future, and I’m very excited by it. But when you see what some of the zealots say about why we should go, they portray the future of humanity on Mars as this kind of techno-utopia. We’re going to leave the Earth behind, and the selfishness of Earth behind, and create a better society. And it’s a wonderful vision, but I wonder if it’s realistic. So that’s why this is a cautionary tale.

It’s also an inspiring tale, because there’s a direct connection between the excitement of Mars back then and the science today. Einstein said it the best: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”

You need to be able to imagine things to then go pursue what the truth is. And Percival Lowell had a very good imagination. I think it was very helpful for a while. His theory of the Martian canals in the 1890s was not crazy; it was an interesting hypothesis worthy of study. But he got carried away with his imagination. He couldn’t back down when the evidence ran counter to it.

But imagination is important for inspiring us. If you want to launch a space mission, it takes a lot more than rocket fuel and carbon fiber and metal. So Lowell lit this fire of imagination which has ripples all the way through the 20th century to today. So, as I write about in my book, Carl Sagan made it clear that he became astronomer because of the Mars fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which came directly out of Percival Lowell’s work. Similarly, Robert H. Goddard became a rocket scientist because he was infatuated by “The War of the Worlds,” written by H.G. Wells.