Filed under
culture
6 milestones, in chronological order.
- c. 1473 BCEAncient Eyes
Egypt leaves Mars an empty boat
On the painted ceiling of Senenmut's tomb at Thebes, four planets ride their sacred boats and a fifth boat sails empty. The empty one is probably Mars.
- c. 168 BCEAncient Eyes
The Fire Star that Chinese astronomers could not pin down
A silk manuscript buried at Mawangdui gives working cycles for Jupiter, Saturn and Venus and none at all for Mars — the one planet that refused to keep a schedule.
- September 1877Canals and Dreamers
Schiaparelli draws the canali
Schiaparelli mapped Mars through the 1877 opposition and crossed it with fine dark lines he called canali — channels. English made them canals, and the word did the rest.
- 1898Canals and Dreamers
Wells invents the hostile Martian
Wells's Martians land near Woking, burn Surrey with a heat-ray, and die of bacteria. The invading alien enters the culture and never leaves it.
- 1908Canals and Dreamers
Bogdanov puts a communist utopia on Mars
Lenin's rival inside the Bolshevik party wrote a Mars that is already communist, running out of raw material, and debating whether to take Earth and remove the humans.
- 25 July 1976First Contact
A mesa in Cydonia looks like a face
Viking 1 orbiter frame 35A72 caught a mesa a kilometre and a half across under a low sun. The shadows read as eyes, nose and mouth, and the argument ran for 25 years.