Filed under
life
7 milestones, in chronological order.
- 1894Canals and Dreamers
Lowell builds an observatory to prove Mars is alive
A wealthy Bostonian put a telescope on a 7,200-foot ridge in Arizona to map a Martian irrigation network. The work was meticulous and entirely wrong.
- 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.
- July – September 1976First Contact
The Viking biology results that never settled
One of Viking's three biology experiments came back positive at both landing sites. The gas chromatograph found no organic molecules at all, and the argument has never closed.
- 7 August 1996The Rover Decades
A Martian meteorite is said to hold fossils
Bill Clinton stood in front of the cameras for a 1.9 kg rock from Antarctica. Within five years every line of evidence for Martian microbes had a non-biological answer.
- 12 March 2013Follow the Water
Gale Crater held a lake you could have drunk from
Curiosity's first drill hole, 6.4 cm into a mudstone called John Klein, produced clay, sulfur and nitrogen — and an ancient lake of fresh, neutral water.
- July 2024The Present Push
Leopard spots in a Martian mudstone
Perseverance drilled a rock ringed with vivianite and greigite. On Earth microbes make those minerals; on Mars nobody has yet found a plain chemical route that fits.