Rather than true channels in a form familiar to us, we must imagine depressions in the soil that are not very deep, extended in a straight direction for thousands of miles, over a width of 100, 200 kilometers and maybe more. I have already pointed out that, in the absence of rain on Mars, these channels are probably the main mechanism by which the water (and with it organic life) can spread on the dry surface of the planet.Giovanni Schiaparelli, Life on Mars
The Google home page kindly informed me this morning that today was the birth date of Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910). This 19th-century astronomer's name may not be known to everyone, but generations of science fiction fans owe an enormous debt to Signore Schiaparelli - or, to be more accurate, to the mistranslation of his work.In 1877, Mars was in a particularly favourable position for observation, and Shiaparelli, at that point director of the Brera Observatory near Milan, took advantage of this opportunity to make detailed observations of the planet's surface. Using these observations and additional data from the next decade, he produced maps of Mars which remained the standard until space probes allowed for more accurate images.
But when Schiaparelli's work was translated into English, the Italian phrase "canali", intended to refer to the channels that he had observed, was translated as "canals" - creations of intelligence rather than environment. The debate regarding life on Mars that was started by this minor alteration was to continue for almost one hundred years, until Mariner 4 sent closeup pictures of Mars back to NASA in 1965.
Regardless of the position of the scientific community, the idea of vast canals spanning a desert planet resonated with the science fiction community. That was the Mars that I first read about when I started reading science fiction, a dying planet inhabited by the descendants of a fallen civilization older than our own, desperately fighting a losing battle against the ever advancing sands. This is the Mars of Planet Stories, the Mars of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, the Mars of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the Mars known as Barsoom to its inhabitants in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter novels.
However, Schiaparelli is more deserving of praise than the common translation error about canals would suggest. As he made his initial observations of the Martian surface, he began to name the various geographic features that he saw, and those names have left Schiaparelli with a lasting heritage.
Just as the broad flat plains of the Moon were commonly referred to as "seas", Schiaparelli used a similar convention for Martian names, giving us The Sea of Sirens, the Bay of the Dawn, and the Lake of the Sun. Other names came from mythology, the Bible, or history. But regardless of its origins, the geography of Mars has a sort of lyrical poetry to it: Tharsis, Chryse, Ophyr, Thyle, Cydonia, Elysium - they almost seem to have been chosen as locations for adventure and fantasy.
Current scientific theory has it that there may be no life at all on Mars, and science fiction authors have sadly and reluctantly moved on from tales of dying civilizations and fallen empires on our sister world. Now science fiction tends to look ahead to life on Mars as it would be lived by colonists from Earth, and, more ambitiously, to the prospect of terraforming Mars. Who knows, if technology can some day match imagination, a future generation of Mars-born humans may be able to stand on the shore of the Bay of the Dawn and see the sun glinting off the waves.
- Sid
P.S. In addition to reminding the world about Schiaparelli's birthday, Google has added a Mars option to Google Earth. (Thereby calling for a new name for the product, if you think about it.)
