Life on Mars?

canals running across the Martian landscape. These canals, argued US scientist Percival Lowell, had been built by technologically advanced Martians to transport water from the poles to the equator of their drying world. 'Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed,' he argued. B The vision of an advanced culture trapped on a drying world was taken up by the British writer H.G. Wells in 1898 in his masterpiece The War of the Worlds, in which Earth is subjected to a pitiless invasion from a race of hideous Martians armed with poison gas and heat rays. Martians became synonymous with grotesque, threatening aliens, at least as far as the public was concerned. Scientists were more restrained, but still supported the idea that the planet might support relatively complex life forms. C Then, in the late 1960s, rocket science changed our image of Mars forever. The US Mariner probes swept past Mars and sent back pictures, not of a world covered in vegetation, as many scientists still expected, but of vistas of cratered, arid deserts. Finally, in 1975, two huge US probes settled on the Martian surface and began a series of experiments aimed at pinpointing, once and for all, the existence of air-breathing…