Most of Barsoom, he wrote, was instead covered by moss that grew in the dead sea bottoms that stretched across the planet. Incredible new images shared by Perseverance rover after Mars landingīurroughs’s Mars was very much like our Earth, with all its struggles for power and wealth, and Burroughs had a good explanation for why the planet had no evident water on the surface: Its inhabitants had diverted it to underground waterways, to protect it from evaporation and hide it from one another. This shot from a camera on Perservance's' "jetpack" captures the rover in midair, just before its wheels touched down. When Carter traveled there in the second volume, “The Gods of Mars” (1914), he encountered this watery scene: “To my left the sea extended as far as the eye could reach, before me only a vague, dim line indicated its further shore, while at my right a mighty river, broad, placid and majestic, flowed between the scarlet banks to empty into the quiet sea before me.” Popular culture soon caught up to that science, especially through the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter novels imagined that a time portal connected Earth and “Barsoom,” or Mars, allowing easy movement between the two. Percival Lowell, an Arizona-based astronomer, did Schiaparelli better around 1895, believing that he could make out an elaborate irrigation system that required an advanced civilization to build. Schiaparelli believed that he could detect oceans on the planet’s surface, as well as canals that, he supposed, were made by beings with knowledge of engineering. It can be traced to the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who mapped the planet in 1877 and bestowed on its regions aspirational names such as Elysium, Eden and Utopia. The widespread presupposition that there is life on Mars is fairly recent. Much of our popular literature and films about Mars, such as “War of the Worlds,” “Invaders from Mars,” and “Mars Attacks!,” has supposed that there is life on the red planet - but life that is markedly hostile to ours and out to get us. And for as long as humans have been around, we have been fascinated by Mars, and more than a little fearful of it, too. Miraculously, Earth did survive, allowing life - and eventually, our kind - to evolve. It is remarkable and supremely unlikely that our planet survived the intense violence of the early solar system, though not without its dings: After all, one prominent theory holds, it was a collision with a body about the size of Mars that knocked the chunk of real estate called the Moon into our sky. So it is with the stars, the planets - with everything in the universe: The odds are always with nothingness and annihilation, and always against existence. Mars has always captured our imagination in books and film
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