The Man Who Wanted to Believe in Life on Mars

From there, things moved quickly. In the winter of 1895, Lowell returned to Boston, where he delivered four lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He proclaimed that “the telescope presents us with perhaps the most startling discovery of modern times—the so-called canals of Mars.” He urged that the canals were, in fact, evidence of a global irrigation system, designed to bring water to the planet’s inhabitants. He believed that the dark spots were probably settlements, where Martians grew crops. Lowell claimed that what he observed suggested a culture that was far older than our own, and also more advanced. “A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see—a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works.”

I am aware that this brief summary might suggest that Lowell’s lectures were wild or preposterous, and that the audience must have thought that he was deluded. But if you read his works in their original form, you will be in for a big surprise. Lowell speaks calmly and patiently. He seems painstaking. He offers some wise statements about belief, noting that “proof is nothing but preponderance of probability.” He offers an impressive number of details about Mars: its relative path around the sun as compared to that of Earth, the length of its year (686.98 days, he reports, compared to 365.26 days for Earth), its size (about 4,215 miles in diameter), its mass (10/94 that of Earth), its average density, and much more. On some of the central details, Lowell’s claims are identical, or nearly so, to current understandings. When Lowell gets to the supposed canals and to the apparent irrigation system, he veers back and forth between confidence, amazement, close attention to detail, and occasional caution. “The canals,” he reports, “are very remarkably attached to one another. Indeed, the manner with which they manage to combine undeviating direction with meetings by the way grows more and more marvelous, the more one studies it.”

Having read some of Lowell’s writings on Mars, I can report a dizzying feeling. Much of the time, the author seems to know exactly what he is talking about, only to disappear into a rabbit hole. If you read him, and then listen to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccines, you might see them as twins: intelligent, eloquent, learned, confident, fixated, charismatic, frequently charming, selling snake oil, and living in a fantasy land.