Benefactor and Fool

T HE Boston aristocrat Percival Lowell was a very great fool and at the same time an important benefactor. He made imaginary discoveries that inspired magnificent dreams. In the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which he himself built, he spent 15 years at the end of the 19th century observing Mars through a 24-inch telescope and making fantastic claims. He took thousands of photographs and drew many detailed pictures. He saw things on Mars that nobody had seen before or since. He observed a vast network of ``canals'', obviously artificial, more complex than the London Underground system, and clearly built by an advanced civilisation. He was not a hoaxer who invents data. He believed he saw what he claimed to see. He wanted to see these technological artifacts so badly that he imagined he had seen them. His observatory assistants also saw them. If they didn't they were sacked.

Marina Warner explains in an essay that this is a common way in which fantasists ``build vast castles of the mind on the sandiest foundations. Once Lowell had interpreted the changing colours of the Martian surface as changes in vegetation, it was `only rational' to think that sophisticated life also existed there. ``It followed that it would require water, hence the canals. Ergo an advanced civilisation had built them. What would Lowell have made of Cydonia and the `Face'? A similar join-the-dots approach leads to `proof' of the divine origin of the Turin Shroud. What some analysts see as random specks are clearly visible to others as traces of inscriptions from Roman coins.'' But many people believed Lowell's story–with important literary and technological consequences. One was H.G. Wells, whose 1898 novel The War of the Worlds described murderous Martian invaders of Earth. ``Across the gulf of space,'' Wells began, ``minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.'' Another, and much cruder novelist influenced by Lowell was Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame. He called Mars the planet Barsoom and filled it with swashbuckling armies and empires. Dashing heroes and beautiful princesses contended in romantic and bloodthirsty adventures against monsters, savages and power-mad Martian tyrants. These tales contained a lot of magic and hardly any science, but they were read by millions. Lowell's imaginary discoveries also inspired the pioneers of rocketry, such men as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth, without whom there would be no space travel. Carl Sagan once asked rhetorically: ``Why are there so many eager speculations and ardent fantasies about Martians, rather than Saturnians or Plutonians? Why does Mars have such an effect on humanity?'' The answer was the inspiring nonsense of Percival Lowell. When the spacecraft Mariner 4 passed Mars in 1965, its photographs revealed a barren desert without a canal in sight. It was, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, a ``cosmic fossil.'' But  Lowell's work has had its effect. Many people now want to colonise Mars. Even if it never had intelligent life, it jolly well ought to have some in the future.