Martian Canals“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that thi

Martian Canals“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”― H.G. Wells, The War of the WorldsThis is the story of how an optical illusion and the mis-translation of one word led to the Victorians believing there was life on Mars…In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli observed upon the surface of Mars an intricate network of what he called ‘canali.’ A quick Google translate will show that ‘canali’ translates to English as ‘channels,’ which infers something naturally occurring and is precisely what Schiaparelli hoped to describe. He made the above map of said ‘canali.’ For perspective, this is what Mars would have looked like through the type of telescope Schiaparelli would have had access to.However, people of the 19th century did not have Google translate and someone, somewhere, accidentally translated ‘canali’ to the more phonetically similar ‘canals’ and canals being man-made structures here on Earth, the assumption was made that only sentient beings could have created them on Mars.Word spread, eventually reaching American astronomer Percival Lowell who was so beguiled by the idea of martian-made canals on Mars, and so convinced of their existence, that he dedicated fifteen years of his life studying them. He wrote extensively of the ‘non-natural features’ and published three books on the subject hypothesising that the canals had been built by a desperate race on a dying planet. Like Schiaparelli, Lowell mapped the supposed canals:Though the theory remained popular even throughout the earlier twentieth century, and likely inspired some of the greatest science-fiction writing, the claims of Schiaparelli and Lowell were met with skepticism from many in the astronomical community who swore they could not see anything on Mars’s surface. As technological advancements allowed for more powerful telescopes the veracity of the claims became increasingly unlikely. The theory was categorically disproved by NASA’s Mariner missions in the 1960s which photographed the surface of Mars and captured no canals. It is most likely that the canals were some strange optical illusion. -- source link

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