Episode Nine: Martians

 Episode summary: Is there life on Mars? Do we take a look at the law man beating up the wrong guy? Is this film a saddening bore? Were there any sailors fighting in the dance hall?

Bike summary: 2.3 miles 118.8 calories

And God said, let there be Nimoy. 

This episode opens with a 1970s understanding of the evolution of the solar system and rocky planets. It's a lot of lava for some reason. I guess film of the Sun was in its infancy. It's like Nimoy's Genesis, especially when he says things like "The planets were the cinders left by the cosmic holocaust". The writing of this show frequently veers into attempts to be poetic and ends up as purple prose, but it's never dull or banal. It's hard to imagine any show today being writen with such aspiration, especially in this genre. Maybe that's why it's survived to be rebroadcast on the History Channel and sold on DVD -- you can't even get all of America's Castles on DVD. 

Then we get a bit of a taste of the history of cinema, as we're shown a lot of Georges Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune because the idea of extraterrestials would have been completely unfamiliar to viewers in 1977. Then we get Percival Lowell and the canals he saw (he may have been seeing the blood vessels in his eyes). He believed that Mars once had oceans and that Earth might lose its. 

But then we go to the Viking missions, that landed probes on Mars and analyzed some soil (I think it's technically regolith like on the Moon) and rocks, as well as taking photographs. (It's astonishing -- this was just a few years after the last Moon landing and I'm sure a lot of people thought Viking was preliminary to a manned mission to Mars, instead of 44 years after this episode aired and we're doing cool things like flying helicopters there, but have yet to set foot on it.)

Nimoy says that the analyses done by Viking show that Mars was once like Earth, before an ice age and dessication. As we know, we were not on the cusp of a new ice age. There was (and is) desertification, but much of it is due to human activity, not some pre-ordained water loss. 

The thing that really amazed me about this episode was that they didn't talk about the Face! 

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake pointed out that this episode doesn't mention War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars books, or theosophy, which all influenced each other and were influenced by Lowell's observations of Mars. They also point out that the episode doesn't talk about Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who first observed what he called canali or channels on Mars. 

But the idea of Mars as a dying planet was fueled by a marriage of Lowell's canals to 19th century ideas on evolution and Darwinism. Everything "evolved" -- "races", nations, civilizations and even planets. But it wasn't really scientific evolution, it was more like Star Trek evolution (and, unsurprisingly, bad sci fi traces its tropes back here) with "evolutionary levels", inevitable transformations and predictable endpoints (for a good example, see the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin"; relatedly, I once read an anthology of so-called Golden Age science fiction that opened with such a story from very early in the genre's history and a note by editor Isacc Asimov that in the late 30s or early 40s he submitted such a story to John Campbell, who rejected it for being cliched and unscientific).

It led into the same kind of thinking that we got in the Mummy's Curse -- there are all these ancient civilizations on earth that declined into decadence and were taken over by Europeans, eventually European civilization will also decline. And therefore Mars would be advanced in planetary and social evolution, so it would be inhabited by "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic".

From there they talked about "spacebro culture" and the idea of terraforming Mars, which they rejected, since there's no air or water (there's also no magnetic field and not much atmosphere, but I don't think they make sunscreen with high enough spf). They also pointed out that a lot of the questions asked by the makers of Viking still haven't been resolved, although the consensus today is that Mars did once have liquid water on the surface. 

They also discussed the meteorite found in Antarctica that was believed to show evidence of microfossils, ALH84001, and talked about the panspermia hypothesis, which they said wasn't impossible but just puts off the big question, so it seems pointless. To that I say it's turtles all the way down.