'John Carter' unveils astronomy's vanished view of Mars
— -- Warring aliens, imperiled princesses and parched desert canals, a vision of the Red Planet still lingering today.
And it will soon be in movie theaters, when John Carter opens this week. It marks a return to the swashbuckling view of Mars popularized a century ago by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs.
All of it is based on once cutting-edge astronomy looking at our planetary neighbor.
"The entire concept of the film is extrapolated from ideas astronomers had about canals on Mars," says John Carter director Andrew Stanton. "There was a certain romanticism in the early 1900's that made some willing to accept what we now know are misconceptions," Stanton says. "So we decided to just run with it in the film."
In magazine stories a century ago and in A Princess of Mars, published in 1917, Burroughs introduced the world to John Carter, a chivalrous fellow who awakens from a mystic cave on Mars, atop "a bed of yellowish, moss-like vegetation," thirsty and surrounded by quartz-laced hills. He proceeds to save a planet of canal-fed desert cities from the bad guys.
Burroughs' vision of Mars was directly borrowed from wealthy astronomer Percival Lowell, the founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., which is still operating today. "He sat looking through a telescope at night and sketched what he thought were canals," says observatory spokesman Chuck Wendt. "People on tours can still look through the same telescope and on many nights see what Lowell saw."
What Lowell saw didn't look too different from the Utah desert where John Carter was filmed. "We had to make a movie that felt as if it were written in 1911, when Mars was, in Lowell's view, run by a civilization running out of water, " says Stanton. "We went as far as getting the antiquated look of Percival Lowell's work in the title sequence."
What did Lowell see? "Not a dead but a living world," he wrote in his 1906 book, Mars And Its Canals, reporting seasonal fields of "vegetation" upon Mars. He got some things correct, noting dust storms on Mars and the waxing and waning of ice caps with the seasons. But other things were a little off:
•Lowell saw a "badge of blue ribbon" surrounding the melting ice caps on Mars, which could only be "water." We know from the Mars Phoenix Lander that Mars has ice in its poles, with its landing site boasting an ice layer perhaps 7 inches thick, but there's been no evidence of a blue sea in the shape of a ribbon.
• Mars had only low hills, in Lowell's view, based on dust storms obscuring the surface. Mars actually possesses the tallest mountain in the solar system, a defunct volcano Olympus Mons, some 14 miles high.
• Average temperatures were lower than Earth's, but still above the freezing point of water, in Lowell's estimate, and "frosts are unknown." NASA's Spirit rover has recorded -130 degree Fahrenheit temperatures in winter, and the planet's average temperature seems around -67 degrees.
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