'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.
Easy to make fun of a guy a century ago. "He just didn't know a lot of what we know today. Astronomers are a lot more careful to verify things now," Wendt says. After all, Lowell was just following in the steps of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who named many of the features on Mars, including "canali," (he just meant thick lines, basically) which Lowell seemed to misintepret as "canals" in his observations.
Many academic astronomers of the time, of course, were far more skeptical, feuding with Lowell, who responded with criticism in his books. And it is worth noting that his observatory later served as the discovery place for Pluto, and in June will inaugurate a $53 million telescope in partnership with The Discovery Channel and Boston University. Both represent legacies besides Lowell's romantic vision of the Red Planet that last today.
"A dying planet losing its water, pretty much the standard 'War of the Worlds' picture of Mars for decades," Stanton says. It wasn't until 1965, when NASA's Ranger 4 mission flew over Mars and revealed a cratered, dry planet that a lot of ideas about lost cities and alien princesses faded. Later, NASA rovers found evidence of water in rock layers as the agency pursued its now familiar " follow the water" mantra of looking for vanished microbes (maybe) from the era billions of years ago when water last seems to have flowed on Mars.
Even today, NASA's goals are colored by Lowell's vision, notes exploration historian Michael Robinson of the University of Hartford (Conn.), where the ongoing debate about the future of NASA partly revolves around whether we should send astronauts to plant a flag on Mars someday. "A lot of our ideas about exploration are still with us from a century ago, or longer," Robinson says.
"Our movie is a fantasy where we return to the Mars of Percival Lowell's era," Stanton says. "I don't think his ideas ever really went away. I think it has moved beyond Mars," he adds, pointing to public fascination with the potential for life on "exoplanets" orbiting alien stars.
In the end, "we're just counting on a good story being a good story," Stanton says. "The whole fascination with Mars is something people have felt for a very long time."