Page Content (OCR)
20 Flammarion, writing of countless human like beings in space, called on us to greet our “sister humanities.” Despite such enthusiastic visions, a new climate of skeptical and rigorous inquiry began to discourage wild speculation about the existence of extra- terrestrial beings. Science removed the supports from early casual assump- tions about the existence of other minds, commented Isaac Asimov. The scientific view of the universe admitted only those phenomena that could be observed. As science found no evidence of other intelligences, Human- kind might stand alone.*° Not by its body, but by its mind, would it be known. Across the gulf of space it could be recognized only by the imprint it had made on the face of Mars. In the latter nineteenth century, the techniques of planetary observation still provided the best hope for detecting evidence of extraterrestrial life and intelligence. As improved telescopes showed the Moon to be a bleak, cratered world, the search moved outward to Mars—the only planet whose surface can be seen in any detail through telescopes on Earth. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described canali (channels) on the red planet. He speculated that these might be canals, the works of an alien civilization.** American astronomer Percival Lowell, stimulated by Schiaparelli’s observations and by Flammarion’s 1892 book Mars, began conducting his own astronomical studies in 1894. Like Schiaparelli, Lowell saw the canali as straight lines that could not be of natural origin. Concluding that they were canals bringing water from the Martian polar caps to drier terrain, he developed a powerful theory: Mars was an aging, drying planet whose inhabitants had been forced to use massive engineering works to save their civilization.” The plight of the Martians was a preview of our own future. As they had preceded us and were by implication an older and wiser species, Lowell expected the Martians to be more socially and politically advanced than we humans. Schiaparelli imagined collective socialism on Mars, a “paradise of societies.” Wars would be unknown; society’s efforts would be directed against the common enemy of “penurious nature.”*’ The extraterrestrial utopia was back, but in quite a different form. Lowell described his detection of an alien civilization as a second Copernican shock. The presence of Martians ousted us from any unique or self-centered position in the solar system. Humans were merely this A Belief in Other Minds Lowell, and Alien Invaders —Percival Lowell, 1908*”