Percival Lowell and the Canals of Mars

Percival Lowell was an American astronomer who was convinced that canals had been built by intelligent life on Mars.

He founded the Lowell Observatory in 1894 in my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona, and his life’s work led to the discovery of Pluto - 14 years after his death. From 1893 to 1908, Lowell studied Mars obsessively. He made detailed sketches of the appearance of the red planet, which bore markings that he perceived as canals on the surface. Lowell published three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). These books made popular the idea that these canals were evidence of intelligent life forms on Mars.

Lowell believed wholeheartedly that an anguished civilization had built the canals to tap Mars' polar ice caps, the last source of water on a planet in the death-throes of drought. Although this romantic idea appealed to the imagination of the masses, the scientific community remained skeptical. Lowell’s theory was eventually disproved in the 1960s by NASA's Mariner missions, which captured no images of canals. There was only a cratered Martian surface. A dead world, where nothing remained.

Today, the surface markings Lowell fervently believed were canals are regarded as nothing more than an optical illusion. I have always imagined Lowell with his head in his hands, surrounded by a confetti of torn papers that flutter like mangled moths. He was a man who believed wholeheartedly in a truth that no one around him could perceive. With his telescope pointed toward the sky, Lowell observed a planet warped through a strange wormhole of time and space.

The desolate place he saw was an Earth-to-come.