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Welcome to Mars 1955; an alien
world in more ways than one.
Mars then was a very different
planet from the one we know today. The Red Planet wasn't
regarded as any sort of a garden spot. Water was rare, existing
only at the polar ice caps or in tiny lakes and streams. During
the night the temperature was supposed to be sub-arctic and at noon at
the equator in mid-summer it might, just might touch 70°
F on a really, really hot day. The air was thinner than that of
the top of Mount Everest, but a man who dressed up warm and wore an
oxygen mask could probably move around and work with no more
difficulty than an Antarctic explorer.
As for life,
the consensus by 1955 was that Mars was probably a dead world, with
emphasis on probably. However, "dead" meant something very
different back then. When we say dead in the 21st
century, we mean a planet so dry and so blasted by radiation that it
is utterly devoid of any form of life right down to and including
viruses now and forever into the past. In '55, dead meant that
there could still be mosses, lichens, primitive plants and maybe even
a few insects roaming about while the soil might hold anything up to
an including the ruins of a long-past Martian civilisation
Today, after forty years of
unmanned probes, we now know that Mars in 1955 was paradise in
comparison. The planet revealed by our machines is a horribly
cold world with a carbon dioxide atmosphere so thin that to us it
might as well be vacuum, yet is still thick enough to support
sandstorms that blast the entire planet with winds of hundreds of
miles per hour. Ultraviolet radiation beats down and turns the
very soil into a corrosive and though we argue about how much water
Mars had in the past, the day to day reality of Mars today is so dry
as to defy simile. In such a place, we don't hope for moss,
lichen, or insects. We'd be grateful for a fossil bacterium.
The past as another country
doesn't just apply to Earth. |
