Obsession and reality
David Baron's The Martians is an engrossing story of speculation and obsession about life on Mars
For eons, Mars has captivated watchers from afar, and we've often imagined what Martian life would be like and wondered if it did harbor life at some point. In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a widespread belief that not only was there life on the red planet but that it was home to a vibrant, intelligent civilization.
David Baron's latest history is an examination of that period: The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-Of-The-Century America is an engrossing and gripping story of obsession and speculation that entranced the nation for a brief period, with echoes and lessons that we can learn from in 2025.
Scientists and philosophers have long speculated about the nature of life on other worlds, and in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made what appeared to be a ground-shaking discovery: as he conducted a series of observations of Mars, he created detailed illustrations of its surface features, including a series of lines that he called canali – channels – which was reported out in English publications a couple of years later as "canals."
Andrew Liptak
Thumbnail histories of Mars often treat this discovery as a sort of first order logic: Schiaparelli's "canals" led to a belief that Mars was home to alien life, but Baron notes that wasn't quite the case. Other astronomers made similar observations, but weren't sure what to make of them, but didn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that they were artificial in nature. As one California observatory director wrote, "every true astronomer has been very sorry to see all this haberdash that some of the newspapers have been printing about Mars being inhabited and our seeing canals on the surface and all that other rot and nonsense."
But they did raise new questions about the nature of the planet and gave space for some wild speculation. At the time, science as a field was in something of a transition: men of means were often at the forefront of their respective topics, and approached their collections and observations with more enthusiasm than expertise, often putting them at odds with their more professional counterparts as those fields matured.
It's in this intersection that the belief that Mars was inhabited took hold: Baron follows the story of Percival Lowell, a Boston-born businessman from Boston who developed a keen interest in astronomy. In 1892, he set up the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona and used it to further his own obsession with his own study of Mars and its canals.
What followed was a fascinating episode in the history of science. Fueled by a media environment that relied on breathless sensationalism and which played fast and loose with the facts, Lowell and others rallied behind the belief that Mars was inhabited and speculated wildly about what that life might look like and how we might contact them.
Their fervent belief was underpinned by their observations of lines that they were seeing on the planet's surface, and pointed to their shifting nature as proof that something was moving them. They worked to figure out the nature of the people who could be building them, making educated guesses about how the Martian temperatures might have guided their biology and culture, spinning out wild theories that left their impressions on authors ranging from H.G. Wells to Ray Bradbury.
The Martian craze fizzled out relatively quickly. Lowell and his adherents drew the ire of many in the rapidly-professionalizing field of astronomy. As Mars made itself available for viewing, they conducted their own observations and experiments. They began to utilize more powerful telescopes and incorporate photography, they found that the "canals" that Schiaparelli, Lowell, and others were observing were the product of an optical illusion: their low-resolution telescopes tricked their viewer into seeing lines from fields of spots.
These observations yielded better alternatives: the structures that they thought might be moving were really the product of changing surface features like sifting sands and ridgelines, or natural features like canyons. Additional studies provided more evidence that Mars couldn't host intelligent life: the place was too cold, too dry, and too airless.
Yet, Baron explains, Lowell was stubborn in his beliefs, pushing back hard on critics who picked away at his arguments, and even doubled down on his ideas.
Towards the end of his book, Baron makes an interesting observation: throughout history, we've often had moments where we collectively believe something that isn't true: "we all comprehend the world through concentric layers of trust. No single individual can master every domain of knowledge, so we must rely on others to shape our own ideas of what is right, what is factual," and that "mass delusions require no hoax to begin, no spur of greed to accelerate."
In many cases, people believe what they believe because they want to believe, and that that desire can help them move past inconvenient facts, whether the practice of alchemy, the next promised technological revolution, that there's life on Mars, or that vaccines cause autism. In his epilogue, Baron writes "I thought I set out to a story of human folly, about how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing things simply because we wish them to be true. That is, of course, one lesson of the tale, but I discovered another, perhaps more powerful, takeaway: Human imagination is a force so potent that it can change what is true."
Lowell believed that there was life on Mars because he wanted to believe; a belief that was reinforced by fame and adoration from a public that looked to him for knowledge. That's a powerful drug, and a good motivation to be skeptical of alternative ideas. In many ways, Lowell wasn't driven by a science outlook on the world – he wouldn't and couldn't accept alternatives to his theories, even as belief in Martians waned as the scientific community provided more rational and fact-based alternatives.
This book comes at a curious time: just earlier this week, we witnessed a press conference from the Trump administration in which the president told the American public that pregnant women shouldn't take Tylenol, saying that it was a factor in the rising autism rates in the country – a belief that has largely been discredited.
Baron doesn't link the modern cesspool of online conspiracy theories to Lowell's belief in life on Mars, but there are parallels. Both situations emerge out of rampant, half-formed speculation that rests on arguments that can feel plausible. Lowell, he notes, wasn't out to trick the public: he really did believe that Mars was home to aliens. But that belief was wrapped up in the rush of celebrity, Lowell's own troubles with what appears to be bipolar disorder, and a personality and upbringing that left him no small amount of insecurity.
The elements that helped shape Lowell's environment still exist a century and a half later: people cling to fringe ideas, whether we've been visited by intelligent life, that the Earth is flat, that school shootings are orchestrated, that there are secretive organizations ruling the planet, and so forth, often pushed along by not only malevolent actors, but by people who really do believe in those realities and who can't back down from them because of the communities that they're part of out of not wanting to be seen as a fool, as well as a media ecosystem that's more than willing to bend the truth for clicks.
It feels very much like the mindset that drove Lowell drives many of our policymakers and their followers: they've accepted a version of reality that they really want to believe, and thus believe it, even as there are plenty of facts and studies that contradict them and their worldviews.
Baron shows that Lowell and others believed in their theories because of what their eyes told them, but they didn't consider whether or not what they were seeing could be inaccurate. But while they clung to those beliefs, they were eventually overcome by reality itself. They might have burrowed in or at times put their heads in the sand, but the truth – that Mars wasn't inhabited by an intelligent civilization – became clearer and clearer as technology made it easier to observe the place.
That process is still ongoing: while scientists might have disproven the existence of a network of Martian canals, each new probe and lander brings new discoveries every day, including the best indication of life yet, in the form of potential fossilized biosignatures. It might not be the vast civilization that Lowell envisioned, but I have a feeling that it's a discovery that he would have been pleased to learn about. Hopefully, the same thing will happen in our lifetimes: that truth and facts about the world around us will slowly grind away the misinformation and beliefs, leaving us with a clearer picture of the world.