Description
Humanity has been fascinated by Mars since ancient times, with its red color often symbolizing blood and war. By the 19th century, telescope optics became sufficiently powerful to begin observing large-scale details on Mars’s surface, and astronomers like Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell were convinced that they could see technological structures. When the first spacecraft arrived at Mars in the 1970s, images of a dry, heavily-cratered world shattered the illusion that Mars was an inhabited world; however, in the 50 years since the first Mariner spacecraft were beamed back to Earth, planetary scientists have significantly rehabilitated Mars’s lifeless image. Today, we know that Mars used to be much warmer and wetter in its distant past, and water is still present in frozen subsurface reservoirs. We will not find an ancient Martian civilization, but there is still a chance that Mars once hosted primitive life in its past, and it may the most adaptable world for humanity’s future.
