We're all Martians

by David Grand
August 21, 2003


I know what you're thinking. I must be hallucinating or spaced-out on something to come up with such a preposterous idea. Well, you're wrong on both counts, even though I admit to becoming a little more "spacey" in my old age. But not to the extent that I can no longer comprehend what's going-on around me or what I read.

And it's what I recently read in an article that led me to make that bold-face statement. In a theory advanced by Paul Davies, an internationally respected cosmologist and physicist, he theorized that Mars may have been able to support underground organisms more than 4 billion years ago- a time when Earth is believed to have been barren.

Because it's half the size of the Earth, he said it would've suffered fewer blows from asteroids and comets crashing into the surface; and that since its atmosphere is less dense, meteorites had an easier time being propelled into space by the force of rocks slamming on its surface. And that the discovery of meteorites on Earth that originated on Mars suggests living microbes could've hitched a ride here.

Now, I'm one whose never had the slightest interest in our solar system, the universe as a whole, or space exploration. (There's too much trouble on the Earth to look for more elsewhere.) And neither the launching of the Russian Sputnik in 1957 nor Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969 turned me on, although I got a laugh in seeing an astronaut hitting a golf ball longer than Tiger Wood could ever do.

But even so, I must say his theory that Mars was our original home cannot be automatically dismissed as so much poppycock, or that he's just another kooky scientist. After all, that's what they called Leonardo da Vinci for claiming the world wasn't flat. And as far as I know, he was right.

Not wanting to bore you, but here's some facts I dug up about Mars (the Roman's god of war for its reddish color), which tends to make it look like our sister planet:

  • Mars is wandering closer to us than it has in the last 60,000 years and six days from now there'll only be 34.6 million miles separating the planets (normally 49 million miles). And it' shines like a lighthouse beacon in the night sky, perhaps as a friendly greeting.
  • It has an atmosphere in which white clouds appear, has polar caps and seasons in its northern and southern hemispheres that last twice as long as Earth's, because it's farther from the sun and takes 687 Earth days to make one trip around it. (The Earth travels over a million and a half miles a day in its trip around the Sun, and would burst instantly into flame if it ever stopped. But not to worry, for as long as somebody keeps putting a quarter in the meter it'll keep turning.)
  • Unlike the other inner planets in the Milky Way galaxy, Mars and the Earth have moons, and theirs aren't made out of cheese, either.
  • About a hundred years ago, astronomers began seeing straight lines on Mars, with lines crisscrossing the planet in a network. They conjectured it was the work of intelligent beings, who'd dug canals to move water from melting ice caps to cropland near the equator, in order to buy time as Mars was slowly drying up. But according to evidence gathered in 1997 by Pathfinder and its robot rock hound, called Sojourner, those lines are the result of cataclysmic floods that deeply scoured the landscape in the distant past.
  • If scientists are right in thinking Mars has had (and still has) water, has it also had life? None was found by the Viking missions of 1976, or by the Pathfinder. But that doesn't prove there's never been life there, or that there isn't now, just because the Pathfinder's rover didn't encounter any green men or women, or a roadside stand selling Mars candy bars. And wouldn't our mountain climbers love to go there, for astronomers have identified a mountain that's three times the height of Mt. Everest.
  • By as early as 2011, NASA may launch the first crewed mission. It would take them six months to arrive, so they'd best take along a lot of reading material and games to play. And they'd better bundle-up before getting off, for it's colder than a banker's heart, dipping to 100 degrees below zero.
Of course, it's probably only a coincidence that the blackout, which disrupted the lives of 50 million people, occurred at the same time as Mars was hovering closer to Earth. But surely, the Martians hadn't caused the blackout as a warm-up before attacking us. They wouldn't do that to their distant relatives. Or would they?

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