Marooned on Mars

Tomorrow’s World

Most of us will live to see pictures of the Moon—pictures taken by men who actually walked on the surface of that round ball in the sky! Twenty years ago, a rocket weighing a few pounds could travel a few hundred feet at most; now, rockets weighing a few tons travel several hundred miles. From that it is only a short step to building rockets that weigh hundreds of tons and can travel 239,000 miles to the Moon. This will be in the world of tomorrow!

Rocket-driven ships, of course, can travel where there is no air. We know that by actual proof; the less air around a rocket, the better it performs. We also know a great deal about how the ship must be designed and what will be found on the airless Moon when we get there. We’ve never seen the other side of the Moon, but we can be sure it’s about the same as the side we do see. We can even guess how the Moon will prove useful, scientifically and commercially. We will probably establish a permanent base there, even though it will be incredibly expensive.

From there, we will move on. Once we’ve learned the secrets of the Moon and how to build even better rocket ships, we’ll look toward the other planets—Mars, Venus, and the moons around Jupiter.

Mars will probably be the first planet explored. Venus is nearer, but Mars has always aroused more interest Unlike the Moon, Mars seems to have air, water, and life! In our telescopes, we’ve seen the icecaps around the poles melt with the coming of spring, and we’ve noticed that the red planet then begins to turn green. In the fall, this green turns to the shades of autumn leaves on Earth, behaving as if it were living vegetation.

We don’t know whether there is animal life there. Bat it seems possible that the same conditions which produced plant life may also have produced animals of some sort, just as such conditions produced both plants and animals on Earth. There may be some form of strange insect life, for instance, or moving, crawling life of a type we can’t imagine—but we can’t know without going there. We can’t even say that intelligent life is impossible.

Once, some scientists believed there was proof of intelligence on Mars. A lot of speculation was given to the mysterious “canals” of the planet (though the word “canals” is a bad translation of the Italian canal, which means “channels”). These can be seen as straight lines on a map of Mars, crisscrossing the surface. Unfortunately, we still don’t know much about them. We don’t even know they really are so straight, or that many of them aren’t simply tricks played on the tired eyes of the observers.

For a long time it was believed that they were great trenches, dug by the Martians—and that would have indicated a high degree of intelligence there. Then doubts began to grow. Photographs didn’t show them, and the later, bigger telescopes showed them less plainly than the smaller ones. Some people, in fact, never had been able to see them. Hence, a few years ago, science began to believe that there were no canals after all.

Today, this has changed. The latest photographs show some of them as mere fuzzy markings, hard to trace, but definitely there. Some of them seem to come and go; old ones disappear and new ones appear from time to time; modern maps don’t entirely agree with those made half a century ago. But the markings on Mars are real, even though there isn’t enough water on the whole planet to nil such “canals.”

We still know very little about them. They may be evidence of intelligence, but certainly no intelligent life on Mars can have reached our stage of civilization. The thin air—thinner than the air” on top of the highest mountain on Earth—would make fire impossible. Without fire, men would never have come out of the caves to begin smelting metals. Fire was man’s first great tool and metals his second; without such tools for a start, a high level of civilization wouldn’t have a chance. Probably the canals are only some natural phenomena which have nothing to do with intelligent life.

We can’t know for certain until we go there and see for ourselves. Since we’ve always been a highly curious form of life, we’ll make the long trip there to find the answers at the earliest possible moment.

This is an account of such-a first trip as it might be made. The technical details are generally accurate and nothing here is really fantastic. We can already write about such a voyage across millions of miles of space without the need of too much wild imagination. When the accounts of the first real trip are made, sometime in the future, we can be sure they will read something like this fictional one. And it doubtless will be much sooner than many of us imagine.