# Mars in 18th Century



## lwhitehead (Jul 5, 2020)

Hi folks first off I would like to thank for the help so far on this forum, and sorry for my long replies to the postings now onto what research I need.


18th Century Mars



I need to know what Mars looks like in the 18th Century, it's not until the 19th Century Martians appear in fiction. I need to create Two Races of Mars for the 18th Century and both Races Culture.

The First is based on Wellsian Martians, Second Race is elvish in nature like in Space 1889 but there culture isn't based on Egyptian.

Also in the 19th Century the Martian Canal theory was created,

LW


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## Xander416 (Jul 7, 2020)

I don't imagine it would have looked significantly different than it does today.


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## luckyscars (Jul 8, 2020)

The 18th century is the 1700's so I'm not sure how Space 1889 makes sense as that would be the nineteenth century. So is this the 1700's or the 1800's?

Regardless, it's sort of moot because the planet itself would likely not have been significantly different. 200/300 years is barely a blink on a planet's timeline, unless there is some kind of catastrophic event. Even Earth wasn't hugely different 300 years ago (the plates were much the same, the physical environment was much the same, biology was much the same) and to the extent that major differences do exist since then it is only because of human activity. Since you have fictional 'races' which are known not to exist on Mars, you can imagine what you want.


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## bdcharles (Jul 8, 2020)

If you mean what Mars looked like to humans, then to me the way to look at it would be to see what was going on on earth at that time. There was lots of social reform and in Britain it was the Georgian period. Asylums had been created recently so that's something you could look at. The notion of asylum inmates pointing at Mars and making claims about there being people up there is pretty compelling, to me. Malthusianism was a new concept, so again, something to explore there.

If you mean from the Martians' point of view, then much depends on their evolutionary timeline. They might be millennia ahead of us or millennia behind. It's your call really. Depends what you feel like doing.


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## Xander416 (Jul 12, 2020)

Biro said:


> On Mars.....Perhaps its been the same for millions of years or maybe there was a thriving life on it in between what the ancient Greeks etc knew and when we first had telescopes in the past few hundred years.


No, there wasn't. We would have found traces of it by now if there had been life on Mars that recently.


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## Xander416 (Jul 13, 2020)

Biro said:


> Not really there could have been a number of things which could have wiped all life devastatingly from the planet.  A huge collision causing a burning inferno etc.


We have skeletons from 65+ million years ago that survived a huge collision which caused burning infernos all over the planet.


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## Xander416 (Jul 18, 2020)

Biro said:


> You mean fossils?
> 
> Have we been digging for such on Mars yet?


No, but we do have rovers up there taking and testing soil samples which would have revealed evidence of bacterial life if there had been any in recent history (and you can't have little green men without bacteria for them to evolve from). The oldest known bacteria found on earth is around 200 million years old.


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## CyberWar (Jul 18, 2020)

I understand that the OP's question was more about how people in the 18th century perceived and imagined Mars. To my knowledge, most folks at the time outside academic circles did not really think much of anything about Mars. For one, information was nowhere near as available as it is today, or even as it was 100 years ago. This meant that while scholars and people with a working knowledge of astronomy were aware that Mars was a planet, for the average person it was just "that reddish star over there" that they neither knew anything about nor really cared to. In short, literacy, let alone some knowledge of astronomy, was far from commonplace at the time, so there was no "science fiction" pertaining to Mars as we understand it.

That said, learned folk of the time did occasionally speculate about the possibility of life on other planets including Mars, and the general consensus was that there probably was advanced life with sapient beings on other worlds. However, without any means to prove or disprove it, debates about alien life remained pure speculation until much later, and few scholars gave it much thought as such. It was only at the end of 19th century that Mars would attract some interest from a broader public and fiction writers, one of the first works pertaining to Mars and a Martian civilization being C. Flammarion's _Uranie _in 1889.

Of the Solar system's bodies, the likeliest candidate for advanced life was ironically long thought to be Venus. Science fiction from 1950's and 1960's oft features Venus as a lush tropical jungle world, until this notion was eventually dispelled by the Venera missions.


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## Xander416 (Jul 19, 2020)

Biro said:


> Thats if little green men were made of same stuff we are.  If they arent then you have no idea what is out there.
> 
> Strong radiation can kill anything and thats as far as we know.  We dont know what else is out there because we simply havent met it yet.
> 
> Every heard the famous quote............"It's life Jim.  But not as we know it".


Until we find a clear-cut case of life "not as we know it", how can you postulate that it's even life to begin with? It's all a matter of having a control mechanism to test it against and carbon-based life is the only one we have. Plus, Mars is made of the same bits and pieces as earth, so it stands to reason any Martian life would be carbon-based, too.


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## JJBuchholz (Jul 19, 2020)

Xander416 said:


> I don't imagine it would have looked significantly different than it does today.



Hasn't Mars looked the same for thousands of years at this point?

I'm confused at what difference a century or two will make on a planet that is a giant dust bowl.

-JJB


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## Turnbull (Jul 20, 2020)

As late as the 1950s, Mars was  a big fat unknown.  At least to judge by CS Lewis' space trilogy.  In his first book, Out of the Silent Planet, he portrayed Mars as a planet where aliens lived in lush ditches carved out by the Mars Oyarsa (sort of like planetary god) while the mountains were sterile and only one species went up there for any length of time.  In Perelandra, Venus was the aforementioned jungle world, except with a lot of water and basically every bit of land mass was an island.

So, it would seem that the major impression of each planet comes from what it looks like on the surface, due to seeing these planets by telescope (ravines on Mars, swirling cloud cover on Venus).

I wish I knew more earlier sci fi for you.  I think you're just gonna have to look in public domain for old space sci fi.  From the Earth to the Moon by HG Wells might contain some hypothesis about Mars, but even if it doesn't, Wells or his contemporaries might have written something useful.


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## Xander416 (Jul 21, 2020)

Biro said:


> If you only use 'what you know' to justify anything, then you will never think out of the box.
> 
> If as you say life is based from only and made of the bits and pieces of what is found on the earth.  But every day we are finding new forms of life alive and extinct on the planet which we thought couldn't have existed before.
> 
> ...


I'm not dismissing anything, just stating established facts. All of these lifeforms you speak of are _carbon-based_, none are life "not as we know it." They aren't energy beings or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that until we have a clear-cut case of such life to measure against, we only have carbon-based life with which to do so. Just like how we had no inkling of infrared or radar before they were discovered and couldn't use GPS before it was invented. And if there had been any recent _complex_ life there, wouldn't there be some signs? Like fossils or even ruins of a civilization? Mars has very little geological activity unlike Earth which is reshaping itself pretty much on a daily basis, so it would take millions or even billions of years to cover it all up.


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## bdcharles (Jul 21, 2020)

Xander416 said:


> I'm not dismissing anything, just stating established facts.



Meh. Facts, schmacts. Give me neck-chopping laser mounted antigrav kung fu ninja assassin mind control bebop dancers from the planet Zog.


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## Terry D (Jul 21, 2020)

Biro said:


> If you only use 'what you know' to justify anything, then you will never think out of the box.
> 
> If as you say life is based from only and made of the bits and pieces of what is found on the earth.  But every day we are finding new forms of life alive and extinct on the planet which we thought couldn't have existed before.
> 
> ...



Biologists knew that some animals used high-frequency sound (sonar, not radar) for echo-location long before sonar was ever invented.

It was also known that some animals, and plants, used infrared light (heat) to target prey or adjust to their environment long before 'heat seeking' technology was invented.

No animals use GPS for navigation (except humans). It has been know for many years before GPS that birds use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation.

In many cases it was an understanding of the biology which lead to the development of the technology (like sonar and heavier than air flight). 

The 'evidence' of a higher intelligence you write about is nothing but wishful thinking. Cave drawing, or hieroglyphs of odd-looking creatures are not evidence of anything except people looking for support for concepts they have no real proof of. Just as we writers create fantastic creatures from our imagination, so too might our ancestors have done the same thing. That's far more likely than extraterrestrial visitations, but not near as fun, so people try to use these random bits of 'evidence' to create a story they would like to believe.

To accept anything for which you have no proof -- particularly when it flies in the face of physics -- is truly foolish.


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