Mars Close Up

Mars, the Red Planet named after the Roman god of war, is currently closer to the Earth than it’s been in 15 years, and the millions of people gazing at the bright red dot will once again be wondering, is there life out there?

Over the years, the answer has gone from an unconditional “yes” — a century ago Mars was often perceived as a teeming alien world crisscrossed by canals, with advanced creatures sending strong signals to Earth — to an equally certain “no”: Space missions reported an arid, rusty globe with a thin atmosphere that couldn’t sustain even a germ. The intriguing current answer is “maybe.” Scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission reported last week that their orbiting radars may have found a briny subterranean sea beneath a Martian ice cap, which could mean that some form of life once existed there. Or still exists.

A petri dish of Martian bacteria may not quite measure up to Ray Bradbury’s copper-colored creatures with telepathic skills (“The Martian Chronicles”), but it’s more than enough to sustain Mars as the most explored planet after Earth, with about 45 flybys, orbits and landings since the 1960s, and many to come.

It’s also certain to maintain Mars as the most explored celestial body in science fiction. Possibly in a reflection on us Earthlings, the Martians in many books and films appear as supersmart invaders. H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” prompted a panic in 1938 when many listeners mistook a radio version of the novel as a real report of an attack by aliens armed with ray guns.

In the interest of full disclosure, The New York Times had a front-page article on Sept. 2, 1921, in which a colleague of Guglielmo (then translated as William) Marconi, the pioneer of wireless transmission, reported that Signore Marconi was convinced he had intercepted Martian radio messages. The article contained no skepticism about that claim, nor about another by the same source saying the time was approaching when it would be possible to send photographs wirelessly across the Atlantic.

At least the vision described by J.H.C. Macbeth, the London manager of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd., was one of optimism. His “material-minded” friends, he said, were asking what might be the practical advantage of communicating with aliens. “I say that the result would be the advancement of scientific knowledge, science that has wrought such miracles in the past quarter of a century, by at least 200 years,” he said.

That is considerably cheerier than the vision of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who has said we need to get to Mars to preserve our species after we finish destroying our current planet.

Luckily, we don’t seem to need such extreme stimulus to continue exploring our red neighbor, and we’ll eventually get there through the same extraordinary curiosity and ingenuity that has fired exploration from the dawn of time. And we may even find some form of life, requiring, as The Times’s Dennis Overbye writes, “a kind of spiritual and intellectual reckoning.”

These are all things to ponder as we gaze at the red spot now a mere 35.8 million miles away. Don’t miss the chance — Mars won’t come any closer until 2035.

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