We are paying way too much attention to Mars, claimed an astronomer and scientist back in 1922, and we should turn our eyes to Venus instead.
Talk to Venus, Says Svante
Mars Is Dead; Try the Planet of Love, Is the Advice of a Prominent Swedish Astronomer
The planet Mars, an old dying world, is receiving altogether too much attention from earthly scientists these days and nights, while the up-and-coming young planet Venus is just waiting for a chance to know us better.
This is the conclusion of Professor Svante Arrhenius, Nobel prize winner and one of Europe’s foremost scientists and astronomers, who lectured here on the prospect of wheedling from the heavens the secrets of some of our celestial neighbors, and especially Mars, when that planet swings into closest proximity to the earth two years hence.
If scientists and long distant radio fans really want to communicate with some celestial neighbor, Professor Arrhenius said, they will not find Mars very cordial, for the old fellow is dead. He described as “fantastic” the belief that so called canals observed on the planet wreathe work of engineers and attributed them to earthquake fissures.
Venus, on the other hand, offers potential possibilities to the patient astronomer, Professor Arrhenius declared. At the expiration of a billion years he thought a flourishing colony of intelligent beings might be discovered on the bright little planet.
“When the earth is extinguished,” he concluded, “it will be Venus, queen of the heavens, that will take over the role as carrier of culture.”
Source: Grainger County news. (Rutledge, Tenn.), 17 May 1922.
