Hi everyone. It’s Elizabeth, and I am taking a momentary break from our dark and depressing past. For a bit of fun, I went to the newspaper archives and did a search on Martians, and whoosh. I found some seriously crazy articles published in the early half of the 20th century.
Let’s take a look at an article titled Do the People on Mars Look Like This? This article was originally published in The Washington Times on November 23, 1919. That is 100 years ago – give or take, depending on when you read this article.
Do the People on Mars Look Like This?
By H. Gernsback
In our planetary system there are probably only three planets now capable of bearing organized life. They are the earth, Venus, and Mars. It has been shown conclusively that the major planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, are all still in a plastic or molten state. And life as we know it cannot exist on a planet whose surface has not as yet cooled to a firm crust, and whose temperature is far above the boiling point of water.
These large planets are still in their early childhood, while the earth may be termed in its “teens,” it being a few steps ahead of the evolution of the major planets. Venus is probably abreast of the earth’s progress, or perhaps just a step behind us.
We know very little about Venus because no human being has ever seen its surface. It is constantly enshrouded in vast masses of clouds, making it impossible to see the land or oceans. Being twenty-five million miles nearer to the sun than our earth, it received twice as much heat. This gives rise to a much greater amount of evaporation – hence the constant clouding.
We may be sure, however, that organized life exists on Venus. Where there are water and clouds, which must give Venus a similar atmosphere to our own, organized life must exist without a shade of a doubt.
But now what of Mars, that interesting planet with which scientists dream of some day communicating?
Being much smaller, Mars cooled down hundreds of thousands of years before the earth did. If the earth is in its teens, Mars is well along in the eighties. And organized life there must have begun eons before it did here.
To form any adequate conception of what life on Mars is like, we must first understand the conditions under which it exists – conditions radically different from those under which we on this earth live.
Our telescopes reveal a very great scarcity of atmosphere on Mars. We know this from the exceedingly rare cloud formations. The air is so thin there that a man suddenly transported from the earth to Mars would suffocate in a few minutes. And Mars is losing its atmosphere into space much quicker than the earth because of its lower gratification.
One terrestrial pound weighs only about a third of a pound on Mars. Therefore Mars does not hold down its air as strongly as is the case on earth, and the air escapes more quickly into the outer space. While this process is slow, requiring millions of years, it is steady and inexorable.
The accompanying diagrams, reproduced from a recent issue of the Electrical Experimenter, show the wide difference in the amount of gravitational pull found beneath the earth’s surface and on Mars and Eros.
If you were to descend a shaft drilled right through the center of the earth you would steadily lose weight until you reached the earth’s center, where you would weigh nothing at all.
An average American living on Mars would be able to lift and carry about with ease a safe weighing 564 pounds, and on Eros he would actually be able to lift a big locomotive weighing 262,200 pounds.
But to return to the conditions life has to face on Mars. Scant air, as every aviator knows, lowers the temperature. How much colder is it then on Mars with an atmosphere thinner than an aviator ever breathed on earth? Also, it must be remembered that Mars if forty-eight million miles further away from the sun than the earth, and that on this account alone it received but half the heat we do.
Bearing these facts in mind, what sort of life does Mars support? How has nature accustomed the Martian to his changing environment down through the tens of thousands of centuries of his history? Is he a biped or a quadruped? Is he a mammal or a highly cultured fish or a sort of thinking bird? We don’t know. We can only speculate.
Nature always does the surprising and bizarre thing – if you don’t think so look at a devil fish or a giraffe or a chameleon or a bat. Any one of them could have been equipped with a human brain had nature thought it expedient. But for some reason they were not. On the other hand, ants and bees probably “think” – perhaps better than we do. Contrawise, if they do, they probably think that all of our acts are due to “instinct.” In their way they are probably right. It depends only upon the point of view.
But given like conditions evolution will progress alike in widely separated spheres.
Following this line of reasoning – and the writer admits it may be all wrong – there is a strong chance that the Martian has developed in a manner similar to that of man on earth. As a matter of fact, the chances are greatly in its favor. If we grant this truth, it should be easy to form a mental picture of the Martian under his present unfavorable conditions upon his planet.
To begin with, the Martian race, millions of years older than the terrestrial, must have advanced tremendously. The Martian’s head, due to his greatly developed brain, must be enormous. On account of the low gravitational force on Mars, where his body is pulled downward with only one-third of the weight as that on earth, the Martian must be of great height. He is at least ten or twelve feet tall. Geotropism on earth proves this amply.
To support such a tall body where gravity is so small, better footing is necessary, hence the big feet are required. The tremendously civilized Martian always rides or flies from place to place; his legs are thus almost useless, just like a stork’s, for instance – devoid of muscles, thin and sinewy.
Due to the very rare Martian atmosphere, the Martian’s chest must be enormous to accommodate the ponderous lungs which are necessary to supply air and oxygen to his large body. On the other hand, rare atmosphere conducts sound very poorly, hence large ears are required to catch the exceedingly weak sounds.
As already mentioned, due to the poor atmosphere, it is exceedingly cold on Mars, except at the equator. Even here it is freezing. Hence Martians are probably covered from head to foot with a white polar fur. A rare atmosphere conducts odors but poorly. We thus may expect the man on Mars to have an elephantine nose, which goes to the odor, as the odor can’t come to the Martian.
The Martian must certainly have stopped all bodily work millions of years ago; machines have done his work for ages. His arms thus are weak and thin. But the hands and eyes – the Martians most important organs – are used and worked constantly and therefore are developed to an undreamed of degree.
He probably has six or more fingers on his hands. Even on earth we have already six-fingered human beings.
His eyes probably can be extended from their sockets at the end of a sort of tentacle, the same as a snail’s. This gives the Martian a larger range of vision, without the trouble of moving his head about. As his food is all taken in highly concentrated form and as he cannot talk, the Martian’s mouth has shrunk to very small dimensions. Talking in a rarified atmosphere being almost impossible – for there are no sound waves in a vacuum – the Martian communicated by means of his telepathic organ, a sort of sensitive skin stretched between antler-like prominences on top of his huge head. This organ sends out the telepathic waves. The antlers protect the sensitive skin against blows.
This statement need not be ridiculed. Certain animals, such as our ants, have a highly developed telepathic organ. Students of ants know that the killing of one ant will be immediately sensed by others, although ten or more feet distant. And within a few seconds they will have arrived at the spot where the death occurred.
The possibility that Mars is inhabited by strange creatures like that pictured on this page is strengthened by the fact that in other parts of the universe life persists under the most extreme conditions imaginable. Certain species of fish may be frozen hard for days, and will revive after thawing out.
Thirty years ago it was strenuously denied that there could be living creatures at the bottom of the ocean, where such tremendous pressure exists, as well as intense cold. It was argued that no living thing could withstand such enormous pressure as 12,000 pounds to the square inch, or exist in the inky darkness of the ocean depths. But our deep sea expeditions brought up fish from these tremendous depths as signal proof that nature somehow manages to implant life in the most impossible places, under the most unfavorable conditions.
Life bearing spores have been frozen in a vacuum almost down to the absolute zero. They have been subjected to tremendous hydraulic pressures. Still life continued to be evident after the experiments. This led Svante Arrhenius to believe that such life-bearing spores propelled by the pressure exerted by the sunlight, may float through interstellar space – a vacuum where the temperature is 459 degrees Fahrenheit – till they are deposited upon a celestial body where, in a fertile soil, they are capable of rising to organized life from the lowest and most humble beginning.
The history of evolution throughout nature shows invariably that animal life is the direct product of its environment. In order to survive, nature equips each animal with the necessary organs best suited for its particular environment. Thus the caterpillar is colored green to match the color of the leaves on which he feasts. If he were red in color the birds would prey upon him sooner. The camel can go for weeks without water, there being none or little in the desert. Nature equipped the camel with certain organs so that he needs less water than other animals of his size. The elephant, due to his big size, found it difficult to drink water, which he likes, and needs. It was impractical to lengthen his huge head or neck, instead, his nose grew into a trunk which reaches down to the water, so that the elephant does not have to bend down on his knees.
This all goes to prove that nature, in its effort to accustom life to its environment, will develop the most astonishing and grotesque forms of animal physique and it makes the attempt to picture what the people of Mars are like a perfectly legitimate subject for scientific speculation. Such a being as has been described here is the sort of one Nature would find it necessary to develop in order to meet the peculiar conditions existing on Mars.
Some interesting comparisons given in a recent issue of the Electrical Experimenter help to make clear the wide difference between the conditions prevailing on Mars and the earth and show how certain it is that the Martian must be a very different sort of creature from man.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1919-11-23/ed-1/seq-30/
