As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. It seemed, however, to be a world without life. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert. Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue – Nirgal, Mangala, Auqàkuh, Harmakhis – they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before.

It seemed to be saying something with all that.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had. There were no witnesses – except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened.

Red mars author