Free Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov Page B

canal-building civilization.
    By far the most influential astronomer who supported the notion of a Martian civilization was the American Percival Lowell (1855–1916). He was a member of an aristocratic Boston family and he used his wealth to build a private observatory in Arizona, where the mile-high dry desert air and the remoteness from city lights made the visibility excellent. The Lowell Observatory was opened in 1894.
    For fifteen years, Lowell avidly studied Mars, taking thousands of photographs of it. He saw many more canals than Schiaparelli ever did, and he drew detailed pictures that eventually included over five hundred canals. He plotted the oases at which they met, recorded the fashion in which the individual lines of particular canals seemed to double at times, and studied the seasonal changes of light and dark that seemed to mark the ebb and flow of agriculture. He was completely convinced of the existence of an advanced civilization on Mars.
    Nor was Lowell bothered by the fact that other astronomers couldn’t see the canals as well as he. Lowell pointed out that no one had better seeing conditions than he had in Arizona, that his telescope was an excellent one, and that his eyes were equally excellent.
    In 1894, he published his first book on the subject,
Mars
. It was well written, clear enough for the general public, and it supported the notion of an ancient, slowly drying Mars; of a race of advanced engineers keeping the planet alive with gigantic irrigation projects; of canals marked out and made visible from Earth by the bands of vegetation on both borders.
    Lowell’s views were even more extreme in later books he published—
Mars and Its Canals
in 1906 and
Mars as the Abode of Life
in 1908. The general public found the whole thing exciting, for the thought of a nearby planet populated by an intelligence advanced beyond that of human beings was dramatic.
    Lowell’s role in making advanced Martian life popular was outpaced, however, by the English science fiction writer, H. G. Wells.
    In 1897, Wells published a novel,
War of the Worlds
, in serial form in a magazine, and the next year it appeared in book form. It combined the view of Mars as presented by Lowell with the situation as it had existed on Earth over the preceding twenty years.
    In those decades, the European powers—chiefly Great Britain and France, but including also Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, andBelgium—had been carving up Africa. Each nation established colonies with virtually no regard for the wishes of the people already living there. Since the Africans were dark skinned and had cultures that were not European, the Europeans considered them inferior, primitive, and barbarous, and felt they had no rights to their own territory.
    It occurred to Wells that if the Martians were as far advanced scientifically over Europeans as Europeans were over Africans, the Martians might well treat Europeans as Europeans treated Africans.
War of the Worlds
was the first tale of interplanetary warfare involving Earth.
    Until then, tales of visitors to Earth from outer space had pictured those visitors as peaceful observers. In Wells’s novel, however, the outsiders came with weapons. Fleeing a Mars on which they could barely keep alive, they arrived at lush, watery Earth and prepared to take over the planet to make a new home for themselves. Earth people were merely animals to them, creatures whom they could destroy and devour. Nor could human beings defeat the Martians or even seriously interfere with them, any more than the Africans could deal with the European armed forces. Though the Martians were defeated in the end, it was not by human beings, but by Earthly decay bacteria, which the Martians’ bodies were not equipped to resist.
    It proved a popular novel and set off a wave of imitations, so that for the next half-century human beings took it for granted that any invasion of extraterrestrial intelligence would lead to the extermination