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Mars has special intrigue. Only 40 million miles away, much farther than the moon and clearly visible in telescopes, Mars images yield polar caps and geologic features not unlike those on earth. Certainly people inhabit it. Such was common knowledge a century ago.

Check out a comparison of Earth and Mars.

Or check out the weather on our inhospitable neighbor.

In 1897 H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds and gave Earthlings the first glimpse of Martians. This novel beame probably the most famous of all radio broadcasts when Orson Welles produced the story on Halloween, 1938, with catastrophic results. TV viewers have since been bombarded with the series, War of the Worlds, a spinoff of the original movie made in 1953. Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame also created a series of novels about an Earthman who wished his way to Mars--Barsun in Martian--and adventured on the sands of Mars.

In 1976, Viking I landed on Mars and confirmed that Wells's, Welles's, Bradbury's details of the planet were more fanciful than true. Mars is frigid. A heat wave on the equator in summer might raise the temperature to freezing. Nights regularly reach 150 degrees below zero. The atmosphere is too thin to breathe without assistance. Winds race about the planet blowing surface sand at better than 300 mph. There is no standing water, let alone flowing canals. Life, of any kind, seems non-existent. In contrast to Bradbury, Mars is not a place that could be a second Earth without grave hardship tending to the impossible.

This is the main link to JPL's Mars web site.

An Earthling invasion of Mars is not possible unless some drastic changes occur. Mars must be made like Earth (terraformed is the process). Before the planet can become hospitable to Earthlings, it must have running water, plants, animals, and the ability to grow what we need. There are ways to do this. The polar ice caps could be seeded with plants that grow well in the cold. They would release oxygen into the atmosphere and thicken the air which would make the planet warmer--a greenhouse effect. In time the planet might be made like Earth; now at the best of times, it is a little like Antarctica at its most hospitable.

On this link you can join the Mars Society mailing list.

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