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There are many romantic reasons for people to want to believe in the idea of life on Mars.

From the earliest telescopic observations of the Red Planet, it was clear that there were lines of some kind on Mars. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli called them "canali", which means "channels", but the popular press of the day mistranslated this as "canals". The presence of a canal implied the presence of canal builders, and the early "pulp" Science Fiction stories soon had Mars populated with a race of mighty warriors; read, for example, the "Barsoom" stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs for an example of the genre. In 1898, the novelist H. G. Wells wrote the book "War of the Worlds", the story of an attack on Earth by aliens. In 1938, Orson Wells (no relation) dramatized a radio play of the story. The descriptions of the events so frightened thousands of people that they fled their homes and prepared to repel the Martian attack!

There are other examples, but when the stories of a fictional Martian race are as good as these, many people prefer not to believe the mundane facts that Mars is a dead planet, and that if any advanced race ever existed there, it is long gone.

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16y ago

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