Life in Mars - What we always believed.

We've all heard the news that constantly talk about Mars & Life, like: When traces of salt water were found flowing the sides of Martian hills and mountains when the temperature rises. But, note to self: It is salt water in the sense that it contains salts. But this kind of salts that some organisms use to survive in Earth, are toxic for humans. This is not table salt or the kind of salts we may find at our seas.

Anyways, it is an important find because now we finally have strong proof about hydrologic activity in our Red Brother. Water moving in its surface is a good sign for potential lifeforms. Yet, if we think about it, that water does not move a lot.

Hold on, hold on! I believe that we've already found water on Mars before. What is so different thins time?

Yes, dry river bed were found before, as a sign that some time ago there was moving water in that planet. We also knew that there's frozen water there; of course solid state water is the least favorable kind for life that we know about.

The thing is that we now know that there's flowing, liquid water, at least in a seasonal cycle in there: Increasing the chances for us to find life as we know it.
There was a time that, with evidence that was not as solid as this, many people were convinced that there was life in Mars. Not mere microorganisms, intelligent lifeforms, they overdid it a bit.

What evidence did they possess -or believed to have- that we do not have now?
Lets review what we used to believe we would find in our neighboring planet.

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In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli said that he found a network of channels around Mar's Equatorial line. A mistranslation of his papers over the word "canalis" as canals instead of as "channels" (where one implies a naturally formed depression in the ground and the other one an artificial construction) led to several crazy theories.
The presence of such network was corroborated by other astronomers: Percival Lowell obsessed so much about them that he wrote three books about them from 1895 to 1908. In them, he defended the theory that said that the Martian channels were built by an advanced civilization in trouble: A desperate attempt to canalize water from the poles to the dryer areas in the Planet.

People loved this idea, of course. After all it was known that Mars had a rotational axis tilt similar to our's, infering that there was seasonal changes just like we do have. Mars undergoes daily hot and cold cycles similar to ours, their day is pretty much as long as ours (24 hours and 40 minutes), and the comparison was very tempting to accept, given that at that moment huge Engineering feats were top news (The Suez and Panama Canals). It was not crazy to believe that an advanced civilization would not use similar techniques to supply water to places that lack of it, it was not crazy to believe that extraterrestrial lifeforms would do everything we do but in a larger scale...

But, as appealingly plausible this idea was to the public eye, astronomers were not convinced about it at all.

Scientists... They always ruin the parties!!!

They had plenty of reasons to doubt about this discovery. The main one was very few people were able to see these "canalis" when they aimed their telescopes to the surface of that planet. Besides, it seemed like every single observer saw different lines. Judging by the maps they drew and by how much they all varied, anyone would've said that they were making them up on-the-fly. This, was what was happening.

In 1909, a 1.5 meter of diameter telescope was installed at the Mount Wilson observatory. Being the largest of the world in that moment, it allowed us to observe Mars with an unprecedented quality. Thanks to that, astronomers were able to find irregular geologic structures, clearly formed by erosion... And no trace of any "canalis". The maps, were ALL wrong.

Funny thing, as the "canalis" were disproved, Lowell aimed his telescope to Venus, where he repeated his theory once again. He was overdoing it, since Venus is covered by a thick layer of clouds made of sulfuric acid. There was no way that such kind of permanent structure was ever permanently formed in that gaseous canvas.

Was Lowell liying on purpose to promote his books or some sort of scam?

That is not very likely.

In 2003, a study ran over the set Lowell used to observe the sky revealed that he observed channels wherever he aimed his telescope at: He was suffering a phenomenon that is usual whenever you look at the sky with high amplification rates. The beam of light that reached his eye had a very small sectioning and was so focused that it casted a shadow of his own blood vessels over the retina. Those thin, elongated shapes Lowell saw.

It is not the first time a lens obfuscates what we observe...