Category: Victorian Science

• The "Martian" Canals

  This theory claimed that the apparent canals seen on Mars were not merely irrigation works or geological features, but an intentional planetary message directed toward Earth, sometimes described as a signal of distress from a dying civilization. It developed from the larger late nineteenth-century Martian canal controversy after Schiaparelli’s observations of canali and the popularization of intelligent-life interpretations by Percival Lowell and others. In its strongest versions, the geometry of the canal network was treated as evidence that Mars was attempting to communicate with another inhabited world.