The Search for Life on Mars: From Mars Mania to NASA’s Rovers
About this episode
This episode explores the historical search for life on Mars, including the Viking mission and the phenomenon of Mars Mania in the early 1900s.
On this episode, a look back at our search for life on Mars. We hear about the Viking mission to Mars — the first to land a craft on the Red Planet — and the controversy over what it discovered, what drove a national obsession with the “Martian civilization” in the early 1900s, and how NASA repairs its rovers from millions of miles away. Back in the early 1900s, a strange phenomenon was sweeping the nation — “Mars Mania,” a belief shared by scientists and the public alike that Mars was home to a sophisticated civilization poised to guide us into the future. We talk with science writer David Baron about what was behind these beliefs, why it became a nationwide obsession, and what happened when scientists discovered the truth. Baron’s book is “ The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America .”
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