On September 11, 2004, Lair No. 1 met at Max's Allegheny Tavern for a Rogue Presentation from Timons Esaias concerning the history of the Canals of Mars. But first he digressed, as Rascals are prone to do. He showed slides of the two Russian circular ironclads Novgorod and Vice-Admiral Popov of the 1870s; a slide of a three-turreted Ericsson monitor from the Civil War; and a slide comparing the very similar-appearing Battleship Queen Elizabeth with the Battlecruiser Hood, followed by one showing what happens when you try to use the latter type vessel to do the work of the former. Not good.
Finally grappling with the subject itself, and waving his copy of the 1906 edition of Percival Lowell’s The Canals of Mars for authority, Tim explained that the story you find in most reference works about Schiaparelli’s and Lowell’s discovery and mapping of the canals is almost entirely incorrect. They believed they were looking at bands of vegetation, and most definitely not open channels of water. They both thought them artificial. And the best science of the day confirmed that these were not illusions.
Esaias went on to the very interesting thing that NASA believed in the canals the day before the first Mariner photos were developed, but discarded them when no open channels of water (well, duh!) were seen. He noted that the photo regions seemed curiously to avoid all oases, and as many canals as possible. And that Mars is the only planet where the probes go astray, and at an astonishing 2/3 rate. Possibilities for trade with the obviously advanced Martian civilization were discussed, especially in such surplus terrestrial goods as Hot Air and Women.
Esaias noted the absence of any easily-discovered paper on how the canals could have been illusory, but that the same mechanism would not apply to observations of other planets. Why, for instance, is there no history of detecting canals on the Moon, if all the eye was doing was connecting obscurely-seen features into straight lines?? [The situation seems more in line with a Paradigm Shift than an orderly scientific testing and discarding of a hypothesis. The canals weren’t disproven, they were discarded.]
There was discussion of theories as to What Happened To The Canals?, and the talk ended with a photo of a Mars railway station, taken in 1912, which NASA deliberately fails to address in any of its publications.
To wake everyone up after this excruciatingly tedious monologue, Woody finished the thing off with an impromptu song: “1500 Miles on the Martian Canal.”
Among those present at this meeting were: