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| A scene from The Settler (2000). |
Southern California as a Futuristic Landscape
<continued>...To complement these government efforts, commercial Mars propaganda heavily targets the future generation with t-shirts, caps, and toys; for example, this holiday season featured NASA’s special edition Mars Rover Lego Sets and Hot Wheels Miniature Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars "Sojourner" Rover.
Artists and photographers played a major role in the popularization of the West. The landscape paintings of Mars by Michael Carroll bear an eerie resemblance to the romantic American landscapes painted by Thomas Moran. The mountains, canyons, and deserts depicted in the Martian paintings are reminiscent of the American West, and the motivation to go to Mars is clearly built upon the same kind of mythologizing that was seen in images of the early American landscape. The only difference is that Carroll’s Martian landscapes romanticize technology and the presence of humans in these embellished futuristic vistas.
Pulp fiction, comic books, Westerns, and science-fiction films have played a critical role in creating and maintaining these myths. Hollywood, Southern California’s own "dream factory," has not only fueled the engine keeping the California dream alive throughout the years, but has played an integral role in promoting Mars as well. Films like Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), Forbidden Planet (1956), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Total Recall (1990), and Mission to Mars (2000) promote a sense of adventure and a depiction of space travel that springs directly from the spirit of Westerns like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). The relationship between science fiction and the practice of science has changed dramatically since the 1950s. Then, fictionalized depictions of attacking aliens, imaginary deep-sea creatures, etc., were viewed as harmful misinformation and were kept within the realm of art and popular culture, far from science. Today, sensational stories are embraced and strategically employed by NASA and the Mars Society to create effective propaganda for future trips to Mars.
In 1908, Professor Percival Lowell (1855-1916) published a book called Mars As the Abode of Life. He boldly proclaimed that Mars was inhabited by an advanced civilization that had engineered a sophisticated system of canals and aqueducts to bring water from the polar caps to its desert cities. His research was inspired by the work of Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910), who in 1877 claimed to see an intricate system of "canali" on Mars, but was cautious in his public statements. Lowell, inspired by these theories, abandoned his career with the family business and decided to dedicate his life to mapping Martian canals. In 1894, as a newly self-anointed astronomer, he built the impressive Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. There he filled volumes with intricate drawings of what appeared to be lines crisscrossing the planet. Lowell imagined these traces to be a network of huge Martian irrigation ditches and evidence of intelligent Martian life. He wrote: "It resembles lace-tracery of an elaborate and elegant pattern, woven as a whole over the disk, veiling the planet’s face." 5 Some say he had "canal-fever," and that his imagination was fueled by the events of his own era, the age of great canals like the Panama and the Manchester. Lowell’s false predictions created a maelstrom of skepticism in the science community, and in 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4, flying close to the Martian surface, revealed a lifeless surface of barren craters. Although the engineered landscape that Lowell imagined on Mars in 1908 is not a reality, it resembles quite closely the landscape of Southern California today.
As you drive down palm-lined Las Palmas Avenue in L.A., you will no doubt hear one particular sound 365 days a year. Ssssst…ssst…Sssst…ssst…Sssst. Watering systems, lawn after lawn, a symphony of staggered mists in counterpoint feeding the thirsty Kentucky blue grass, weeping willows, bougainvillaea, banana trees, and birds of paradise. It appears to be a lush place. This is a grand illusion. All the water that quenches the thirst from L.A. to San Diego County to Imperial Valley flows through an elaborate aqueduct system draining the lake beds in northern California and the Colorado River.
In other words, "artificial" is its middle name. Southern California is an entirely engineered landscape. In the early 1900s, the infamous waterworks mastermind William Mulhulland, backed by hundreds of wealthy landowners and businessmen in Los Angeles County, signed a water bill with the federal government that would insure fresh water to their desert city forever.
They drained lake bed after lake bed, stole the Owens River and Mono Lake, and went after the Colorado River. They built what has become the most elaborate aqueduct system and water project since the beginning of time. They engineered a desert into the most fertile farmland in America. Percival Lowell’s far-fetched theories about intricate highways and aqueducts on Mars are a reality in Southern California. ...<more>
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