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Why Have Humans Been SO Obsessed with Mars ... for Over 100 Years?!

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The Other Side of Midnight

The Other Side of Midnight

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Show Page: https://www.theothersideofmidnight.com/20200809-guest/
Alternate Listening:  https://www.talkstreamlive.com/program/richard_c_hoagland


Mars ....

The very name evokes an aura of "romance, exotica and mystery" unparalleled in the history of science ....

For well over a hundred years -- since the late 1800's -- astronomers ... and all the rest of us ... have become obsessed with Mars.

As the centuries proceeded, every new astronomical discovery associated with "the Red Planet" became entangled with the fledgling efforts to create a true "planetary science" of the solar system -- from fleeting glimpses of "canals ... marching out across its ochre Martian deserts," to the sobering possibilities that we on Earth, from a minimum of 35 million miles away, were final witness to--

"An increasingly desperate global civilization, vainly battling against the inexorable realities of an entire dying world ...."

Then, in 1965, came Mariner 4 ... and the Romance and the Mystery of Mars all came crashing down:

The Red Planet -- so the whispering spacecraft signals told us -- was as "dead" as our own Moon.
Or ... IS it?

Join us ....

Richard C. Hoagland

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