PL is the OG of Mars

            Instead of doing a tiny summary of Percival Lowell’s life and contributions to the study of Mars, I thought I would elaborate on his inspirations and muses – these are the people and things that got Lowell’s juices flowing and led him in the direction of Mars Canals and the founding of his observatory in Arizona. I also talk briefly about his legacy.

            Before Lowell became an astronomer he traveled the globe, spending most of his time in Korea and Japan. He wrote multiple books about his studies in Japan, including Noto: An Unexpected Corner of Japan, and Occult Japan, or The Way of the Gods. He was specifically fascinated in the Japanese religious practices, their relationships and behaviors within societal range, and how this affected their economy and society. His intense study of the Japanese culture can be seen as almost a foreshadowing into his almost obsessive yet scholarly study of the surface of Mars, including his various books and surface scans of possible Martian society movement in his future endeavors.

Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer and author of La planète Mars, which was one book that heavily influenced Lowell’s following of astronomy and the beginning of his research into Mars. Flammarion, similar to Lowell, was quite fascinated with psychology and religious practice. He study psychical research, becoming very interested in reincarnation and comparing it to the scientific method and later tried working as a medium. Lowell’s dive into the depths of Mars canal began with the drawings of said surface grooves by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Lowell became so fascinated with these canals that he dedicated the next decade on to researching and studying the surface of Mars, which led to him writing 3 books and more and more people joining on the “Mars has intelligent life!” bandwagon. Later he would be shunned for these thoughts because no other astronomers could find these canals on the surface of Mars, but in 1909 the Mount Wilson Observatory telescope would pick up on these, and all would be well.

            Lowell’s legacy: Clyde Tombaugh would discover Pluto with Lowell’s telescope. Lowell believed in the mysterious Planet X, beyond the reaches of Neptune and Uranus, where no eyes had pried quite yet. Well, he wouldn’t discover it, until a guy named Clyde Tombaugh came along and used the Planet X coordinates to discover Pluto, naming it after Lowell with his initials: PL. Here is a video talking about Lowell's fueling of the Mars canals theory and also it is simply enjoyable for the intense music and the depiction of the Mar's surface. 

            Oh Percival, you always knew Pluto was real, and even though people are now disregarding it as a planet, I can say that it will always live on in my heart, along with the rest of your Martian canals and their hysteria of the possibility of intelligent life.

            Here is a video showing what it would have been like landing humans on Mars and discovering intelligent life (before we landed on the moon…conspiracy theory).