Popular Culture Review 29.2
their distance from the Earth . In 365 BCE , Plato ’ s student , Aristotle , observed Mars passing behind the moon and concluded that Mars must thus be farther away from Earth . We have been thinking about Mars for a long time . But have we thought about how we have been thinking about it ?
It is unclear how Mars got its name , though it seems to have been associated with struggles and war in many different cultures throughout history . Babylonians called the planet “ Nergal ,” the King of Conflicts . Egyptians referred to it as “ Har Decher ,” the Red One . The Greeks named the planet after their god of war , Ares , and when the Romans adopted and adapted the Greek god pantheon , they simply renamed it in accordance with Ares ’ new name : Mars . Galileo was the first person to look at Mars through a telescope , though because Mars is so small , telescopes have never been extremely helpful at telling us much about the exact details of the Martian surface . We know now that the southern hemisphere is old highlands with numerous impact craters , but the northern hemisphere is more intricate , with lower elevation plains that have been formed more recently . Even the Hubble Space Telescope , though , was not able to fill in these blanks ; it took sending spacecraft to visit Mars to find this out .
And so , long before Mariner , Viking , or Curiosity , we have imagined ourselves on Mars , speculating on our relationship to our nearby neighbor . And we have taken our values with us there as well . As Carl Sagan once wrote , “ Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears .” 1 This is a projection that always seems to take place with us . Even when we Earthlings first set our sites on gathering rocks from our closest planetary body : the moon .
1 Carl Sagan , Cosmos ( NY : Ballantine Books , 1980 / 2013 ): 109 .
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