…for life elsewhere, was somewhere between science fiction and hokum, it had suffered serious losses in credibility, going back to Percival Lowell, who taught at this institution, who believed that mars was covered by a network of canals built by intelligent…

…the worlds and that in turn was based in a way on real astronomy, semi real astronomy, namely the work of Percival Lowell, an American scientist who established an observatory in flagstaff, Arizona who had mapped what he believed were canals on the surface…

…spring were connected with the canal network and the water was redirected to the thirsty inhabitants of the equatorial cities. And Lowell went quite far in his deductions. For example he deduced from the fact that the straight lines go enormous distances…

…do not exist they are a snare and a delusion. Some terrible vulnerability, weakness of the human hand eye brain system led Lowell, under conditions of imperfect seeing and not just Lowell by the way, but a bunch of other astronomers to probably connect up…

…Some terrible vulnerability, weakness of the human hand eye brain system led Lowell, under conditions of imperfect seeing and not just Lowell by the way, but a bunch of other astronomers to probably connect up disconnected fine detail into straight lines and…

…until the mariner 9 mission to mars in 1971, although it was certainly the prevailing view of the astronomical community. But Lowell was so effective a popularizer of his work and so passionate in his conclusions and the idea is so entrancing that…

…in 1897 h g wells wrote one of the classic and also one of the earliest science fiction novels in which the Percival Lowell Martians were given a fictional but very potent manifestation. The idea was that yes they're running out of water and they cast…

…spaceflight pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and to his American Counterpart Robert Goddard, both of whom, by the way, were influenced by Percival Lowell and h g wells. The rockets they designed and they were the principal designers of the spacecraft we have…