GURPS 3e - Mars (Playtest Text).pdf - GURPS - Matrinicz

Title Page (1 page)

Contents (1 page)

Introduction (2 pages) -- by Richard Wagner

About the Author

James L. Cambias is a blatant poseur. He has never visited any planet other

than Earth, but he didn't let that stop him from writing GURPS Planet

Krishna and GURPS Planet of Adventure . His experience with Mars

is limited to watching it through a telescope from a distance of 40 million

miles. Truly he has no shame. Mr. Cambias lives in western Massachusetts

with his wife and daughter, who seem willing to endure his pretensions.

About GURPS

Chapter 1. Mars Observed

The Red Star

Humans have been watching Mars for thousands of years. Its dramatic

red-orange color and erratic movements through the heavens drew the

attention of the earliest astronomers. Its color naturally made humans

associate Mars with other red things, like fire and blood, and those in

turn linked Mars with war and danger in almost every human civilization. To

the Babylonians it was Nergal, the god of plagues; in India it is Angaraka,

the burning coal; the Persians called it Bahram, the warrior. Mars's role

in astrology and mysticism is described in more detail in Chapter 5.

Early Theories and Observations

Mars played a key role in the development of modern astronomy. Using

extremely accurate data gathered by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler studied

the motion of Mars through the sky and realized that it could not be

explained by any combination of circular movements. Instead, Mars followed

an elliptical path, leading Kepler to the discovery that all planets moved

around the sun in ellipses. Had he been studying any other planet, Kepler

might not have realized this, as among the naked-eye planets only Mars has

an orbit sufficiently eccentric to be detected with the equipment available

to Tycho and Kepler.

Galileo made some brief telescope observations of Mars in 1609-1610

but the resolving power of his instrument was so low that he was unable to

even tell if it showed phases. Francisco Fontana of Naples tried again with

a better telescope in 1638, and made some rough sketches of dark spots on

the surface. The Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens began to study Mars in

1659, and was able to recognize some surface features and estimate the

planet's rotation period as being about the same as that of Earth; Huygens

also speculated about life on Mars in his book Cosmotheoros (1698).

The polar caps were discovered by Giandomenico Cassini in 1666. Cassini

also refined Huygens's measurement of Mars's day length, producing a value

of 24 hours 40 minutes.

In 1777-83 William Herschel (the discoverer of Uranus) did a

systematic study of Mars using a very powerful 40-foot telescope. He

measured the inclination of Mars's axis, observed seasonal changes in the

polar caps, and observed changes in the atmosphere. Like most of his

predecessors he called the visible dark areas "seas."

The first maps of Mars were created by the German team of Wilhelm

Beer and Johann Von Madler in 1830-39. Astronomers still use the coordinate

system they devised. In 1868-1871, the British astronomer Richard Proctor

created maps and named many of the features. Like Huygens and others, he

called the dark areas seas, and named them in honor of his predecessors.

Although this meant Mars could boast a "Beer Sea" as a prominent feature,

other astronomers were not taken with Proctor's nomenclature.

Giovanni Schiaparelli, the director of the Milan observatory, created

what became the most evocative map of Mars in 1877 and 1879. The 1877

opposition was a particularly close one, and many astronomers with big new

telescopes took the opportunity to study Mars that year. Schiaparelli used

a Mercator projection to plot the features he observed, and adopted a

naming system based on Classical nomenclature, which became the standard

for Mars thereafter. He also noted features which he called "channels" or

canali on the surface of Mars. His canali became "canals" in

translation, and completely changed the way people thought about Mars.

The year 1877 also saw the discovery of the Martian moons by Asaph

Hall at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington. Hall named them for the

mythological companions of the war god Mars, Phobos (fear) and Deimos

(terror). Hall always credited his wife with encouraging him to take one

more look at Mars despite poor seeing conditions in Washington's humid

climate. In recognition of her key role in their discovery, the

International Astronomical Union later named the biggest crater on Phobos

Angelina Stickney, Mrs. Hall's maiden name.

Schiaparelli continued his study of Mars at later oppositions in the

1870s and 1880s. In 1879 he noticed that some of his "canali" appeared as

double lines. He named this phenomenon "gemination." Schiaparelli also saw

dark spots where the canali intersected, and began referring to them as

"oases."

The exact nature of the "canali" remained controversial. Some, like

Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion, were firmly convinced that they

were artificial waterways or aqueducts. Others speculated they might be

cracks in the surface of Mars (ironically, Voyager images of Europa

revealed a system of real cracks which look a lot like old pictures of

Martian canals). Others suggested the lines were the paths trampled out by

herds of migrating animals moving between oases. And there were always some

astronomers who couldn't see them at all. Schiaparelli himself changed his

mind several times. At first he was noncommittal, but when Lowell and

Flammarion began loudly beating the drum for artificial canals he swayed in

that direction. At the end of his life he became distinctly skeptical.

(((START BOX)))

@B-BOXHEAD:Gulliver's Travels and the Moons of Mars

@TEXT-BOX:In Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels

there is an amazing description of the moons of Mars. In his wanderings,

Lemuel Gulliver visits the flying island of Laputa, inhabited by somewhat

impractical scholars and scientists. Among their discoveries:

"They have likewise discovered two lesser stars,or 'satellites,' which

revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the

primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the

former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and

a half . . . "

@TEXT-BOX:This is strikingly close to the real values: Phobos orbits Mars

at a distance of 2.76 planetary radii (Swift apparently confused radius and

diameter) and has a period of 9.6 hours; Deimos's orbital distance is 6.9

planetary radii and its period is 30 hours. The fit for Phobos is almost

exact; the numbers for Deimos are about 30 percent off of the real values.

What makes it amazing is that Gulliver's Travels was published in

1726, 150 years before Asaph Hall discovered the moons of Mars and

determined their orbits. How did Swift know?

@TEXT-BOX:While some have theorized about Swift finding clues in ancient

Irish manuscripts preserving the wisdom of ancient astronauts or Atlantean

astronomers, the explanation is probably a bit simpler. Noting that Earth

has one moon and Jupiter had four known moons in his day, the astronomer

Johannes Kepler theorized that Mars must have two. (Kepler was a great

believer in numerical ratios and proportions.) The notion gained currency

among various writers; Voltaire used it in his Micromegas .

@TEXT-BOX:As to getting the periods so accurate, Swift may actually have

been trying to be funny. To modern readers, the idea of a moon rising in

the west and setting in the east several times a day, or a moon which

doesn't move in the sky seem perfectly plausible, but to 18th century

readers they would have been the height of ridiculousness. The whole Laputa

section was a satire on the pretensions of scientists, and the moons may

have been one bit of silliness which happened to be true.

(((END BOX)))

Percival Lowell: A Man, A Planet, A Canal

Percival Lowell was born in 1855 to a very rich and prominent Boston

family. The Lowells lived in the rarefied heights of Boston society, "where

the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God." He

graduated from Harvard in 1876, helped to run the family textile business,

and traveled extensively in the Orient. He wrote several books about Korea

and Japan, concluding with Occult Japan in 1894. That year marked a

tremendous shift in Lowell's interests.

Lowell had always had an interest in astronomy, and read with

interest Giovanni Schiaparelli's description of the mysterious "canali" on

the surface of Mars. By 1894, Schiaparelli's eyesight was deteriorating,

and Lowell resolved to take up the challenge of studying Mars. He may have

been influenced by a fellow Harvard man, William Pickering, who translated

Schiaparelli's work into English and reported seeing lakes and snowfalls on

Mars during an observing trip to the Andes in 1892.

In the spring of 1894 Lowell set up operations atop Mars Hill,

outside Flagstaff, with a well-equipped private observatory, a powerful

24-inch telescope, and a staff of assistants. From then on he studied Mars

at every opposition, churning out a series of books chronicling his

observations: Mars in 1895, Mars and Its Canals in 1906, and

Mars as the Abode of Life in 1908. As the titles suggest, Lowell

quickly became convinced that the "canali" seen by Schiaparelli were real,

that they were artificial irrigation canals, and that they were the work of

intelligent beings.

From then on, Percival Lowell was the indefatigable champion of the

existence of life on Mars. He wrote books and articles, and gave lectures

in dozens of cities. When professional astronomers criticized his findings,

he was quick to dismiss them: "Wolves hunt in packs, the lion stalks

alone," he once remarked. Relatively late in life he married, and died in

1916. Having more or less "conquered" Mars, he had turned his attention to

finding the unknown Ninth Planet, and it was a Lowell Observatory

astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

The Canals and the Martians

In his books, Lowell described Mars as an old world, its surface worn

smooth by erosion and its oceans long since dried up. Because Mars was a

smaller world than Earth, it had cooled faster, its crust shrinking and

fracturing and its oceans draining away into the interior. In effect, Mars

was a look at Earth's future.

Much of the surface was a vast desert, so dry as to make the Sahara

seem verdant by comparison. The dark features on the surface were ancient

seabeds, still capable of supporting plants. And crisscrossing the dry

plains were the thin lines of canals, carrying vital water from the melting

polar caps down to the tropics each spring. Each year, a "wave of

darkening" moved along the canals as vegetation bloomed with the coming of

the waters. In all, Lowell charted 437 canals, and recorded such phenomenon

as "gemination," in which single canals sometimes appeared as a pair of

parallel lines.

To Lowell, the canals appeared absolutely straight, clear proof that

they were artificial constructs, which implied Mars had intelligent

inhabitants. Since Mars was an older planet, this seemed entirely

reasonable. As Lowell put it in Mars and Its Canals , "Within the

bounds that make life possible, the smaller the body the quicker it ages

and the more advanced its denizens must be." He believed the planetary

scale of the Martian canal network showed that the inhabitants of Mars had

a single planetary government, and wrote approvingly of the wisdom and

determination which the Martians showed in such a huge project.

Given his ability to see canals where nobody else could, and his

willingness to theorize about Martian vegetation and canal-builders, Lowell

was remarkably reserved about what form life on Mars might take. Unlike

just about every other popular work about Mars, his books have no pictures

of hypothetical Martians or Martian animals.

Reactions to Lowell

Percival Lowell's vision of Mars was simultaneously enchanting to the

general public and infuriating to professional astronomers. His discoveries

were a standard of newspaper Sunday supplements and his books were widely

read. His lectures were always well-attended. In the public mind, Lowell's

version of Mars was Mars, right up until the Mariner space probe

photographs revealed the true face of the planet in the 1960s.

Astronomers, on the other hand, were much less enthusiastic. Only

Lowell and his followers could see the canals. Skilled observers using

bigger telescopes didn't see canals, and nobody could photograph them. Some

British astronomers tried an interesting experiment: they showed a group of

schoolboys a picture of Mars without canals, but with dark spots speckled

across the surface. The boys sitting close to the picture drew the spots,

but those further away drew lines connecting the dark areas.

A devastating critique came from Alfred Russell Wallace, who shared

credit with Charles Darwin for developing the theory of evolution by

natural selection. Wallace began a review of Lowell's Mars which

turned into an entire book. In it, he pointed out some physical flaws with

the whole canal idea: the rate of evaporation would soon empty them out,

and the rapid melting of the polar caps indicated that they couldn't hold

very much water to start with.

Paradoxically, Lowell's very success at arousingpublic interest made

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