Signalling to Mars

Nikola Tesla, who is the most remarkable electrician in the world, and who, like all great inventors and discoverers, works in commendable self continence, without fireworks or advertisement, believes that a way exists for using the earth currents of electricity to telegraph around the world, and even thinks that so strong a pulsation can be generated that we can use it to signal to Mars. The prevalence of electric fluid is obvious to everyone. It dances in the aurora, it snaps from the fur of a cat’s back. Schemes have already been advanced for diverting it to work-a-day uses, though we are no farther along in that than the employment of the mariner’s compass. Like the force of the waves on our coast, like the X rays, like the sunshine, this subtle power waits only the strong and cunning mind and hand to harness it to man’s service.

As Mr. Tesla tells it, the scheme sounds impracticable and flighty; but this century has seen such wonders that he is a brash conservative, indeed, who declares that any scientific proposition is impossible of fulfillment. Our day of steam, electricity, bicycles, free government, Sunday papers, long railroads and ocean grayhounds would have been derided as the imagining of an insane man a century ago. Even if in its commercial test this proposition fails, it will still be of vast interest as a discovery in natural science, a revelation of the powers that dwell in and permeate this stolid looking earth and seem to spiritualize and glorify its manifestations.

All signals to the planet Mars must fail of their purpose unless the people on Mars resemble our people. This is unlikely. We have evolved on this isolated ball of rock into a type that would hardly be repeated unless the force and direction of initiative were exactly similar. That there is life on Mars there is no doubt. It is like our earth; it has belts of wood, caps of ice, seas, clouds, rains, atmosphere, all the conditions that make life, and some will have it that the so-called canals discovered by Schiaparelli are of artificial construction. Perhaps they are. But the people of Mars may be pygmies, unable to build answering engines for signaling; they may be defective in brain substance; they may be without eyes; they may have eyes of only a few yards range. In such case we must still be without information about them.

Yet, it may be that they are a people far surpassing us. As their planet has been in an habitable condition longer than ours, it stands to reason that they would be, if the evolutionary forces were equal on both worlds. Again, as they are at a greater distance from the sun, the need of keeping warm may have acquainted them with facts about heat, light and electricity of which we but have a glimmering of knowledge. So, if we are able to intensify an electric wave that courses from here to Mars, and produce visible, audible or otherwise appreciable phenomena in the air or on the surface of that globe, the Martians may send back another wave to apprise us that our message has been received. When Mr. Tesla is ready to make his experiment, thousands of telescopes will be turned upon Mars, and eyes and fingers will be upon many delicate instruments.