We May Yet Be Able to Talk With the Inhabitants of Mars

Garrett P. Serviss, the Noted Astronomer, on the Feasibility of Signalling to the Martians by Means of the Electric Impulses Discovered by Nikola Tesla.

Of course there is nothing essentially improbable in Mr. Tesla’s idea that it may become possible electrically to signal to the planet Mars. Mr. Tesla is not a man likely to make a mistake in a matter of that kind. His recent experiments, recorded in the Sunday World, in transmitting harmonic notes through Pike’s Peak was indeed a step in the direction of the still more wonderful achievements which he now suggests are within the range of scientific accomplishment.

It does not, of course, make very much difference to us whether a planet like Mars has inhabitants or not, unless we can contrive some means of communicating with them and making ourselves absolutely sure that they live there. There is at present no indication that we shall be able to see them, although I shall make a suggestion in regard to that before I am through. All the plans that have been suggested for communicating with Mars by means of signal lights and the electrical appliances of illumination are essentially faulty, because unless a very considerable area of the surface of the earth were covered with such a light it could not be made bright enough to be seen at the distance Mars is from us.

But Mr. Tesla’s suggestion of communicating by means of electrical impulses transmitted through the ether is quite a different thing. It recalls what has already been done in sending despatches from wires running alongside of a railroad track to the interior of the cars of a moving express train. That has been carried still further in recent experiments in which electrical communication has been established between the shore and vessels anchored at a considerable distance away. No doubt, as Mr. Tesla suggests, it is only necessary to improve on the means for transmitting such impulses which we already possess, and the improvement need not be so very great either.

Any disturbance of the electrical equilibrium of a body like the earth is not only instantly transmitted to all parts of it, but, with the proper instruments, must be easy to detect. Suppose that a disturbance of that kind is transmitted to the planet Mars, the question instantly arises, how are the people of Mars to recognize it?

Suppose, for instance, a series of impulses are successively transmitted so as to suggest the idea that they are the result of some active intelligence. Imagine a transmission of electrical impulses of that kind to Mars from the earth over and over again.

If Mars contains any electricians as intelligent and wide-awake as Mr. Tesla, it might not be long before they would notice that there were constantly recurring phenomena in the electrical condition of the planet. In casting about for an explanation, they would not find the solution in anything existing about the planet, and naturally would inquire if it could come to them from outer space — from the sun or other planets. As soon as their attention had been called to this phenomenon it would be very easy to recognize it.

Thus in the confused noise on Broadway everything is to the unpractised ear mingled in an undistinguishable roar. But if the attention is once fixed upon any element of that noise thereafter that single source of sound-wave can readily be held under attention and discriminated from other noises.

So in the case of imaginary signals, if once recognized, they could easily be made the subject of study. That they should be recognized as the result of intelligence acting somewhere outside of Mars would, of course, depend upon the ingenuity of the senders of the impulses from the earth. It would naturally be necessary, first, to consider how it would be easiest to impress upon the mind of an intelligent person, with whom no words could be exchanged, the conviction that the phenomenon which he was studying came from a brain resembling his own in its action.

No one could doubt that it would be comparatively easy to contrive some recognizable signal of that kind. It might not be so easy to determine at first the source of these mysterious electrical impulses coming to Mars, but a careful study of the phenomena by the electricians of that planet would determine in the course of time the direction from which they had come. In fact, as soon as communication had been established (especially if the inhabitants of Mars should at once endeavor to reply in a general way to these mysterious communications coming to them out of space) the source of the original impulses could soon be indicated by further signals transmitted from the earth.

As soon as that had been done a kind of invisible and intangible interplanetary cable would have been established between two of the worlds of the solar system. Most entertaining complications might then arise. Sometimes Mars and the earth are on opposite sides of the sun. At such times the distance between them is vastly greater than when they are on the same side of the sun. Moreover, under such circumstances it is not improbable that disturbances arising because the sun was between the two bodies might temporarily interrupt the communication.

Thus, again (for this whole subject is most mysterious, although so full of promise of wonderful results), the moon, playing in its monthly orbit about the earth, might possibly introduce another source of irregularity in the communications passing between the two planets. In a speculation of this kind, of course, there is no end of possibilities. Thus Venus, our great sister planet, might also establish communication with the planet Mars, and, as Venus and the earth swing round the sun, coming alternately into opposition and conjunction, the wires, so to speak, might cross.

Imagine this communication with the planet Mars once established. At first it would consist only of the merest signals, giving evidence by their form of the existence of intelligence behind them. From that we can conceive that it might gradually progress to the interchange of ideas and of statement of facts.

Of course, a new language would have to be invented in order to conduct correspondence across our interplanetary cable. The inhabitants of Mars know nothing of the earth under the name of Earth. To them we are simply a star nearer the sun than they are, and they could not recognize in Mars our name for their planet. The electricians of the two communicating worlds would have, as the astronomers say, to “establish their co-ordinates.”

There would be need, therefore, of some different system for making the names of the planets known to each other. From this beginning, by which the location of the two planets in space had been mutually made known to each other the communication would undoubtedly rapidly widen in its scope.

The learned men of both planets would get together, suggestions would be made, experiments would be tried and ingenuity would be exhausted in the effort to discover some method unknown to man by which intelligence could be conveyed from the originators of the thought across impassable space and across the still greater gulf which the absence of a common method of expressing thought would make between them.

But the human race has accomplished too many seemingly impossible things for us to doubt that the desired end would be attained. It is not unreasonable to conclude, however, that centuries might elapse before messages transmitted between the two worlds had advanced beyond the merest elements. Once established, however, the Mars-Earth language would be the most wonderful thing that the mind of man had yet contemplated.

Although intellect must be essentially the same wherever it is found, in whatever world, yet unquestionably it might expand in a great variety of directions on the different planets and under varying conditions. So that this communication once established would go much further than the mere interchange of greetings between different races.

The Martians might transmit the germs of ideas such as a mind like Newton’s or La Place’s had never dreamed of, and, conversely, we might have the happiness of knowing that we had given the inhabitants of another world the pleasure that arises from the suggestion of new ideas.

But the wonderful progress which has recently been made not only in what we call electricity, but in the development of our knowledge concerning other and mysterious forms of radiation, suggests the possibilities of a surprising expansion of our powers of sight.

Already acting upon the suggestion of Prof. Roentgen’s discovery of the photographic action of the X rays, Mr. Edison has contrived an instrument by means of which the interior of the human body may not only be photographed but actually seen, so that the surgeon by looking through the spectacles which Mr. Edison has invented for him may see the location of a bullet or the fracture of a bone and may perform his dissection not merely by guess but with the subject of his experiments directly under his eyes, although it may be very deep beneath the surface.

Unquestionably this is already a wonderful expansion of the power of sight. If bone and other objects may be seen through the flesh we shall be able to see more than that. We shall be able to see the whole interior structure of bodies. The inner world will be brought to sight.

Now, while no direct suggestion bearing upon what I am about to say has yet been given by any discoverer, there is something in what has been recently developed to make the thoughtful person recognize the possibility that a change may be brought about in the manner by which light is brought to the retina of the eye.

The eye is not a fixed optical instrument constructed according to the well-known principles of lenses. If you hold your finger within a few inches of the eye it appears to reach from the basement to the roof of the house on the opposite side of the street. If, now, you approach the house and place your finger close to the wall of course the apparent size of the house is increased so far that the real difference in dimensions between the finger and the house becomes evident. Put your house far enough away and you will only cover it with your finger, but the head of a pin will cover it. The actual size of the house is, of course, the same whether it is within one foot of your eye or a hundred miles.

But in one case you can see every granule of the brick in the wall and in the other you cannot see the house at all. Now, the same is true, of course, of Mars. Put close to the earth it would almost fill the sky. Millions of miles away it is a mere star. If it were close we could see the blades of grass on it. Where it is it is a mere point of light, but we could still see the blades of grass if our eyes were constructed upon a different plan.

The reason why the same object looks greater when nearer the eye than when further away arises from the fact that the eye is a system of lenses and it has the property of lenses to bend rays of light proceeding from any object to a point. Looking from that point the rays gradually diverge one from another.

But suppose the eye was not shaped like a lens and that the rays of light fell parallel upon the retina. Then, unless some opaque medium were interposed, a blade of grass held within one inch or a million of miles from the eye would be equally visible. With eyes like those we could then see the inhabitants of Mars and the blades of grass and flowers growing there. Only we could see but a very small part of the planet at a single view.

Now is there any way in which the so-called longitudinal rays — the X rays — coming from a distant planet might impinge upon the retina of the eye without being bent or refracted by the lenses so that they would cover the same surface on the retina that they covered upon the planet from which they originated? The X rays are not refracted by lenses. They cannot be bent. Yet, differing as widely as they do from light rays, the means have been found to enable them to indirectly produce the effect of vision. An extension of that same principle would enable us, through these same mysterious rays, or some form of radiation related to them, to avoid refraction in our eyes and to see the smallest objects — grains of sand and insects, for instance — upon the planet Mars.

GARRETT P. SERVISS.