We could all be Martians, then, which could help explain the seemingly endless lure of the Red Planet. The dream of the exile to return to what might once have been Eden. Elon Musk has said he wants to die there, but he’s not r ead y to go there quite yet. Those visions sprang from a misunderstanding of the work of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who in 1877 thought he saw long, thin lines he called canali, (channels in Italian) lacing the surface of Mars. Percival Lowell, a socialite and astronomer took the notion seriously and proceeded to map what he thought were cities and canals on the planet.

Source: New York Times July 30, 2018 22:24 UTC