Living in today's ambitious robot exploration era of Mars, the ultimate human mission may one day take place, and it's hard to imagine an era where Mars is a mysterious and unachievable world. However, before the Rockets were invented, astronomers who wanted to explore Mars beyond what they could see through telescopes had to use their imagination.

As the author and author of "Love for Mars: Human History of the Red Planet", I worked hard to understand how people from different eras and places imagined Mars.

The second half of the 19th century was a particularly interesting period, and Mars could be imagined. During this period, the Red Planet seems ready to abandon some of its mysteries. Astronomers are learning more about Mars, but they still don't have enough information to know whether it hosts life and if so, what kind of species.

With more powerful telescopes and new printing techniques, astronomers began using geographers’ mapping tools to create the first detailed map of the Earth’s surface and fill it in continents and oceans, which in some cases could have been produced by life. Because it is still difficult to see the actual surface features of Mars, these maps vary greatly.

During this time, a well-known scientist and popularist brought together science and imagination to explore the possibilities that life in another world may have.

Camille Flammarion

During this period, an imaginative thinker attracted Mars' attention during this period, was the Parisian astronomer Camille Flammarion. In 1892, Flammarion published "Plan Mars", which to this day is still a certain history of Mars' observations in the 19th century. It summarizes all published literature on Mars since the 17th century Galileo era. He reported that the work required him to review 572 Martian drawings.

Like many of his contemporaries, Flamarion concluded that Mars was an old world of evolutionary stages that were the same as Earth and had to be a living world. Unlike his contemporaries, he insisted that Mars, while perhaps the most Earth-like planet in our solar system, is clearly its world.

It is the difference that makes Mars interesting, not the similarities. Any life found will adapt to its specific conditions in evolution - an idea that attracted the author Wells when he imagined invading the Martians in the "World War."

But Flammarion also admits that it is difficult to determine these differences because “the distance is too big, our atmosphere is too dense, and our instruments are not perfect enough.” He lamented that no map he reviewed could be taken literally because everyone saw and painted Mars in different ways.

In view of this uncertainty about what is actually seen on Mars surface, Flammarion takes an agnostic position on the specific nature of Martian life in the "planet of Mars".

But he does think that if there were indeed smart lives on Mars, it would be older than human life on Earth. Logically, this kind of life will become more perfect—a civilization similar to the peace, unity and technologically advanced that he predicted will enter the earth in the coming century.

"We can hope that because the world of Mars is larger than our own, its inhabitants may be wiser and more advanced than us. There is no doubt that the spirit of peace has brought this neighboring world to life."

But, as Flammarion told his readers, "known as an island in an unknown ocean", is often emphasized in more than 70 books he has published throughout his life. This is the "unknown" he found particularly tempting.

Historians often describe Flammarion as a popularist rather than a serious scientist, but this should not reduce his achievements. For Flammarion, science is not a body of a method or established knowledge. This is the new core of a new philosophy, waiting to be born. He takes his popular work very seriously and hopes that it will turn people's minds into heaven.

Imaginative novels

It is too early to speculate on which form of life might exist on Mars without addressing the surface of the Earth or communicating with its inhabitants in some way. However, Flamarion did speculate on his scientific work, but rather in a series of novels written throughout his career.

In these imaginative works, he was able to visit Mars and see its surface for himself. Unlike his contemporary novelist Jules Verne, who imagines a journey to promote the moon technically, Flammarion prefers a spiritual journey.

Based on his belief that the human soul after death can not travel through space with the body of life, Flammarion's novels include dream journeys and narratives of friends or fictional characters of the deceased.

In his novel Urania (1889), Flammarion's soul visits Mars in his dream. Upon arrival, he meets a late friend, George Spero, who is reincarnated as a winged, glowing six bound men.

"There is no more earthly person on Mars than the antennas on the seabed," Framarion wrote.

Later in the same novel, Sperot's soul visits Flamarion on Earth. He revealed that the development of Martian civilization and science far exceeds that of Earth, not only because Mars is an older world, but also because the atmosphere is thinner and more suitable for astronomy.

Flammarion believes that practicing and popularizing astronomy and other sciences helped promote Martian society.

Flammarion imagined Martians live in war, hunger and other earthly concerns. This is the life that Flammarion wanted for the Parisians, who had suffered from the destruction of the French Prussian War and were hunger and deprivation during the siege of Paris and its consequences.

Today, Flammarion’s Mars reminds people that imagining the future on Mars is about understanding ourselves and our social aspirations, just like developing the technology that brings us there.

Flammarion's popularization of science was his means to help his Earthly humans understand their place in the universe. They can one day join the Martians he imagined, not more literal than his analysis of the Martian map of "The Planet of Mars". His world is an example of what life becomes under the right conditions.