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Offers the theory that the Red Planet is dying of climate changes and suggests that Earth may face a similar fate.
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00:00Earth, the third planet from the Sun. For uncounted thousands of years, men looked to
00:09the sky and wondered if they were alone. Finally, there were machines that could travel into space.
00:17Men walked on the moon, but found no sign there of other intelligence. But there are eight other
00:34planets moving around the same Sun that kindled life on Earth. Could it have happened only on our
00:40planet? A spark that could evolve into intelligence? The winter of 1976 would see another great step
00:49in search of life on other worlds.
01:10The planet nearest Earth glows readily in the night sky. What common heritage might these
01:27two worlds have? This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. The
01:40producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only
01:45ones to the mysteries we will examine. The first sunrise for mankind occurred more
01:57than three million years ago. Long, long before there were men, the Sun was an insignificant
02:06cluster of dust and gas. It wasn't long in the scheme of things before the gas and dust began
02:20to boil. Mass becoming energy, energy becoming mass. Other forces were at work as pressures built,
02:35and the infant Sun was at war with itself. Nuclear fusion, the same force at work in the hydrogen
02:49bomb, created the Sun and has fueled it through the millennium.
02:54In the convulsion of birth, great mass and enormous energy must have been thrown off into space. The planets were the cinders left by this cosmic holocaust. The same process was at work throughout the universe. Uncounted stars, uncounted planets.
03:21Uncounted possibilities for life.
03:31Probes have been sent into space, and new mathematics invented to help understand the dynamics of the universe. Most of what is known about space has been learned only in the latter half of this century. It would be arrogant to suppose, therefore, that we've done more than begin to ask the right questions. Of course, there's never been a shortage of answers. Before men had been asked,
03:39space probes and computers. They had imaginations.
03:57George Millier was a pioneering filmmaker. In the first quarter of the century that would see men actually walk on the moon, he created a vision of what that event might be like.
04:09George Millier
04:27Essential to Millier's comic view of a landing on the moon was an encounter with aliens. Such encounters have been dreamed of with mingled fear and hope for a long time.
04:45To be continued...
04:49...
04:51...
04:53...
04:57...
04:59...
05:07Ironically, Vellier's view of the return to Earth was not unlike a modern Apollo splashdown
05:21and recovery.
05:27Percival Lowell was one of many who contemplated the possibilities of life on other worlds.
05:32He was not a filmmaker, but a man of science. Lowell's passion was something he saw on the
05:38face of Mars. Lowell came to Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894 to build an observatory. He hoped that
05:48the clear desert air would afford him a better look at Mars than any astronomer before him
05:54had been able to achieve.
05:57The 24-inch refracting telescope Lowell installed on the site was the most advanced of the day.
06:09When all was ready, Lowell trained his eye on Mars. The conclusions he reached about what
06:15he saw made him one of the most controversial scientists of the age. Arizona newspaper man
06:22George Hoyt has written a definitive biography of Percival Lowell. His research focused on
06:29Lowell's fascination with Mars and with the remarkable conclusions he made after long study.
06:34Percival Lowell thought that there was an intelligent life of some form on Mars. He deduced this logically
06:44from the existence of what he thought were canals on Mars, lines that he could see in the telescope
06:50that were highly geometrical and he couldn't explain them in any other way except to assume
06:57that some intelligent beings had constructed these lines.
07:05Lowell's observatory is still in use today. Its creator died in 1916, having fired the imaginations of
07:13many and tasted the ridicule of others. Later research indicates that Lowell's canals were illusions,
07:21but the remarkable events of 1976 have proven the astronomer right on many of his other observations.
07:29He thought that Mars was in what he called the terrestrial stage of planetary evolution,
07:35and that was the stage after the one that the Earth was in, which was the Terraqueus stage. In short,
07:41the Earth had oceans. Mars, he thought, had already lost its oceans, but it did have oceans at one time.
07:49Mars was drying up, Mars was desiccating, and he coined the word desertism for what was happening to Mars,
07:56and he thought that it was also just beginning to appear on Earth. Lowell's observation about Earth's
08:04changing climate was profound. The forces at work in the solar system have a rhythm and a reason beyond
08:14the grasp of most men. Changes that are imperceptible from man's tiny window on the universe can have
08:21profound consequences. Lowell believed that some small shift in the orbit of Mars or some fluctuation
08:29in the sun's rays had gradually deprived Mars of life-giving water. He saw indications that the same
08:37processes were at work on Earth. Could it be that some Martian scientist was able to warn his people in time?
08:44At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, scientists like Harold Klein are studying
08:52the similarities between Earth and Mars that Percival Lowell was the first to recognize.
08:58Well, it's very difficult to talk about the evolution of a planet like Mars without too much information.
09:08The general theory at present is that both Mars and the Earth were formed at the same time,
09:13about five billion years ago. One would then postulate that at the beginning when the solar
09:21system was created, Mars had a much denser atmosphere than it has now, and that in many ways it was much
09:27more similar to the Earth and perhaps, therefore, was conducive to the origin of life on that planet,
09:35as we believe was the case on this planet.
09:37Water would have been essential if life on Mars was to develop as we know it.
09:48Gerald Soffin is a Mars geologist.
09:51The important thing to understand is that both planets were, at one time, hydrological planets.
09:56They were planets that had flooded amounts of water, and that that water, that simple molecule,
10:01dominated for a great, great period of time, the course, the history of the planet. Now,
10:06there's no, no water on Mars today. There's no flooding water. There's certainly atmospheric
10:11water, and we now know the poles of Mars are water. So somewhere along the way, Mars went one way,
10:17the Earth went the other way. What effect might the radical change in the Martian environment have
10:27had on life there? We're asking the question, if there is life on Mars, was it a separate event
10:34from the evolution of life on Earth? It's entirely possible that what we find on Mars, possible,
10:39not likely, is so close to our own that we've discovered, in a sense, the same event, the terrestrial
10:45life and the Earth life, because we're related to the same event that took place some time ago.
10:52Some time ago, indeed. And the question remains, could the birth of the sun, some five billion
11:00years ago, have given life to two worlds instead of one?
11:15Mission Control, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the foothills above Pasadena, California.
11:23It is from here that an ambitious undertaking in space will be directed.
11:27The target is Mars, 212 million miles from Earth.
11:34Men have walked on the moon, but this journey to Mars will take 11 months.
11:38It's too long for man now, but not for his machines.
11:45Copy, thank you.
11:47And the teen orders in for 215602.
11:52Copy, thank you.
11:55A Titan Centaur lifts off from Cape Kennedy. It is August 20th, 1975.
12:02In the nose cone is a machine of ingenious artifice. It is called Viking.
12:08Men have learned to extend their intelligence beyond the confines of their fragile bodies,
12:13into icy space, and onto unknown worlds. The machine will go where men cannot for the present go.
12:21It will obey the commands of the scientists in Pasadena, sitting at their computers,
12:2635 miles from the surfing beach at Malibu.
12:31The voyage itself is largely uneventful.
12:44Soon, however, the command center at Pasadena will be alive with activity.
12:48Yeah, Art, uh, looking at the, uh, I got the sheet here with me for the ranging for today.
12:53Okay, uh, first range, uh, eight decimal two seven zero eight nine.
13:03Okay, how do the correlation go?
13:05Ten months from liftoff, Viking 1 enters the orbit of Mars.
13:10An instrument package descends to the surface and awaits instructions from Earth.
13:14Now we chose Mars primarily because Mars is, I guess you would call Mars our true sister planet to Earth.
13:25The biology that we know in the universe is focused mostly on the Earth.
13:28That's the only life that we know. Our, our life, we terrestrial beings, we the trees, and we the people.
13:34And our candidate for, uh, for a search began with Mars.
13:39Eight, decimal two seven zero eight nine.
13:44The first Viking lander is joined by a second six weeks later.
13:48With infrared sensors and special television cameras, men get their first close look at Mars.
13:54Nine seven, second power.
13:58Calibrate out the effects of the solar corona.
14:02Soil samples yield particularly fascinating results.
14:05The data from both landers can be interpreted as being due to living organisms,
14:11can also be interpreted from what we now know as being due to some kind of very active surface
14:19chemistry going on on the planet.
14:24In Pasadena, a mock-up of the Viking lander is used to rehearse every move the real lander would be
14:30required to make.
14:34The dexterity of the lander is amazing.
14:37Sighting through television eyes, programmers on Earth trigger Viking to scoop up samples of soil or rock.
14:46Samples are dropped into a sifting mechanism that sorts particles for specific tests.
14:52Dr. Leslie Orgel points out that the tests are inconclusive.
14:56The experiments that we've done with the Viking on Mars this time doesn't give any evidence at all
15:04for any compounds left over from life in the past on Mars. But that doesn't of course mean at all that
15:12there wasn't any life on Mars. There may have been compounds there and they may have been destroyed.
15:18Well, if you want to postulate a technological civilization on Mars, which has died out,
15:27you would then also have to have some mechanism to cover up, cover over any sort of buildings or any
15:35sort of vast projects. It is conceivable that you might have had such a civilization which then got
15:43covered up by some cataclysmic events such as a massive Marsquake which completely covered over
15:50everything and that all the artifacts of your ancient civilization are unburied in some way.
15:56None of this is visible, you see, from from our pictures now that we're taking from the Viking
16:01spacecraft which could see objects as small as about, oh, 15 yards or so or bigger in size.
16:12The Viking scientists believe that the Martian sky must have once resembled our own.
16:18Whether some natural catastrophe obliterated an ancient Mars civilization, we don't know.
16:23It seems, however, that Earth is not immune to the same forces that made Mars a desert.
16:30There are three schools of thought. Some believe a slight tilt in the Earth's axis is bringing on a new ice age.
16:39Others feel the Earth's climate is drying and the deserts are slowly encroaching on population centers.
16:44Another view is that men have so altered the natural environment, no one can predict the future.
16:55Tons of pollution pour into the air from the great cities of Earth.
16:59The problem has been only recently recognized and the effects of man's tampering can only be guessed at.
17:05Men have done worse things than pour smoke into the sky.
17:23It is possible that all of Earth may one day resemble the southwest American desert.
17:41Mars looked much like this to the electronic eyes of Viking.
17:45The machines scanned the horizon and recorded no sign of intelligent life.
17:50It is unlikely that life evolving elsewhere in the universe would follow the same path as life on Earth.
17:57If that were to happen, however, Mars would seem to be the likely host.
18:03The two worlds have much in common, even now.
18:07Perhaps Viking didn't see all there was to see.
18:10Beyond that, could men recognize the works of a civilization radically different from his own?
18:21If there were Martians and they knew what was happening to their planet, perhaps they chose to abandon it.
18:43On Earth, men have developed the technology to create orbiting habitats.
18:54Theoretically, these artificial worlds could be built on an immense scale in weightless space.
19:00They could provide a safe refuge for long voyages in space.
19:05Voyages to new worlds.
19:06It is not inconceivable that Earth once held the same promise and fascination for Martians that the red planet now holds for mankind.
19:19Viking may be a step in the return voyage.
19:23This is the beginning.
19:38This is really truly the beginning.
19:40Regardless of what happens next year or even a decade from now,
19:43we have started what will become an adventure of mankind
19:46in searching for not only the lowly forms of life, but eventually, I think, to search for intelligent life.
19:53This is one of the milestones in the course of human destiny to find cousins.
20:02It is the inevitable path of man's destiny that he will explore the heavens.
20:06We're only now talking about the timetable.
20:13We'll adapt the environment to ourselves.
20:14We will change the atmosphere.
20:16We'll do what is called planetary engineering.
20:18It doesn't exist yet, but it will someday.
20:21For example, with all that water at the pole of Mars, there's no point in leaving it frozen there.
20:27We might as well melt it and form an ocean.
20:29And that's not so fantastic.
20:32It's possible to dream about things like that.
20:37It is also possible to dream that should we reshape the Martian landscape,
20:41we would be settling an old, old account.
20:45Perhaps they did as much for us once.
20:51If we, on the other hand, are unique in the universe,
20:55the time is approaching when we can spread our kind to the stars.
21:00Albert Einstein believed the universe was shaped like a saddle.
21:17By traveling in a straight line, one could eventually wind up where he started.
21:21With the universe, as with life, endings seemed to merge with beginnings.
21:28Was the end of some undiscovered civilization on Mars the beginning of our civilization on Earth?
21:34Will our first steps on some dusky Martian plane be a homecoming?
21:39Only when we've been there can we prove or dismiss the notion that some calamity of nature or poverty of spirit
21:47might have overtaken apparent civilization on the fourth planet from the sun.
21:53It would be well for us to find out.
21:55For it has been observed that those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to relive it.
22:21So
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