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Read Carl Saganís ìMars:
A New World to Exploreî
in the December 1967 issue
of National Geographic by
visiting archive.national
geographic.com.photos were grainy and inconclusive and
showed only one percent of the planet.
In 1967 Sagan wrote a feature story for
National Geographic that explored the
question that had occupied his thoughts
as a child: Is there life on Mars? The piece
included a rendering of a theoretical
Martian, to which he gave serious atten-
tion. In correspondence with his editors,
Sagan expressed dismay at an early draft
of the art, saying the Martian resembled
“a man dressed up in a turtle suit.” He
envisioned “a benign Martian vegetar-
ian” with no eyes. “Let’s have him find
his way in the daytime by his little red
tendrils and at night he will dig a hole.”
The final painting (above) satisfied
Sagan, his years of study evident in the
details: The creature’s spindly limbs suit
Mars’s low gravity; its glass-like shield
blocks ultraviolet radiation. The art was
a paean to the Martian imaginings of
Sagan’s youth. In 1996, shortly before
his death, Sagan recorded a message
to future Mars explorers: “Whatever the
reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re
there. And I wish I was with you.”Carl Sagan spent his childhood im-
mersed in Mars. The future scientist,
an avid reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
science fiction, would pass evenings ly-
ing in vacant lots, looking up at the sky
and “thinking myself to that twinkling
red place.” He fantasized about Martians,
their bodies a kaleidoscope of color—
Burroughs’s Mars had two more prima-
ry colors than Earth—with removable
heads but decidedly human forms. “I
didn’t realize then the chauvinism of
making people on another planet like us.”
But in 1965 the first flyby mission to
Mars returned photos of pristine rock—
and nothing else. It was a gut punch. The
New York Times declared Mars a dead
planet. “The fanciful Martian mega-
fauna,” John Updike wrote many years
later for this magazine, “were swept into
oblivion.” Sagan was undeterred: TheCARL SAGAN
IMAGINES MARSBy Natasha DalyPAINTING: DOUGLAS S. CHAFFEE‘LET’S HAVE
[THE MARTIAN]
FIND HIS WAY
IN THE DAYTIME
BY HIS LITTLE
RED TENDRILS
AND AT NIGHT
HE WILL DIG
A HOLE.’
CARL SAGAN IN A LETTER
TO HIS EDITOR, 1967