Wednesday, February 15, 2017, 6 – 7:30 p.m. EST

Please join the Smithsonian Libraries for a lecture featuring Dr. Joshua Nall, Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, at the University of Cambridge, UK.

This event is free. RSVP is requested. Contact us at 202.633.2241 or silrsvp@si.edu with any questions, or for access services (preferably two weeks prior to the program).

Humans have long been intrigued by the possibility that Mars might harbor life. Planetary scientists nowadays continue to hunt for evidence of it, and space technologists even advocate settling ourselves there permanently. These are bold projects, and in this talk I suggest that we look back before we look forward, to consider how humans studied and thought about Mars before the Space Age. Investigating 19th-century arguments over whether the red planet was teeming with intelligent life, and exploring fantastical stories about what that life might do to us, reveal important lessons, I will argue, for how we understand the next century of Martian exploration.