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254-491: Mars , the fourth planet from the Sun , has appeared as a setting in works of fiction since at least the mid-1600s. Trends in the planet's portrayal have largely been influenced by advances in planetary science . It became the most popular celestial object in fiction in the late 1800s, when it became clear that there was no life on the Moon . The predominant genre depicting Mars at the time

508-461: A Martian solar year is equal to 1.88 Earth years (687 Earth days). Mars has two natural satellites that are small and irregular in shape: Phobos and Deimos . The relatively flat plains in northern parts of Mars strongly contrast with the cratered terrain in southern highlands – this terrain observation is known as the Martian dichotomy . Mars hosts many enormous extinct volcanoes (the tallest

762-629: A flying carpet as in the 1905 novel Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation by Edwin Lester Arnold , a balloon as in A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont among the Planets , or an "aeroplane" as in the 1893 novel Unveiling a Parallel : A Romance by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Robinson Merchant  [ ca ] (writing jointly as "Two Women of the West"). They might also visit in

1016-534: A Mars colony economically sustainable by way of resource extraction. Mars colonies seeking independence from or outright revolting against Earth is a recurring motif; in del Rey's Police Your Planet a revolution is precipitated by Earth using unrest against the colony's corrupt mayor as a pretext for bringing Mars under firmer Terran control, and in Tubb's Alien Dust the colonists threaten Earth with nuclear weapons unless their demands for necessary resources are met. In

1270-506: A Martian moon, described a fictional voyage to it in the 1744 story " Die Geschwinde Reise " ("The Speedy Journey"). The moons' small sizes have made them unpopular settings in science fiction, with some exceptions such as the 1955 novel Phobos, the Robot Planet by Paul Capon and the 2001 short story " Romance with Phobic Variations " by Tom Purdom in the case of Phobos, and the 1936 short story "Crystals of Madness" by D. L. James in

1524-402: A Parallel: A Romance , depicts a man from Earth visiting two egalitarian societies on Mars: one where women have adopted male vices and one where equality has brought out everyone's best qualities. The 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten ( Two Planets ) by German science fiction pioneer Kurd Lasswitz contrasts a utopian society on Mars with that society's colonialist actions on Earth. The book

1778-480: A Persian army under Ariobarzanes and then hurried to Persepolis before its garrison could loot the treasury. On entering Persepolis, Alexander allowed his troops to loot the city for several days. Alexander stayed in Persepolis for five months. During his stay, a fire broke out in the eastern palace of Xerxes I and spread to the rest of the city. Possible causes include a drunken accident or deliberate revenge for

2032-517: A breathable (albeit thin) atmosphere, a diverse ecosystem including sentient Martians, and Lowellian canals. Martian canals remained a prominent symbol of this more traditional vision of Mars, appearing both in lighthearted works like the 1954 novel Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown and more serious ones like the 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis and the 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. Some works attempted to reconcile both visions of Mars, one example being

2286-485: A classical albedo feature it contains. In April 2023, The New York Times reported an updated global map of Mars based on images from the Hope spacecraft . A related, but much more detailed, global Mars map was released by NASA on 16 April 2023. The vast upland region Tharsis contains several massive volcanoes, which include the shield volcano Olympus Mons . The edifice is over 600 km (370 mi) wide. Because

2540-477: A classroom. In return for teaching Alexander, Philip agreed to rebuild Aristotle's hometown of Stageira , which Philip had razed, and to repopulate it by buying and freeing the ex-citizens who were slaves, or pardoning those who were in exile. Mieza was like a boarding school for Alexander and the children of Macedonian nobles, such as Ptolemy , Hephaistion , and Cassander . Many of these students would become his friends and future generals, and are often known as

2794-633: A dream as in the 1899 play A Message from Mars by Richard Ganthony , teleport via astral projection as in Burroughs's A Princess of Mars , or use a long-range communication device while staying on Earth as in Braine's Messages from Mars, By Aid of the Telescope Plant and the 1894 novel W nieznane światy ( To the Unknown Worlds ) by Polish science fiction writer Władysław Umiński . Anti-gravity

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3048-554: A fleet of 120 ships with crews numbering 38,000 drawn from Macedon and various Greek city states, mercenaries, and feudally raised soldiers from Thrace , Paionia , and Illyria . He showed his intent to conquer the entirety of the Persian Empire by throwing a spear into Asian soil and saying he accepted Asia as a gift from the gods. This also showed Alexander's eagerness to fight, in contrast to his father's preference for diplomacy. After an initial victory against Persian forces at

3302-422: A global magnetic field, the types and distribution of auroras there differ from those on Earth; rather than being mostly restricted to polar regions as is the case on Earth, a Martian aurora can encompass the planet. In September 2017, NASA reported radiation levels on the surface of the planet Mars were temporarily doubled , and were associated with an aurora 25 times brighter than any observed earlier, due to

3556-482: A high ratio of deuterium in Gale Crater , though not significantly high enough to suggest the former presence of an ocean. Other scientists caution that these results have not been confirmed, and point out that Martian climate models have not yet shown that the planet was warm enough in the past to support bodies of liquid water. Near the northern polar cap is the 81.4 kilometres (50.6 mi) wide Korolev Crater , which

3810-483: A low of 30  Pa (0.0044  psi ) on Olympus Mons to over 1,155 Pa (0.1675 psi) in Hellas Planitia , with a mean pressure at the surface level of 600 Pa (0.087 psi). The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to that found 35 kilometres (22 mi) above Earth's surface. The resulting mean surface pressure is only 0.6% of Earth's 101.3 kPa (14.69 psi). The scale height of

4064-442: A massive, and unexpected, solar storm in the middle of the month. Mars has seasons, alternating between its northern and southern hemispheres, similar to on Earth. Additionally the orbit of Mars has, compared to Earth's, a large eccentricity and approaches perihelion when it is summer in its southern hemisphere and winter in its northern, and aphelion when it is winter in its southern hemisphere and summer in its northern. As

4318-399: A mention that the advanced astronomers of Laputa have discovered two Martian moons. The 1752 work Micromégas by Voltaire likewise mentions two moons of Mars; astronomy historian William Sheehan  [ Wikidata ] surmises that Voltaire was inspired by Swift. German astronomer Eberhard Christian Kindermann  [ de ] , mistakenly believing that he had discovered

4572-530: A minimum thickness of 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) in Isidis Planitia , and a maximum thickness of 117 kilometres (73 mi) in the southern Tharsis plateau. For comparison, Earth's crust averages 27.3 ± 4.8 km in thickness. The most abundant elements in the Martian crust are silicon , oxygen , iron , magnesium , aluminium , calcium , and potassium . Mars is confirmed to be seismically active; in 2019 it

4826-531: A place where political dissidents and criminals are exiled in Police Your Planet , and the site of an outright prison colony in the 1966 novel Farewell, Earth's Bliss by David G. Compton . The vision of Mars as a prison colony recurs in Japanese science fiction author Moto Hagio 's 1978–1979 manga series Star Red ( スター・レッド ), a homage to Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles . The independence theme

5080-530: A primary setting , though it did appear in some stories visiting multiple locations in the Solar System . The first fictional tour of the planets, the 1656 work Itinerarium exstaticum by Athanasius Kircher , portrays Mars as a volcanic wasteland. It also appears briefly in the 1686 work Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes ( Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds ) by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle but

5334-670: A prophecy. During his stay in Egypt, he founded Alexandria , which would become the prosperous capital of the Ptolemaic Kingdom after his death. Control of Egypt passed to Ptolemy I (son of Lagos), the founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty (305–30 BC) after the death of Alexander. Leaving Egypt in 331 BC, Alexander marched eastward into Achaemenid Assyria in Upper Mesopotamia (now northern Iraq ) and defeated Darius again at

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5588-467: A record of erosion caused by the catastrophic release of water from subsurface aquifers, though some of these structures have been hypothesized to result from the action of glaciers or lava. One of the larger examples, Ma'adim Vallis , is 700 kilometres (430 mi) long, much greater than the Grand Canyon, with a width of 20 kilometres (12 mi) and a depth of 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) in places. It

5842-581: A remnant of that ring. The geological history of Mars can be split into many periods, but the following are the three primary periods: Geological activity is still taking place on Mars. The Athabasca Valles is home to sheet-like lava flows created about 200 million years ago. Water flows in the grabens called the Cerberus Fossae occurred less than 20 million years ago, indicating equally recent volcanic intrusions. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured images of avalanches. Mars

6096-592: A result of poisoning by Olympias. News of Philip's death roused many states into revolt, including Thebes, Athens, Thessaly, and the Thracian tribes north of Macedon. When news of the revolts reached Alexander, he responded quickly. Though advised to use diplomacy, Alexander mustered 3,000 Macedonian cavalry and rode south towards Thessaly. He found the Thessalian army occupying the pass between Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa , and ordered his men to ride over Mount Ossa. When

6350-471: A result, the humans who visit succumb to boredom and leave ahead of schedule—to the approval of the Martians, who have come to view them as a corrupting influence. The 1892 novel Messages from Mars, By Aid of the Telescope Plant by Robert D. Braine is unusual in portraying a completely rural Martian utopia without any cities. An early work of feminist science fiction , Jones's and Merchant's 1893 novel Unveiling

6604-460: A result, the seasons in its southern hemisphere are more extreme and the seasons in its northern are milder than would otherwise be the case. The summer temperatures in the south can be warmer than the equivalent summer temperatures in the north by up to 30 °C (54 °F). Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −110 °C (−166 °F) to highs of up to 35 °C (95 °F) in equatorial summer. The wide range in temperatures

6858-462: A series of loosely connected stories depicting the first few decades of human efforts to colonize Mars. Unlike later works on this theme, The Martian Chronicles makes no attempt at realism (Mars has a breathable atmosphere, for instance, even though spectrographic analysis had at that time revealed no detectable amounts of oxygen ); Bradbury said that "Mars is a mirror, not a crystal", a vehicle for social commentary rather than attempting to predict

7112-464: A small crater (later called Airy-0 ), located in the Sinus Meridiani ("Middle Bay" or "Meridian Bay"), was chosen by Merton E. Davies , Harold Masursky , and Gérard de Vaucouleurs for the definition of 0.0° longitude to coincide with the original selection. Because Mars has no oceans, and hence no " sea level ", a zero-elevation surface had to be selected as a reference level; this is called

7366-478: A storm over a small area, to gigantic storms that cover the entire planet. They tend to occur when Mars is closest to the Sun, and have been shown to increase global temperature. Seasons also produce dry ice covering polar ice caps . Large areas of the polar regions of Mars While Mars contains water in larger amounts , most of it is dust covered water ice at the Martian polar ice caps . The volume of water ice in

7620-516: A study on how Mars might be settled and terraformed presented in the form of a fiction narrative, was influential on science and fiction alike. Kim Stanley Robinson was an early prolific writer on the subject with the 1982 short story " Exploring Fossil Canyon ", the 1984 novel Icehenge , and the 1985 short story " Green Mars ". Turner revisited the concept in 1988 with Genesis , a 10,000-line epic poem written in iambic pentameter , and Ian McDonald combined terraforming with magical realism in

7874-609: A usurper and set out to defeat him. This campaign, initially against Bessus, turned into a grand tour of central Asia. Alexander founded a series of new cities, all called Alexandria, including modern Kandahar in Afghanistan, and Alexandria Eschate ("The Furthest") in modern Tajikistan . The campaign took Alexander through Media , Parthia , Aria (West Afghanistan), Drangiana , Arachosia (South and Central Afghanistan), Bactria (North and Central Afghanistan), and Scythia . In 329 BC, Spitamenes , who held an undefined position in

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8128-500: A variation on Christianity where woman was created first, in contrast to the conventional Genesis creation narrative . Hugo Gernsback depicted a science-based utopia on Mars in the 1915–1917 serial Baron Münchhausen's New Scientific Adventures , but by and large, World War I spelled the end for utopian Martian fiction. In Russian science fiction , Mars became the setting for socialist utopias and revolutions. The 1908 novel Red Star ( Красная звезда ) by Alexander Bogdanov

8382-802: A vast swath of territory between the Adriatic Sea and the Indus River . Alexander endeavored to reach the "ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea" and invaded India in 326 BC, achieving an important victory over Porus , an ancient Indian king of present-day Punjab , at the Battle of the Hydaspes . Due to the mutiny of his homesick troops, he eventually turned back at the Beas River and later died in 323 BC in Babylon ,

8636-426: A vehicle for satire of contemporary Chinese society. In the 1950 film Rocketship X-M , Martians are depicted as disfigured cavepeople inhabiting a barren wasteland, descendants of the few survivors of a nuclear holocaust ; in the 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis a survivor of nuclear holocaust on Mars comes to Earth for refuge but finds it to be similarly corrupt and degenerate. Inverting

8890-491: A very thick lithosphere compared to Earth. Below this the mantle gradually becomes more ductile, and the seismic wave velocity starts to grow again. The Martian mantle does not appear to have a thermally insulating layer analogous to Earth's lower mantle ; instead, below 1050 km in depth, it becomes mineralogically similar to Earth's transition zone . At the bottom of the mantle lies a basal liquid silicate layer approximately 150–180 km thick. Mars's iron and nickel core

9144-524: A work of fiction was in the 1905 novel Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation by Edwin Lester Arnold , one of the earliest examples of the planetary romance subgenre. The idea was developed further and popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1912–1943 Barsoom series starting with A Princess of Mars . Burroughs presents a Mars in need of human intervention to regain its vitality, a place where violence has replaced sexual desire. Science fiction critic Robert Crossley  [ Wikidata ] , in

9398-466: A year, there are large surface temperature swings on the surface between −78.5 °C (−109.3 °F) to 5.7 °C (42.3 °F) similar to Earth's seasons , as both planets have significant axial tilt . Mars was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. During the Noachian period (4.5 to 3.5 billion years ago), Mars's surface was marked by meteor impacts , valley formation, erosion, and

9652-527: Is Olympus Mons , 21.9 km or 13.6 mi tall) and one of the largest canyons in the Solar System ( Valles Marineris , 4,000 km or 2,500 mi long). Geologically , the planet is fairly active with marsquakes trembling underneath the ground, dust devils sweeping across the landscape, and cirrus clouds . Carbon dioxide is substantially present in Mars's polar ice caps and thin atmosphere . During

9906-452: Is Syrtis Major Planum . The permanent northern polar ice cap is named Planum Boreum . The southern cap is called Planum Australe . Mars's equator is defined by its rotation, but the location of its Prime Meridian was specified, as was Earth's (at Greenwich ), by choice of an arbitrary point; Mädler and Beer selected a line for their first maps of Mars in 1830. After the spacecraft Mariner 9 provided extensive imagery of Mars in 1972,

10160-479: Is a parody . The 1897 novel The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells , which depicts an alien invasion of Earth by Martians in search of resources, represented a turning point in Mars fiction. Rather than being portrayed as essentially human, Wells's Martians have a completely inhuman appearance and cannot be communicated with. Rather than being noble creatures to emulate, the Martians dispassionately kill and exploit

10414-497: Is a space opera set in part on Mars that was originally based on a role-playing game and later adapted to a television series starting in 2015 . Tom Chmielewski 's 2014 novel Lunar Dust, Martian Sands is a piece of noir fiction set partially on Mars. The Martian —book and film—is hard science fiction ; the film adaptation was described by the production team as being "as much science fact as science fiction". The 100th anniversary of Burroughs's A Princess of Mars in 2012 saw

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10668-406: Is a light albedo feature clearly visible from Earth. There are other notable impact features, such as Argyre , which is around 1,800 kilometres (1,100 mi) in diameter, and Isidis , which is around 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) in diameter. Due to the smaller mass and size of Mars, the probability of an object colliding with the planet is about half that of Earth. Mars is located closer to

10922-425: Is also occasionally used to refer to extraterrestrials in general. These inhabitants of Mars have variously been depicted as enlightened, evil, and decadent; in keeping with the conception of Mars as an older civilization than Earth, Westfahl refers to these as "good parents", "bad parents", and "dependent parents", respectively. Martians have also been equated with humans in different ways. Humans are revealed to be

11176-432: Is approximately half the diameter of Earth, with a surface area only slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land. Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of Earth's mass , resulting in about 38% of Earth's surface gravity . Mars is the only presently known example of a desert planet , a rocky planet with a surface akin to that of Earth's hot deserts . The red-orange appearance of

11430-440: Is based on the premise that the depictions of Mars that appear in older stories are not incorrect but reflect alternative universes ; the book is dedicated to "the Mars that used to be, but never was". The urge to recapture the romantic vision of Mars is reflected as part of the story in the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, where the people living on a desolate Mars enjoy reading old stories about

11684-766: Is completely molten, with no solid inner core. It is around half of Mars's radius, approximately 1650–1675 km, and is enriched in light elements such as sulfur , oxygen, carbon , and hydrogen . Mars is a terrestrial planet with a surface that consists of minerals containing silicon and oxygen, metals , and other elements that typically make up rock . The Martian surface is primarily composed of tholeiitic basalt , although parts are more silica -rich than typical basalt and may be similar to andesitic rocks on Earth, or silica glass. Regions of low albedo suggest concentrations of plagioclase feldspar , with northern low albedo regions displaying higher than normal concentrations of sheet silicates and high-silicon glass. Parts of

11938-429: Is divided into two kinds of areas, with differing albedo. The paler plains covered with dust and sand rich in reddish iron oxides were once thought of as Martian "continents" and given names like Arabia Terra ( land of Arabia ) or Amazonis Planitia ( Amazonian plain ). The dark features were thought to be seas, hence their names Mare Erythraeum , Mare Sirenum and Aurorae Sinus . The largest dark feature seen from Earth

12192-426: Is due to the thin atmosphere which cannot store much solar heat, the low atmospheric pressure (about 1% that of the atmosphere of Earth ), and the low thermal inertia of Martian soil. The planet is 1.52 times as far from the Sun as Earth, resulting in just 43% of the amount of sunlight. Mars has the largest dust storms in the Solar System, reaching speeds of over 160 km/h (100 mph). These can vary from

12446-496: Is employed in several works including Greg's Across the Zodiac , MacColl's Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet , and the 1890 novel A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie . Occasionally, the method of transport is not addressed at all. Some stories take the opposite approach of having Martians come to Earth; examples include the 1891 novel The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion by Thomas Blot (pseudonym of William Simpson) and

12700-437: Is explored in the 1994 novel Climbing Olympus by Kevin J. Anderson , as the humans that have been "areoformed" to survive on Mars do not wish the planet to be altered to accommodate unmodified humans at their expense. Other works where terraforming is eschewed in favour of alternatives include the 1996 novel River of Dust by Alexander Jablokov , where the settlers create a liveable environment by burrowing underground, and

12954-531: Is found in hibernation there in the 1977 short story " In the Hall of the Martian Kings " by John Varley . By the turn of the millennium, the idea of microbial life on Mars gained popularity, appearing in the 1999 novel The Martian Race by Gregory Benford and the 2001 novel The Secret of Life by Paul J. McAuley . As stories about an inhabited Mars fell out of favour in the mid-1900s amid mounting evidence of

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13208-810: Is largely dismissed as uninteresting due to its presumed similarity to Earth. Mars is home to spirits in several works of the mid-1700s. In the anonymously published 1755 work A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth , it is a heavenly place where, among others, Alexander the Great enjoys a second life. In the 1758 work De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari ( Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System ) by Emanuel Swedenborg ,

13462-409: Is non-human and intelligent without being hostile. In particular, one Martian creature called Tweel is found to be intelligent but have thought processes that are utterly inhuman. This creates an impenetrable language barrier between the alien and the human it encounters, and they are limited to communicating through the universal language of mathematics . Asimov would later say that this story met

13716-813: Is recreated and the 1957 short story " Omnilingual " by H. Beam Piper in which scientists attempt to decipher their fifty-thousand-year-old language; the 1933 novel The Outlaws of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline and the 1949 novel The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett employ time travel to set stories in the past when Mars was still alive. The 1934 short story " A Martian Odyssey " by Stanley G. Weinbaum contains what Webster describes as "the first really alien aliens" in science fiction, in contrast to previous depictions of Martians as monsters or essentially human. The story broke new ground in portraying an entire Martian ecosystem wholly unlike that of Earth—inhabited by species that are alien in anatomy and inscrutable in behaviour—and in depicting extraterrestrial life that

13970-452: Is reflected in the 1970 novel Die Erde ist nah ( The Earth Is Near ) by Czech science fiction writer Luděk Pešek , which depicts the members of an astrobiological expedition on Mars driven to despair by the realization that their search for life there is futile. A handful of authors still found ways to place life on the red planet: microbial life exists on Mars in the 1977 novel The Martian Inca by Ian Watson , and intelligent life

14224-496: Is said to have seen himself, in a dream, securing his wife's womb with a seal engraved with a lion's image. Plutarch offered a variety of interpretations for these dreams: that Olympias was pregnant before her marriage, indicated by the sealing of her womb; or that Alexander's father was Zeus . Ancient commentators were divided about whether the ambitious Olympias promulgated the story of Alexander's divine parentage, variously claiming that she had told Alexander, or that she dismissed

14478-510: Is striking: northern plains flattened by lava flows contrast with the southern highlands, pitted and cratered by ancient impacts. It is possible that, four billion years ago, the Northern Hemisphere of Mars was struck by an object one-tenth to two-thirds the size of Earth's Moon . If this is the case, the Northern Hemisphere of Mars would be the site of an impact crater 10,600 by 8,500 kilometres (6,600 by 5,300 mi) in size, or roughly

14732-419: Is the primary example of this, and inspired many others. Red Star portrays a socialist society on Mars from the perspective of a Russian Bolshevik invited there, where the struggle between classes has been replaced with a common struggle against the harshness of nature. The 1913 prequel Engineer Menni ( Инженер Мэнни ), also by Bogdanov, is set several centuries earlier and serves as an origin story for

14986-606: Is thought to have been carved by flowing water early in Mars's history. The youngest of these channels is thought to have formed only a few million years ago. Elsewhere, particularly on the oldest areas of the Martian surface, finer-scale, dendritic networks of valleys are spread across significant proportions of the landscape. Features of these valleys and their distribution strongly imply that they were carved by runoff resulting from precipitation in early Mars history. Subsurface water flow and groundwater sapping may play important subsidiary roles in some networks, but precipitation

15240-478: The Viking probes suggesting that there might be substantial quantities of non-liquid and sub-surface water on Mars ; among the earliest such works are the 1977 novel The Martian Inca by Ian Watson and the 1978 novel A Double Shadow by Frederick Turner . Works depicting the terraforming of Mars continued to appear throughout the 1980s. The 1984 novel The Greening of Mars by James Lovelock and Michael Allaby ,

15494-537: The areoid of Mars, analogous to the terrestrial geoid . Zero altitude was defined by the height at which there is 610.5  Pa (6.105  mbar ) of atmospheric pressure. This pressure corresponds to the triple point of water, and it is about 0.6% of the sea level surface pressure on Earth (0.006 atm). For mapping purposes, the United States Geological Survey divides the surface of Mars into thirty cartographic quadrangles , each named for

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15748-589: The Achaemenid Persian Empire and began a series of campaigns that lasted for 10 years. Following his conquest of Asia Minor , Alexander broke the power of Achaemenid Persia in a series of decisive battles, including those at Issus and Gaugamela ; he subsequently overthrew Darius III and conquered the Achaemenid Empire in its entirety. After the fall of Persia, the Macedonian Empire held

16002-521: The American Civil War who is made superhumanly strong by the lower gravity of Mars —encounters indigenous Martians representing Native Americans . Burroughs's vision of Mars would go on to have an influence approaching but not quite reaching Wells's, inspiring the works of many other authors—for instance, C. L. Moore 's stories about Northwest Smith starting with the 1933 short story " Shambleau ". Another author who followed Burroughs's lead in

16256-428: The Battle of Gaugamela . Darius once more fled the field, and Alexander chased him as far as Arbela . Gaugamela would be the final and decisive encounter between the two. Darius fled over the mountains to Ecbatana (modern Hamadan ) while Alexander captured Babylon . Babylonian astronomical diaries say that "the king of the world, Alexander" sent his scouts with a message to the people of Babylon before entering

16510-659: The Battle of the Granicus , Alexander accepted the surrender of the Persian provincial capital and treasury of Sardis ; he then proceeded along the Ionian coast, granting autonomy and democracy to the cities. Miletus , held by Achaemenid forces, required a delicate siege operation, with Persian naval forces nearby. Further south, at Halicarnassus , in Caria , Alexander successfully waged his first large-scale siege , eventually forcing his opponents,

16764-755: The Indian subcontinent . The Hellenistic period developed through the Roman Empire into modern Western culture ; the Greek language became the lingua franca of the region and was the predominant language of the Byzantine Empire until its collapse in the mid-15th century AD. Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mould of Achilles , featuring prominently in the historical and mythical traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. His military achievements and unprecedented enduring successes in battle made him

17018-562: The Mars Direct proposal by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin to fiction by depicting a private sector competition to conduct the first crewed Mars landing with a large monetary reward attached. Zubrin would later write a story of his own along the same lines: the 2001 novel First Landing . In a variation on the theme, Ian McDonald 's 2002 short story " The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars " (included in

17272-554: The Mars Express orbiter found to be filled with approximately 2,200 cubic kilometres (530 cu mi) of water ice. Alexander the Great Alexander III of Macedon ( Ancient Greek : Ἀλέξανδρος , romanized :  Alexandros ; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), most commonly known as Alexander the Great , was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon . He succeeded his father Philip II to

17526-500: The Seven Wonders of the World , burnt down. This led Hegesias of Magnesia to say that it had burnt down because Artemis was away, attending the birth of Alexander. Such legends may have emerged when Alexander was king, and possibly at his instigation, to show that he was superhuman and destined for greatness from conception. In his early years, Alexander was raised by a nurse, Lanike , sister of Alexander's future general Cleitus

17780-461: The Taurus into Cilicia . After a long pause due to an illness, he marched on towards Syria. Though outmanoeuvered by Darius's significantly larger army, he marched back to Cilicia, where he defeated Darius at Issus . Darius fled the battle, causing his army to collapse, and left behind his wife, his two daughters, his mother Sisygambis , and a fabulous treasure. He offered a peace treaty that included

18034-544: The Trail of Tears , but the indigenous population soon goes extinct due to chickenpox in a parallel to the virgin soil epidemics that devastated Native American populations as a result of the Columbian exchange . The majority of works about colonizing Mars endeavoured to portray the challenges of doing so realistically. The hostile environment of the planet is countered by the colonists bringing life-support systems in works like

18288-644: The Yellowknife Bay area in the Glenelg terrain. In September 2015, NASA announced that they had found strong evidence of hydrated brine flows in recurring slope lineae , based on spectrometer readings of the darkened areas of slopes. These streaks flow downhill in Martian summer, when the temperature is above −23 °C, and freeze at lower temperatures. These observations supported earlier hypotheses, based on timing of formation and their rate of growth, that these dark streaks resulted from water flowing just below

18542-415: The asteroid belt , so it has an increased chance of being struck by materials from that source. Mars is more likely to be struck by short-period comets , i.e. , those that lie within the orbit of Jupiter . Martian craters can have a morphology that suggests the ground became wet after the meteor impact. The large canyon, Valles Marineris (Latin for " Mariner Valleys", also known as Agathodaemon in

18796-561: The planetary romance style of older stories whose visions of Mars are now outdated; Martin compared it to the common practice of setting Westerns in a romanticized version of the Old West rather than a more realistic one. Stories about the first human mission to Mars became popular after US president George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989, which proposed to accomplish this feat by 2019, though

19050-469: The possible presence of water oceans . The Hesperian period (3.5 to 3.3–2.9 billion years ago) was dominated by widespread volcanic activity and flooding that carved immense outflow channels . The Amazonian period, which continues to the present, has been marked by the wind as a dominant influence on geological processes . Due to Mars's geological history, the possibility of past or present life on Mars remains of great scientific interest. Since

19304-467: The pulp era of science fiction, appearing in works such as the 1928 short story " The Menace of Mars " by Clare Winger Harris , the 1931 short story " Monsters of Mars " by Edmond Hamilton , and the 1935 short story "Mars Colonizes" by Miles J. Breuer . It quickly became regarded as a cliché and inspired a kind of countermovement that portrayed Martians as meek in works like the 1933 short story " The Forgotten Man of Space " by P. Schuyler Miller and

19558-659: The science fiction genre. Life on Mars appeared frequently in fiction throughout the first half of the 1900s. Apart from enlightened as in the utopian works from the turn of the century, or evil as in the works inspired by Wells, intelligent and human-like Martians began to be depicted as decadent, a portrayal that was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Barsoom series and adopted by Leigh Brackett among others. More exotic lifeforms appeared in stories like Stanley G. Weinbaum 's " A Martian Odyssey ". The theme of colonizing Mars replaced stories about native inhabitants of

19812-418: The utopian fiction of the late 1800s. In-depth treatment of the nuances of the concept was pioneered by Kurd Lasswitz with the 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten , wherein the Martians visit Earth to share their more advanced knowledge with humans and gradually end up acting as an occupying colonial power. Martians sharing wisdom or knowledge with humans is a recurring element in these stories, and some works such as

20066-455: The "Companions". Aristotle taught Alexander and his companions about medicine, philosophy, morals, religion, logic, and art. Under Aristotle's tutelage, Alexander developed a passion for the works of Homer , and in particular the Iliad ; Aristotle gave him an annotated copy, which Alexander later carried on his campaigns. Alexander was able to quote Euripides from memory. In his youth, Alexander

20320-577: The 1889 novel Uranie by Camille Flammarion as a form of afterlife , the 1896 novel Daybreak: The Story of an Old World by James Cowan  [ Wikidata ] depicts Jesus reincarnated there, and the protagonist of the 1903 novel The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars by Louis Pope Gratacap  [ Wikidata ] receives a message in Morse code from his deceased father on Mars. Other supernatural phenomena include telepathy in Greg's Across

20574-436: The 1893 novel A Cityless and Countryless World by Henry Olerich . A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury , a swamp-and-jungle Venus , and a canal-infested Mars, while all classic science-fiction devices, are all, in fact, based upon earlier misapprehensions by planetary scientists. Carl Sagan , 1978 During the opposition of Mars in 1877 , Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced

20828-521: The 1912 novel A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs . This carried on in later works such as the 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis , which calls the planet Malacandra . Several stories also depict Martians speaking Earth languages and provide explanations of varying levels of preposterousness. In the 1899 novel Pharaoh's Broker by Ellsworth Douglass  [ Wikidata ] , Martians speak Hebrew as Mars goes through

21082-504: The 1934 short story " Old Faithful " by Raymond Z. Gallun . The 1946 novel The Man from Mars by Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem likewise depicts a Martian mistreated by humans. Outside of the pulps, the alien invasion theme pioneered by Wells appeared in Olaf Stapledon 's 1930 novel Last and First Men —with the twist that the invading Martians are cloud-borne and microscopic, and neither aliens nor humans recognize

21336-435: The 1936 novel Planet Plane by John Wyndham , the 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis, and the 1949 novel Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein . Said Lewis in response to criticism from biologist J. B. S. Haldane , "The canals in Mars are there not because I believe in them but because they are part of the popular tradition." Eventually, the flyby of Mars by Mariner 4 in 1965 conclusively determined that

21590-496: The 1948 short story " Mars Is Heaven! " by Ray Bradbury (later revised and included in The Martian Chronicles as "The Third Expedition"), where they use telepathic abilities to impersonate the humans' deceased loved ones before killing them. Comical portrayals of evil Martians appear in the 1954 novel Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown , where they are little green men who wreak havoc by exposing secrets and lies; in

21844-557: The 1949 short story " Queen of the Martian Catacombs " and the 1951 short story " Black Amazon of Mars " (later expanded into the 1964 novels The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman , respectively). Decadent Martians appeared in many other stories as well. The 1933 novel Cat Country ( 貓城記 ) by Chinese science fiction writer Lao She portrays feline Martians overcome by vices such as opium addiction and corruption as

22098-454: The 1950 Superman comic book story " Black Magic on Mars " by Alvin Schwartz and Wayne Boring where Orson Welles tries to warn Earth of an impending Martian invasion but is dismissed, the 1968 novel The Second Invasion from Mars ( Второе нашествие марсиан ) by Soviet science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky where the Martians forgo military conquest in favour of infiltration,

22352-494: The 1950s likewise limited themselves to rudimentary lifeforms such as lichens and tumbleweed that could conceivably exist in the absence of any appreciable atmosphere or quantities of water. In light of the Mariner and Viking probes to Mars between 1965 and 1976 revealing the planet's inhospitable conditions, almost all fiction started to portray Mars as a lifeless world. The disappointment of finding Mars to be hostile to life

22606-439: The 1951 novel The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke and the 1966 short story " We Can Remember It for You Wholesale " by Philip K. Dick , the early colonists during the centuries-long terraforming process in the 1953 short story " Crucifixus Etiam " by Walter M. Miller Jr. are dependent on a machine that oxygenates their blood from the thin atmosphere, and the scarcity of oxygen even after generations of terraforming forces

22860-471: The 1952 novel David Starr, Space Ranger by Isaac Asimov depict Martians sharing their advanced technology with the inhabitants of Earth. Several depictions of enlightened Martians have a religious dimension: in the 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis , Martians are depicted as Christian beings free from original sin , the Martian Klaatu who visits Earth in the 1951 film The Day

23114-549: The 1952 novel Marooned on Mars by Lester del Rey where the presumed canals turn out to be rows of vegetables and the only animal life is primitive. As the Space Age commenced the divide between portraying Mars as it was and as it had previously been imagined deepened, and the discoveries made by Mariner 4 in 1965 solidified it. Some authors simply ignored the scientific findings, such as Lin Carter who included intelligent Martians in

23368-433: The 1952 short story " The Martian Way " by Isaac Asimov , Martian colonists extract water from the rings of Saturn so as not to depend on importing water from Earth. Besides direct conflicts with Earth, Mars colonies get other kinds of unfavourable treatment in several works. Mars is a dilapidated colony and neglected in favour of locations outside of the Solar System in the 1967 novel Born Under Mars by John Brunner ,

23622-457: The 1959 short story " The Man Who Lost the Sea " by Theodore Sturgeon . Crossley writes that No Man Friday is in some respects an "anti-robinsonade", inasmuch as it rejects the underlying colonialist attitudes and portrays the Martians as more advanced than humans rather than less. Robinsonades remained popular throughout the 1960s; examples include the 1966 novel Welcome to Mars by James Blish and

23876-407: The 1960s as the scale of the associated challenges became apparent. By the 1970s, Martian literature as a whole had mostly succumbed to the discouragement of finding the planet's conditions to be so hostile, and stories set on Mars became much less common than they had been in previous decades. A resurgence of popularity of the terraforming theme began to emerge in the late 1970s in light of data from

24130-423: The 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars , the latter being significantly if unofficially based on No Man Friday . The subgenre was later revisited with the 2011 novel The Martian by Andy Weir and its 2015 film adaptation , in which an astronaut accidentally left behind by the third mission to Mars uses the resources available to him to survive until such a time that he can be rescued. Although most stories by

24384-464: The 1965 novel Dune rather than setting the story on Mars, Robert F. Young set the 1979 short story " The First Mars Mission " in 1957 so as not to have to take the findings of Mariner 4 into account, and Colin Greenland set the 1993 novel Harm's Way in the 1800s with corresponding scientific concepts like the luminiferous aether . The 1965 novel The Alternate Martians by A. Bertram Chandler

24638-470: The 1973 novel The Man Who Loved Mars , and Leigh Brackett who declared in the foreword to The Coming of the Terrans (a 1967 collection of earlier short stories) that "in the affairs of men and Martians, mere fact runs a poor second to Truth, which is mighty and shall prevail". Others were cognizant of them and used workarounds: Frank Herbert invented the fictional extrasolar Mars-like planet Arrakis for

24892-458: The 1975 novel Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds by Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman  [ Wikidata ] and the 1976 novel The Second War of the Worlds by George H. Smith which both combine Wells's story with Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes characters, the 1976 novel The Space Machine by Christopher Priest which combines the story of The War of the Worlds with that of Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine ,

25146-421: The 1988 novel Desolation Road . By the 1990s, terraforming had become the predominant theme in Martian fiction. Several methods for accomplishing it were depicted, including ancient alien artefacts in the 1990 film Total Recall and the 1997 novel Mars Underground by William Kenneth Hartmann , utilizing indigenous animal lifeforms in the 1991 novel Martian Rainbow by Robert L. Forward , and relocating

25400-469: The 1990 novel Voyage to the Red Planet by Terry Bisson , which posits that a mission like that could only get funding by being turned into a movie. Stephen Baxter's 1996 novel Voyage depicts an alternate history where US president John F. Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963 , ultimately leading to the first Mars landing happening in 1986. The 1999 novel The Martian Race by Gregory Benford adapts

25654-546: The 1992 novel Labyrinth of Night by Allen Steele , the 1995 short story " The Great Martian Pyramid Hoax " by Jerry Oltion , and the 1998 novel Semper Mars by Ian Douglas . Outside of literature, it has made appearances in the 1993 episode " Space " of The X-Files , the 2000 film Mission to Mars , and the 2002 episode " Where the Buggalo Roam " of the animated television show Futurama . Deliberately nostalgic homages to older works have continued to appear through

25908-411: The 1999 novel White Mars, or, The Mind Set Free: A 21st-Century Utopia by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose where environmental preservation is prioritized and humans live in domed cities. Martian robinsonades —stories of astronauts stranded on Mars—emerged in the 1950s with works such as the 1952 novel Marooned on Mars by Lester del Rey, the 1956 novel No Man Friday by Rex Gordon , and

26162-641: The 2001 film Ghosts of Mars , the 2005 film Doom (based on the video game franchise ), and the 2013 film The Last Days on Mars . In the 2003 novel Ilium by Dan Simmons and its 2005 sequel Olympos , the Trojan War is reenacted on Mars, and the 2011 animated film Mars Needs Moms revisits the older theme of evil Martians coming to Earth, though with more modest ambitions than launching an all-out invasion. The 2011–2021 novel series The Expanse by James S. A. Corey (joint pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck ), starting with Leviathan Wakes ,

26416-399: The 2002 short story " Ulla, Ulla " by Eric Brown which reframes the invasion as a desperate escape by a peaceful race from a dying world, and the 2005 novel The Martian War by Kevin J. Anderson where Wells himself goes to Mars and instigates a slave uprising . The authorised 2017 sequel novel The Massacre of Mankind by Stephen Baxter is set in 1920 in an alternate timeline where

26670-444: The 2011 non-fiction book Imagining Mars: A Literary History , identifies Burroughs's work as the archetypal example of what he dubs "masculinist fantasies", where "male travelers expect to find princesses on Mars and devote much of their time either to courting or to protecting them". This version of Mars also functions as a kind of stand-in for the bygone American frontier , where protagonist John Carter —a Confederate veteran of

26924-524: The 2020s no such mission is planned. Scientists have theorized that during the Solar System's formation , Mars was created as the result of a random process of run-away accretion of material from the protoplanetary disk that orbited the Sun. Mars has many distinctive chemical features caused by its position in the Solar System. Elements with comparatively low boiling points, such as chlorine , phosphorus , and sulfur , are much more common on Mars than on Earth; these elements were probably pushed outward by

27178-594: The Achaemenid throne. The Achaemenid Empire is normally considered to have fallen with Darius. However, as basic forms of community life and the general structure of government were maintained and resuscitated by Alexander under his own rule, he, in the words of the Iranologist Pierre Briant "may therefore be considered to have acted in many ways as the last of the Achaemenids ." Alexander viewed Bessus as

27432-471: The Battle of Gabai. After the defeat, Spitamenes was killed by his own men, who then sued for peace. During this time, Alexander adopted some elements of Persian dress and customs at his court, notably the custom of proskynesis , either a symbolic kissing of the hand, or prostration on the ground, that Persians showed to their social superiors. This was one aspect of Alexander's broad strategy aimed at securing

27686-537: The Black . Later in his childhood, Alexander was tutored by the strict Leonidas , a relative of his mother, and by Lysimachus of Acarnania . Alexander was raised in the manner of noble Macedonian youths, learning to read, play the lyre , ride, fight, and hunt. When Alexander was ten years old, a trader from Thessaly brought Philip a horse, which he offered to sell for thirteen talents . The horse refused to be mounted, and Philip ordered it away. Alexander, however, detecting

27940-486: The Cydonia region of Mars first photographed by the Viking 1 orbiter under conditions that made it resemble a human face; higher-quality photographs taken by subsequent probes under different lighting conditions revealed this to be a case of pareidolia . It was popularized by Richard C. Hoagland , who interpreted it as an artificial construction by intelligent extraterrestrials, and has appeared in works of fiction including

28194-539: The Cynic occurred during Alexander's stay in Corinth. When Alexander asked Diogenes what he could do for him, the philosopher disdainfully asked Alexander to stand a little to the side, as he was blocking the sunlight. This reply apparently delighted Alexander who is reported to have said, "But verily, if I were not Alexander, I would like to be Diogenes." At Corinth, Alexander took the title of Hegemon ("leader") and, like Philip,

28448-509: The Earth Stood Still is a Christ figure , and the 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein revolves around a human raised by Martians who brings a religion based on their ideals to Earth as a prophet . In comic books , the superhero Martian Manhunter first appeared in 1955. In the 1956 novel No Man Friday by Rex Gordon , an astronaut stranded on Mars encounters pacifist Martians and feels compelled to omit

28702-519: The Earthlings like livestock—a critique of contemporary British colonialism in general and its devastating effects on the Aboriginal Tasmanians in particular. The novel set the tone for the majority of the science-fictional depictions of Mars in the decades that followed in portraying the Martians as malevolent and Mars as a dying world. Beyond Martian fiction, the novel had a large influence on

28956-554: The Greek city of Perinthus , Alexander reportedly saved his father's life. Meanwhile, the city of Amphissa began to work lands that were sacred to Apollo near Delphi , a sacrilege that gave Philip the opportunity to further intervene in Greek affairs. While Philip was occupied in Thrace, Alexander was ordered to muster an army for a campaign in southern Greece. Concerned that other Greek states might intervene, Alexander made it look as though he

29210-609: The Illyrian chieftain Cleitus and King Glaukias of the Taulantii were in open revolt against his authority. Marching west into Illyria, Alexander defeated each in turn, forcing the two rulers to flee with their troops. With these victories, he secured his northern frontier. While Alexander campaigned north, the Thebans and Athenians rebelled once again. Alexander immediately headed south. While

29464-713: The Islamic world. After the Bible , it was the most popular form of European literature. Alexander III was born in Pella , the capital of the Kingdom of Macedon , on the sixth day of the ancient Greek month of Hekatombaion , which probably corresponds to 20 July 356 BC (although the exact date is uncertain). He was the son of the erstwhile king of Macedon, Philip II , and his fourth wife, Olympias (daughter of Neoptolemus I , king of Epirus ). Although Philip had seven or eight wives, Olympias

29718-577: The Late Heavy Bombardment. There is evidence of an enormous impact basin in the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, spanning 10,600 by 8,500 kilometres (6,600 by 5,300 mi), or roughly four times the size of the Moon's South Pole–Aitken basin , which would be the largest impact basin yet discovered if confirmed. It has been hypothesized that the basin was formed when Mars was struck by a Pluto -sized body about four billion years ago. The event, thought to be

29972-519: The Macedonian court a good knowledge of Persian issues, and may even have influenced some of the innovations in the management of the Macedonian state. Suda writes that Anaximenes of Lampsacus was one of Alexander's teachers, and that Anaximenes also accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. At the age of 16, Alexander's education under Aristotle ended. Philip II had waged war against the Thracians to

30226-490: The Macedonians would implore the gods to give them a lawful successor to the kingdom by his niece. This so irritated Alexander that throwing one of the cups at his head, "You villain," said he, "what, am I then a bastard?" Then Philip, taking Attalus's part, rose up and would have run his son through; but by good fortune for them both, either his over-hasty rage, or the wine he had drunk, made his foot slip, so that he fell down on

30480-474: The Martian ionosphere , lowering the atmospheric density by stripping away atoms from the outer layer. Both Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express have detected ionized atmospheric particles trailing off into space behind Mars, and this atmospheric loss is being studied by the MAVEN orbiter. Compared to Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is quite rarefied. Atmospheric pressure on the surface today ranges from

30734-538: The Martian sky a tawny color when seen from the surface. It may take on a pink hue due to iron oxide particles suspended in it. The concentration of methane in the Martian atmosphere fluctuates from about 0.24 ppb during the northern winter to about 0.65 ppb during the summer. Estimates of its lifetime range from 0.6 to 4 years, so its presence indicates that an active source of the gas must be present. Methane could be produced by non-biological process such as serpentinization involving water, carbon dioxide, and

30988-424: The Martian society by detailing the events of the revolution that brought it about. Another prominent example is the 1922 novel Aelita ( Аэлита ) by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy —along with its 1924 film adaptation , the earliest Soviet science fiction film—which adapts the story of the 1905 Russian Revolution to the Martian surface. Red Star and Aelita are in some ways opposites. Red Star , written between

31242-415: The Martian surface is caused by ferric oxide , or rust . It can look like butterscotch ; other common surface colors include golden, brown, tan, and greenish, depending on the minerals present. Like Earth, Mars is differentiated into a dense metallic core overlaid by less dense rocky layers. The outermost layer is the crust, which is on average about 42–56 kilometres (26–35 mi) thick, with

31496-542: The Moon, Johann Heinrich von Mädler and Wilhelm Beer were the first areographers. They began by establishing that most of Mars's surface features were permanent and by more precisely determining the planet's rotation period. In 1840, Mädler combined ten years of observations and drew the first map of Mars. Features on Mars are named from a variety of sources. Albedo features are named for classical mythology. Craters larger than roughly 50 km are named for deceased scientists and writers and others who have contributed to

31750-527: The Planets , it is divided between the Roman gods Mars and Vulcan . In the anonymously published 1873 novel A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont among the Planets , it is culturally rather similar to Earth—unlike the other planets. In the 1883 novel Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds by W. S. Lach-Szyrma , a visitor from Venus relates the details of Martian society to Earthlings. The first work of science fiction set primarily on Mars

32004-506: The Strong " where they find disappointment in human lack of altruism and " Controlled Experiment " where murder is a foreign concept to them. There is a long tradition of portraying Martians as warlike, perhaps inspired by the planet's association with the Roman god of war . The seminal depiction of Martians as evil creatures was the 1897 novel The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, wherein the Martians attack Earth. This characterization dominated

32258-605: The Thessalians awoke the next day, they found Alexander in their rear and promptly surrendered, adding their cavalry to Alexander's force. He then continued south towards the Peloponnese . Alexander stopped at Thermopylae where he was recognized as the leader of the Amphictyonic League before heading south to Corinth . Athens sued for peace and Alexander pardoned the rebels. The famous encounter between Alexander and Diogenes

32512-685: The Thracian forces manning the heights. The Macedonians marched into the country of the Triballi and defeated their army near the Lyginus river (a tributary of the Danube ). Alexander then marched for three days to the Danube , encountering the Getae tribe on the opposite shore. Crossing the river at night, he surprised them and forced their army to retreat after the first cavalry skirmish . News then reached Alexander that

32766-554: The Wenuses  [ Wikidata ] . Wells's story gained further notoriety in 1938 when a radio adaptation by Orson Welles in the style of a news broadcast was mistaken for a real newscast by some listeners in the US, leading to panic; less famously, a 1949 broadcast in Quito , Ecuador, also resulted in a riot. Several sequels and adaptations by other authors have been written since, including

33020-417: The Zodiac and precognition in the 1886 short story " The Blindman's World " by Edward Bellamy . Several recurring tropes were introduced during this time. One of them is Mars having a different local name such as Glintan in the 1889 novel Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet by Hugh MacColl , Oron in the 1892 novel Messages from Mars, By Aid of the Telescope Plant by Robert D. Braine, and Barsoom in

33274-438: The aforementioned anthology Mars Probes ) portrays the lingering yearning for Mars in a future where the intended first Mars landing was cancelled and the era of space exploration has come to an end without the dream of a human mission to Mars ever being realized. Beyond the events of the first crewed landing on Mars, this time period also saw an increase in portrayals of the early stages of exploration and settlement happening in

33528-618: The age of 16, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle . In 335 BC, shortly after his assumption of kingship over Macedon, he campaigned in the Balkans and reasserted control over Thrace and parts of Illyria before marching on the city of Thebes , which was subsequently destroyed in battle . Alexander then led the League of Corinth , and used his authority to launch the pan-Hellenic project envisaged by his father, assuming leadership over all Greeks in their conquest of Persia . In 334 BC, he invaded

33782-471: The aid and support of the Iranian upper classes. The Greeks however regarded the gesture of proskynesis as the province of deities and believed that Alexander meant to deify himself by requiring it. This cost him the sympathies of many of his countrymen, and he eventually abandoned it. During the long rule of the Achaemenids, the elite positions in many segments of the empire including the central government,

34036-570: The animal died (because of old age, according to Plutarch, at age 30), Alexander named a city after him, Bucephala . When Alexander was 13, Philip began to search for a tutor , and considered such academics as Isocrates and Speusippus , the latter offering to resign from his stewardship of the Academy to take up the post. In the end, Philip chose Aristotle and provided the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza as

34290-401: The appearance of straight lines on the surface in some other way, such as simooms or large tracts of vegetation. Although they quickly fell out of favour as a serious scientific theory, largely as a result of higher-quality telescopic observations by astronomers such as E. M. Antoniadi failing to detect them, canals continued to make sporadic appearances in fiction for a while in works such as

34544-462: The area of Europe, Asia, and Australia combined, surpassing Utopia Planitia and the Moon's South Pole–Aitken basin as the largest impact crater in the Solar System. Mars is scarred by a number of impact craters: a total of 43,000 observed craters with a diameter of 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) or greater have been found. The largest exposed crater is Hellas , which is 2,300 kilometres (1,400 mi) wide and 7,000 metres (23,000 ft) deep, and

34798-475: The army, and the many satrapies were specifically reserved for Iranians and to a major degree, Persian noblemen. The latter were in many cases additionally connected through marriage alliances with the royal Achaemenid family. This created a problem for Alexander as to whether he had to make use of the various segments and people that had given the empire its solidity and unity for a lengthy period of time. Pierre Briant explains that Alexander realized that it

35052-419: The atmosphere is about 10.8 kilometres (6.7 mi), which is higher than Earth's 6 kilometres (3.7 mi), because the surface gravity of Mars is only about 38% of Earth's. The atmosphere of Mars consists of about 96% carbon dioxide , 1.93% argon and 1.89% nitrogen along with traces of oxygen and water. The atmosphere is quite dusty, containing particulates about 1.5 μm in diameter which give

35306-406: The atmosphere is small, but enough to produce larger clouds of water ice and different cases of snow and frost , often mixed with snow of carbon dioxide dry ice . Landforms visible on Mars strongly suggest that liquid water has existed on the planet's surface. Huge linear swathes of scoured ground, known as outflow channels , cut across the surface in about 25 places. These are thought to be

35560-463: The broader science fiction genre, and inspired rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard . According to science fiction essayist Bud Webster , "It's impossible to overstate the importance of The War of the Worlds and the influence it's had over the years." An unauthorized sequel— Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss —was released in 1898, as was a parody by Charles L. Graves  [ Wikidata ] and E. V. Lucas titled The War of

35814-459: The broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock . Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 centimetres (24 in), during the rover's traverse from the Bradbury Landing site to

36068-585: The burning of the Acropolis of Athens during the Second Persian War by Xerxes; Plutarch and Diodorus allege that Alexander's companion, the hetaera Thaïs , instigated and started the fire. Even as he watched the city burn, Alexander immediately began to regret his decision. Plutarch claims that he ordered his men to put out the fires but the flames had already spread to most of the city. Curtius claims that Alexander did not regret his decision until

36322-405: The canals were mere optical illusions . Because early versions of the nebular hypothesis of Solar System formation held that the planets were formed sequentially starting at the outermost planets, some authors envisioned Mars as an older and more mature world than the Earth, and it became the setting for many utopian works of fiction . This genre made up the majority of stories about Mars in

36576-502: The case of Deimos. Phobos is turned into a small star to provide heat and light to Mars in the 1951 novel The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke. The moons are revealed to be alien spacecraft in the 1955 juvenile novel The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donald A. Wollheim . Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun . The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron(III) oxide dust, giving it

36830-502: The catalogue of early science fiction works compiled by E. F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler in the reference works Science-Fiction: The Early Years from 1990 and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years from 1998, concludes that Lowell thus "effectively set the boundaries for subsequent narratives about an inhabited Mars". Canals became a feature of romantic portrayals of Mars such as Burroughs's Barsoom series. Early works that did not depict any waterways on Mars typically explained

37084-466: The cause of the Martian hemispheric dichotomy , created the smooth Borealis basin that covers 40% of the planet. A 2023 study shows evidence, based on the orbital inclination of Deimos (a small moon of Mars), that Mars may once have had a ring system 3.5 billion years to 4 billion years ago. This ring system may have been formed from a moon, 20 times more massive than Phobos , orbiting Mars billions of years ago; and Phobos would be

37338-434: The challenge science fiction editor John W. Campbell made to science fiction writers in the 1940s: to write a creature who thinks at least as well as humans, yet not like humans. Three different species of intelligent lifeforms appear on Mars in C. S. Lewis's 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet , only one of which is humanoid. In the 1943 short story " The Cave " by P. Schuyler Miller, lifeforms endure on Mars long after

37592-549: The city of Mesopotamia that he had planned to establish as his empire's capital. Alexander's death left unexecuted an additional series of planned military and mercantile campaigns that would have begun with a Greek invasion of Arabia . In the years following his death, a series of civil wars broke out across the Macedonian Empire, eventually leading to its disintegration at the hands of the Diadochi . With his death marking

37846-605: The city: "I shall not enter your houses". From Babylon, Alexander went to Susa , one of the Achaemenid capitals, and captured its treasury. He sent the bulk of his army to the Persian ceremonial capital of Persepolis via the Persian Royal Road . Alexander himself took selected troops on the direct route to the city. He then stormed the pass of the Persian Gates (in the modern Zagros Mountains ) which had been blocked by

38100-444: The civilization that used to exist there has driven itself to extinction through ecological collapse . The 1951 novel The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke features some indigenous life in the form of oxygen-producing plants and Martian creatures resembling Earth marsupials , but otherwise depicts a mostly desolate environment—reflecting then-emerging data about the scarcity of life-sustaining resources on Mars. Other novels of

38354-504: The coast held no major ports and Alexander moved inland. At Termessos , Alexander humbled and did not storm the Pisidian city. At the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordium , Alexander "undid" the hitherto unsolvable Gordian Knot , a feat said to await the future "king of Asia ". According to the story, Alexander proclaimed that it did not matter how the knot was undone, and hacked it apart with his sword. In spring 333 BC, Alexander crossed

38608-537: The colonists to live in a domed city in the 1953 novel Police Your Planet by Lester del Rey . In the 1955 fix-up novel Alien Dust by Edwin Charles Tubb , colonists are unable to return to a life on Earth because inhaling the Martian dust has given them pneumoconiosis and the lower gravity has atrophied their muscles . The 1952 novel Outpost Mars by Cyril Judd (joint pseudonym of Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril ) revolves around an attempt at making

38862-500: The concept had earlier appeared indirectly in the 1977 film Capricorn One , wherein NASA fakes the Mars landing. Among these are the 1992 novel Beachhead by Jack Williamson and the 1992 novel Mars in Ben Bova 's Grand Tour series , both of which emphasize the barrenness of the Martian landscape upon arrival and contrast it with a desire to find beauty there. The idea was spoofed in

39116-503: The contest. Philip marched on Amphissa (ostensibly acting on the request of the Amphictyonic League ), capturing the mercenaries sent there by Demosthenes and accepting the city's surrender. Philip then returned to Elatea, sending a final offer of peace to Athens and Thebes, who both rejected it. As Philip marched south, his opponents blocked him near Chaeronea , Boeotia . During the ensuing Battle of Chaeronea , Philip commanded

39370-467: The decadent portrayal of Mars and its inhabitants—while updating the politics to reflect shifting attitudes toward colonialism and imperialism in the intervening years—was Leigh Brackett , the "Queen of the Planetary Romance". Brackett's works in this vein include the 1940 short story " Martian Quest " and the 1944 novel Shadow Over Mars , as well as the stories about Eric John Stark including

39624-423: The descendants of Martians in several stories including the 1954 short story " Survey Team " by Philip K. Dick . Conversely, Martians are the descendants of humans from Earth in some works such as the 1889 novel Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet by Hugh MacColl, where a close approach between Mars and Earth in the past allowed some humans to get to Mars, and Tolstoy's Aelita where they are descended from inhabitants of

39878-437: The discovery of linear structures he dubbed canali (literally channels , but widely translated as canals ) on the Martian surface. These were generally interpreted—by those who accepted their disputed existence—as waterways, and they made their earliest appearance in fiction in the anonymously published 1883 novel Politics and Life in Mars , where the Martians live in the water. Schiaparelli's observations, and perhaps

40132-432: The earliest depictions of terraforming Mars to make it more hospitable to human life; in the novel, the atmosphere of Mars is made breathable by plants that release oxygen from minerals in the Martian soil , and the climate is improved by creating an artificial sun. The theme appeared occasionally in other 1950s works like the aforementioned "Crucifixus Etiam" and Police Your Planet , but largely fell out of favour in

40386-637: The early efforts of establishing a permanent human presence on the red planet. The members of the third human mission to Mars are forced to trek across the planet's surface in the 2000 novel Mars Crossing by Geoffrey A. Landis to reach a return vehicle from a previous mission after theirs is damaged beyond repair. [Mars] offers an accessible and somewhat-known-but-somewhat-mysterious setting for all kinds of imaginative storylines. For this reason, video games love using Mars-related maps or themes – colonisation, space travel, dying and dystopian societies, scientific research settlements gone wrong, cosmic war, aliens,

40640-458: The edges of boulders and other obstacles in their path. The commonly accepted hypotheses include that they are dark underlying layers of soil revealed after avalanches of bright dust or dust devils . Several other explanations have been put forward, including those that involve water or even the growth of organisms. Environmental radiation levels on the surface are on average 0.64 millisieverts of radiation per day, and significantly less than

40894-586: The enemy's cohesion, Philip ordered his troops to press forward and quickly routed them. With the Athenians lost, the Thebans were surrounded. Left to fight alone, they were defeated. After the victory at Chaeronea, Philip and Alexander marched unopposed into the Peloponnese, devastating much of Laconia and ejecting the Spartans from various parts of it. At Corinth , Philip established a "Hellenic Alliance" (modelled on

41148-417: The entire planet to a new solar system in the 1993 novel Moving Mars by Greg Bear . The 1993 novel Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley portrays Mars in the process of reverting to its natural state after an abandoned attempt at terraforming it. With a Mars settled primarily by China, Red Dust also belongs to a tradition of portraying a multicultural Mars that developed parallel to the rise to prominence of

41402-403: The events of the original novel caused World War I never to happen by making Britain war-weary and isolationist, and the Martians attack yet again after inoculating themselves against the microbes that were their downfall the first time. The term Martians typically refers to inhabitants of Mars that are similar to humans in terms of having such things as language and civilization , though it

41656-518: The failed revolution in 1905 and the successful 1917 Russian Revolution , sees Mars as a socialist utopia from which Earth can learn, whereas in Aelita the socialist revolution is instead exported from the early Soviet Russia to Mars. Red Star depicts a utopia on Mars, in contrast to the dystopia initially found on Mars in Aelita —though both are technocracies . Red Star is a sincere and idealistic work of traditional utopian fiction, whereas Aelita

41910-559: The famous oracle of Amun-Ra at the Siwa Oasis in the Libyan desert, at which he was pronounced the son of the deity Amun . Henceforth, Alexander often referred to Zeus-Ammon as his true father, and after his death, currency depicted him adorned with horns , using the Horns of Ammon as a symbol of his divinity. The Greeks interpreted this message – one that the gods addressed to all pharaohs – as

42164-405: The final quarter of the century, the most prominent example being Kim Stanley Robinson 's Mars trilogy . Stories of the first human mission to Mars appeared throughout the 1990s in response to the Space Exploration Initiative , and near-future exploration and settlement became increasingly common themes following the launches of other Mars exploration probes in the latter half of the decade. In

42418-429: The flanks of the volcano Arsia Mons . The caves, named after loved ones of their discoverers, are collectively known as the "seven sisters". Cave entrances measure from 100 to 252 metres (328 to 827 ft) wide and they are estimated to be at least 73 to 96 metres (240 to 315 ft) deep. Because light does not reach the floor of most of the caves, they may extend much deeper than these lower estimates and widen below

42672-562: The floor, at which Alexander reproachfully insulted him: "See there," said he, "the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another." In 337 BC, Alexander fled Macedon with his mother, dropping her off with her brother, King Alexander I of Epirus in Dodona , capital of the Molossians . He continued to Illyria where he sought refuge with one or more Illyrian kings, perhaps with Glaucias , and

42926-415: The form of the cartoon character Marvin the Martian introduced in the 1948 short film " Haredevil Hare ", who seeks to destroy Earth to get a better view of Venus; and in the 1996 film Mars Attacks! , a pastiche of 1950s alien invasion films . The conception of Martians as decadent was largely derived from Percival Lowell 's vision of Mars. The first appearance of Martians characterized by decadence in

43180-670: The future. Contemporary issues touched upon in the book include McCarthyism in " Usher II ", racial segregation and lynching in the United States in " Way in the Middle of the Air ", and nuclear anxiety throughout. There are also several allusions to the European colonization of the Americas : the first few missions to Mars in the book encounter Martians, with direct references to both Hernán Cortés and

43434-438: The horse's fear of its own shadow, asked to tame the horse, which he eventually managed. Plutarch stated that Philip, overjoyed at this display of courage and ambition, kissed his son tearfully, declaring: "My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions. Macedon is too small for you", and bought the horse for him. Alexander named it Bucephalas , meaning "ox-head". Bucephalas carried Alexander as far as India . When

43688-436: The human history of warfare lest they think of humans as savage creatures akin to cannibals . On television, the 1963–1966 sitcom My Favorite Martian —later adapted to children's animation in 1973 and to film in 1999 —portrayed a Martian comedically; the contemporaneous science fiction anthology series The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits also occasionally featured Martian characters, such as in " Mr. Dingle,

43942-436: The lander showed that the Martian soil has a basic pH of 7.7, and contains 0.6% perchlorate by weight, concentrations that are toxic to humans . Streaks are common across Mars and new ones appear frequently on steep slopes of craters, troughs, and valleys. The streaks are dark at first and get lighter with age. The streaks can start in a tiny area, then spread out for hundreds of metres. They have been seen to follow

44196-491: The lands he had already lost, and a ransom of 10,000 talents for his family. Alexander replied that since he was now king of Asia, it was he alone who decided territorial divisions. Alexander proceeded to take possession of Syria , and most of the coast of the Levant . In the following year, 332 BC, he was forced to attack Tyre , which he captured after a long and difficult siege . The men of military age were massacred and

44450-446: The language by a Roman who was flung into space by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 . Martians were often portrayed as existing within a racial hierarchy : the 1894 novel Journey to Mars by Gustavus W. Pope features Martians with different skin colours (red, blue, and yellow) subject to strict anti-miscegenation laws , Rossi's A Trip to Mars sees one portion of the Martian population described as "our inferior race,

44704-414: The late 1800s and continued to be represented through the early 1900s. The earliest of these works was the 1880 novel Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg. The 1887 novel Bellona's Husband: A Romance by William James Roe portrays a Martian society where everyone ages backwards. The 1890 novel A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie depicts a society that is so advanced that life there has become dull and, as

44958-414: The late 20th century, Mars has been explored by uncrewed spacecraft and rovers , with the first flyby by the Mariner 4 probe in 1965, the first orbit by the Mars 2 probe in 1971, and the first landing by the Viking 1 probe in 1976. As of 2023, there are at least 11 active probes orbiting Mars or on the Martian surface. Mars is an attractive target for future human exploration missions , though in

45212-411: The lifeful Mars that never was, as well as in the 1989 novel The Barsoom Project by Steven Barnes and Larry Niven , where the fantastical version of Mars is recreated as an amusement park . Following the arrival of the Viking probes in 1976, the so-called " Face on Mars " superseded the Martian canals as the most central symbol of nostalgic depictions of Mars. The "Face" is a rock formation in

45466-421: The lost civilization of Atlantis . Human settlers take on the new identity of Martians in the 1946 short story " The Million Year Picnic " by Ray Bradbury (later included in the 1950 fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles ), and this theme of "becoming Martians" came to be a recurring motif in Martian fiction toward the end of the century. The portrayal of Martians as superior to Earthlings appeared throughout

45720-401: The making rather than a pre-existing one—and Martian struggle for independence from Earth. Alternatives to terraforming have also been explored. The opposite approach of modifying humans to adapt them to the existing environment, known as pantropy , appears in the 1976 novel Man Plus by Frederik Pohl but has otherwise been sparsely depicted. The conflict between pantropy and terraforming

45974-440: The measure against which many later military leaders would compare themselves, and his tactics remain a significant subject of study in military academies worldwide. Legends of Alexander's exploits coalesced into the third-century Alexander Romance which, in the premodern period, went through over one hundred recensions, translations, and derivations and was translated into almost every European vernacular and every language of

46228-415: The mercenary captain Memnon of Rhodes and the Persian satrap of Caria, Orontobates , to withdraw by sea. Alexander left the government of Caria to a member of the Hecatomnid dynasty, Ada , who adopted Alexander. From Halicarnassus, Alexander proceeded into mountainous Lycia and the Pamphylian plain, asserting control over all coastal cities to deny the Persians naval bases. From Pamphylia onwards,

46482-446: The middle of the 1900s acknowledged that advances in planetary science had rendered previous notions about the conditions of Mars obsolete and portrayed the planet accordingly, some continued to depict a romantic version of Mars rather than a realistic one. Besides the stories of Ray Bradbury 's 1950 fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles , another early example of this was Robert A. Heinlein 's 1949 novel Red Planet where Mars has

46736-418: The mineral jarosite . This forms only in the presence of acidic water, showing that water once existed on Mars. The Spirit rover found concentrated deposits of silica in 2007 that indicated wet conditions in the past, and in December 2011, the mineral gypsum , which also forms in the presence of water, was found on the surface by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity. It is estimated that the amount of water in

46990-553: The mineral olivine , which is known to be common on Mars, or by Martian life. Compared to Earth, its higher concentration of atmospheric CO 2 and lower surface pressure may be why sound is attenuated more on Mars, where natural sources are rare apart from the wind. Using acoustic recordings collected by the Perseverance rover, researchers concluded that the speed of sound there is approximately 240 m/s for frequencies below 240 Hz, and 250 m/s for those above. Auroras have been detected on Mars. Because Mars lacks

47244-399: The more to make the attempt". After three unsuccessful assaults, the stronghold fell, but not before Alexander had received a serious shoulder wound. As in Tyre, men of military age were put to the sword, and the women and children were sold into slavery. Egypt was only one of a large number of territories taken by Alexander from the Persians. After his trip to Siwa, Alexander was crowned in

47498-427: The mountain is so large, with complex structure at its edges, giving a definite height to it is difficult. Its local relief, from the foot of the cliffs which form its northwest margin to its peak, is over 21 km (13 mi), a little over twice the height of Mauna Kea as measured from its base on the ocean floor. The total elevation change from the plains of Amazonis Planitia , over 1,000 km (620 mi) to

47752-431: The movement of dry dust. No partially degraded gullies have formed by weathering and no superimposed impact craters have been observed, indicating that these are young features, possibly still active. Other geological features, such as deltas and alluvial fans preserved in craters, are further evidence for warmer, wetter conditions at an interval or intervals in earlier Mars history. Such conditions necessarily require

48006-438: The near future, especially following the 1996 launches of the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor probes. In the 1991 novel Red Genesis by S. C. Sykes  [ Wikidata ] , settlement of Mars begins in 2015, though the bulk of the narrative is set decades later and focuses on the social—rather than technical—challenges of the project. The 1997 novel Mars Underground by William K. Hartmann also deals with

48260-416: The negotiations and scolded Alexander for wishing to marry the daughter of a Carian, explaining that he wanted a better bride for him. Philip exiled four of Alexander's friends, Harpalus , Nearchus , Ptolemy and Erigyius , and had the Corinthians bring Thessalus to him in chains. In the 24th day of the Macedonian month Dios, which probably corresponds to 25 October 336 BC, while at Aegae attending

48514-457: The next morning. Plutarch recounts an anecdote in which Alexander pauses and talks to a fallen statue of Xerxes as if it were a live person: Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of the expeditions you led against Greece, or shall I set you up again because of your magnanimity and your virtues in other respects? Alexander then chased Darius, first into Media, and then Parthia. The Persian king no longer controlled his own destiny, and

48768-419: The nickname " the Red Planet ". Mars is among the brightest objects in Earth's sky , and its high-contrast albedo features have made it a common subject for telescope viewing. It is classified as a terrestrial planet and is the second smallest of the Solar System 's planets with a diameter of 6,779 km (4,212 mi). In terms of orbital motion, a Martian solar day ( sol ) is equal to 24.6 hours, and

49022-481: The niece of his general Attalus . The marriage made Alexander's position as heir less secure, since any son of Cleopatra Eurydice would be a fully Macedonian heir, while Alexander was only half-Macedonian. During the wedding banquet , a drunken Attalus publicly prayed to the gods that the union would produce a legitimate heir. At the wedding of Cleopatra, whom Philip fell in love with and married, she being much too young for him, her uncle Attalus in his drink desired

49276-434: The north, which left Alexander in charge as regent and heir apparent . During Philip's absence, the Thracian tribe of Maedi revolted against Macedonia. Alexander responded quickly and drove them from their territory. The territory was colonized, and a city, named Alexandropolis , was founded. Upon Philip's return, Alexander was dispatched with a small force to subdue the revolts in southern Thrace . Campaigning against

49530-456: The northwest, to the summit approaches 26 km (16 mi), roughly three times the height of Mount Everest , which in comparison stands at just over 8.8 kilometres (5.5 mi). Consequently, Olympus Mons is either the tallest or second-tallest mountain in the Solar System ; the only known mountain which might be taller is the Rheasilvia peak on the asteroid Vesta , at 20–25 km (12–16 mi). The dichotomy of Martian topography

49784-416: The old anti-Persian alliance of the Greco-Persian Wars ), which included most Greek city-states except Sparta. Philip was then named Hegemon (often translated as "Supreme Commander") of this league (known by modern scholars as the League of Corinth ), and announced his plans to attack the Persian Empire . When Philip returned to Pella, he fell in love with and married Cleopatra Eurydice in 338 BC,

50038-408: The old canal maps ), has a length of 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) and a depth of up to 7 kilometres (4.3 mi). The length of Valles Marineris is equivalent to the length of Europe and extends across one-fifth the circumference of Mars. By comparison, the Grand Canyon on Earth is only 446 kilometres (277 mi) long and nearly 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) deep. Valles Marineris was formed due to

50292-455: The other as a sentient species. In film, this theme gained popularity in 1953 with the releases of The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars ; later films about Martian invasions of Earth include the 1954 film Devil Girl from Mars , the 1962 film The Day Mars Invaded Earth , a 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars and three different adaptations of The War of the Worlds in 2005. Martians attacking humans who come to Mars appear in

50546-420: The other cities again hesitated, Thebes decided to fight. The Theban resistance was ineffective and Alexander razed the city and divided its territory between the other Boeotian cities. The end of Thebes cowed Athens, leaving all of Greece temporarily at peace. Alexander then set out on his Asian campaign, leaving Antipater as regent. After his victory at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) , Philip II began

50800-711: The past. This paleomagnetism of magnetically susceptible minerals is similar to the alternating bands found on Earth's ocean floors . One hypothesis, published in 1999 and re-examined in October 2005 (with the help of the Mars Global Surveyor ), is that these bands suggest plate tectonic activity on Mars four billion years ago, before the planetary dynamo ceased to function and the planet's magnetic field faded. The Phoenix lander returned data showing Martian soil to be slightly alkaline and containing elements such as magnesium , sodium , potassium and chlorine . These nutrients are found in soils on Earth. They are necessary for growth of plants. Experiments performed by

51054-445: The planet in the second half of the 1900s following emerging evidence of the planet being inhospitable to life, eventually confirmed by data from Mars exploration probes. A significant minority of works persisted in portraying Mars in a nostalgic way that was by then scientifically outdated, including Ray Bradbury 's The Martian Chronicles . Terraforming Mars to enable human habitation has been another major theme, especially in

51308-419: The planet is inhabited by beings characterized by honesty and moral virtue. In the 1765 novel Voyage de Milord Céton dans les sept planètes ( The Voyages of Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets ) by Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert , reincarnated soldiers roam a war-torn landscape. It later appeared alongside the other planets throughout the 1800s. In the anonymously published 1839 novel A Fantastical Excursion into

51562-422: The planet's inhospitable nature, they were replaced by stories about enduring the harsh conditions of the planet. Themes in this tradition include colonization , terraforming , and pure survival stories. The colonization of Mars became a major theme in science fiction in the 1950s. The central piece of Martian fiction in this era was Ray Bradbury 's 1950 fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles , which contains

51816-460: The premise of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land , the 1963 short story " A Rose for Ecclesiastes " by Roger Zelazny sees decadent Martians visited by a preacher from Earth. In some stories where Mars is not inhabited by humanoid lifeforms, it was in the past or is inhabited by other types of life. The ruins of extinct Martian civilizations are depicted in the 1943 short story " Lost Art " by George O. Smith where their perpetual motion machine

52070-439: The principal one being whether to turn Mars "Green" by terraforming or keep it in its pristine "Red" state. Other major topics besides the ethics of terraforming include the social and economic organization of the emerging Martian society and its political relationship to Earth and the multinational economic interests that finance the mission, revisiting the earlier themes of Mars as a setting for utopia—albeit in this case one in

52324-566: The radiation of 1.84 millisieverts per day or 22 millirads per day during the flight to and from Mars. For comparison the radiation levels in low Earth orbit , where Earth's space stations orbit, are around 0.5 millisieverts of radiation per day. Hellas Planitia has the lowest surface radiation at about 0.342 millisieverts per day, featuring lava tubes southwest of Hadriacus Mons with potentially levels as low as 0.064 millisieverts per day, comparable to radiation levels during flights on Earth. Although better remembered for mapping

52578-474: The release of both the film adaptation John Carter and an anthology of new Barsoom fiction: Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom edited by John Joseph Adams . In Polish science fiction , Rafał Kosik 's 2003 novel Mars  [ pl ] depicts people migrating to Mars to escape an Earth ravaged by overpopulation , and an anthology of short stories titled Mars: Antologia polskiej fantastyki ( Mars: An Anthology of Polish Fantasy )

52832-402: The right wing and Alexander the left, accompanied by a group of Philip's trusted generals. According to the ancient sources, the two sides fought bitterly for some time. Philip deliberately commanded his troops to retreat, counting on the untested Athenian hoplites to follow, thus breaking their line. Alexander was the first to break the Theban lines, followed by Philip's generals. Having damaged

53086-429: The same as your terrestrian negroes ", and Burroughs's Barsoom series has red, green, yellow, and black Martians, a white race—responsible for the previous advanced civilization on Mars—having become extinct. The question of how humans would get to Mars was addressed in several ways: when not travelling there via spaceship as in the 1911 novel To Mars via the Moon: An Astronomical Story by Mark Wicks, they might use

53340-420: The same historical phases as Earth with a delay of a few thousand years, here corresponding to the captivity of the Israelites in Biblical Egypt . In the 1901 novel A Honeymoon in Space by George Griffith , they speak English because they acknowledge it as the "most convenient" language of all. In the 1920 novel A Trip to Mars by Marcianus Rossi, the Martians speak Latin as a result of having been taught

53594-417: The satrapy of Sogdiana, betrayed Bessus to Ptolemy , one of Alexander's trusted companions, and Bessus was executed. However, at some point later when Alexander was on the Jaxartes dealing with an incursion by a horse nomad army, Spitamenes raised Sogdiana in revolt. Alexander personally defeated the Scythians at the Battle of Jaxartes and immediately launched a campaign against Spitamenes, defeating him in

53848-411: The size of Earth's Arctic Ocean . This finding was derived from the ratio of protium to deuterium in the modern Martian atmosphere compared to that ratio on Earth. The amount of Martian deuterium (D/H = 9.3 ± 1.7 10 ) is five to seven times the amount on Earth (D/H = 1.56 10 ), suggesting that ancient Mars had significantly higher levels of water. Results from the Curiosity rover had previously found

54102-422: The south polar ice cap, if melted, would be enough to cover most of the surface of the planet with a depth of 11 metres (36 ft). Water in its liquid form cannot prevail on the surface of Mars due to the low atmospheric pressure on Mars, which is less than 1% that of Earth, only at the lowest of elevations pressure and temperature is high enough for water being able to be liquid for short periods. Water in

54356-461: The southern highlands include detectable amounts of high-calcium pyroxenes . Localized concentrations of hematite and olivine have been found. Much of the surface is deeply covered by finely grained iron(III) oxide dust. Although Mars has no evidence of a structured global magnetic field , observations show that parts of the planet's crust have been magnetized, suggesting that alternating polarity reversals of its dipole field have occurred in

54610-475: The start of the Hellenistic period , Alexander's legacy includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism that his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism and Hellenistic Judaism . He founded more than twenty cities , with the most prominent being the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Alexander's settlement of Greek colonists and the resulting spread of Greek culture led to the overwhelming dominance of Hellenistic civilization and influence as far east as

54864-505: The study of Mars. Smaller craters are named for towns and villages of the world with populations of less than 100,000. Large valleys are named for the word "Mars" or "star" in various languages; smaller valleys are named for rivers. Large albedo features retain many of the older names but are often updated to reflect new knowledge of the nature of the features. For example, Nix Olympica (the snows of Olympus) has become Olympus Mons (Mount Olympus). The surface of Mars as seen from Earth

55118-421: The subject of terraforming Mars is the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (consisting of the novels Red Mars from 1992, Green Mars from 1993, and Blue Mars from 1996), a hard science fiction story of a United Nations project wherein 100 carefully selected scientists are sent to Mars to start the first settlement there. The series explores in depth the practical and ideological considerations involved,

55372-406: The suggestion as impious. On the day Alexander was born, Philip was preparing a siege on the city of Potidea on the peninsula of Chalcidice . That same day, Philip received news that his general Parmenion had defeated the combined Illyrian and Paeonian armies and that his horses had won at the Olympic Games . It was also said that on this day, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus , one of

55626-513: The surface. However, later work suggested that the lineae may be dry, granular flows instead, with at most a limited role for water in initiating the process. A definitive conclusion about the presence, extent, and role of liquid water on the Martian surface remains elusive. Researchers suspect much of the low northern plains of the planet were covered with an ocean hundreds of meters deep, though this theory remains controversial. In March 2015, scientists stated that such an ocean might have been

55880-430: The surface. "Dena" is the only exception; its floor is visible and was measured to be 130 metres (430 ft) deep. The interiors of these caverns may be protected from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet's surface. Mars lost its magnetosphere 4 billion years ago, possibly because of numerous asteroid strikes, so the solar wind interacts directly with

56134-484: The swelling of the Tharsis area, which caused the crust in the area of Valles Marineris to collapse. In 2012, it was proposed that Valles Marineris is not just a graben , but a plate boundary where 150 kilometres (93 mi) of transverse motion has occurred, making Mars a planet with possibly a two- tectonic plate arrangement. Images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter have revealed seven possible cave entrances on

56388-406: The taxation system on the Greek models and organized the military occupation of the country, but in early 331 BC he left for Asia in pursuit of the Persians. Alexander advanced on Egypt in later 332 BC where he was regarded as a liberator. To legitimize taking power and be recognized as the descendant of the long line of pharaohs, Alexander made sacrifices to the gods at Memphis and went to consult

56642-405: The temple of Ptah at Memphis. It appears that the Egyptian people did not find it disturbing that he was a foreigner – nor that he was absent for virtually his entire reign. Alexander restored the temples neglected by the Persians and dedicated new monuments to the Egyptian gods. In the temple of Luxor, near Karnak, he built a chapel for the sacred barge. During his brief months in Egypt, he reformed

56896-412: The terraforming theme. Other such works include the 1989 novel Crescent in the Sky by Donald Moffitt , where Arabs apply their experience with surviving in desert conditions to living in their new caliphate on a partially terraformed Mars, and the 1991 novel The Martian Viking by Tim Sullivan where Mars is terraformed by Geats led by Hygelac . The most prominent work of fiction dealing with

57150-557: The theme of the king who protects the lands and the peasants". Alexander wrote a letter in 332 BC to Darius III, wherein he argued that he was worthier than Darius "to succeed to the Achaemenid throne". However, Alexander's eventual decision to burn the Achaemenid palace at Persepolis in conjunction with the major rejection and opposition of the "entire Persian people" made it impracticable for him to pose himself as Darius' legitimate successor. Against Bessus (Artaxerxes V) however, Briant adds, Alexander reasserted "his claim to legitimacy as

57404-454: The throne in 336 BC at the age of 20 and spent most of his ruling years conducting a lengthy military campaign throughout Western Asia , Central Asia , parts of South Asia , and Egypt . By the age of 30, he had created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India . He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered to be one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders. Until

57658-423: The throne. He had his cousin, the former Amyntas IV , executed. He also had two Macedonian princes from the region of Lyncestis killed for having been involved in his father's assassination, but spared a third, Alexander Lyncestes . Olympias had Cleopatra Eurydice, and Europa, her daughter by Philip, burned alive. When Alexander learned about this, he was furious. Alexander also ordered the murder of Attalus, who

57912-645: The translation of canali as "canals" rather than "channels", inspired Percival Lowell to speculate that these were artificial constructs and write a series of non-fiction books— Mars in 1895, Mars and Its Canals in 1906, and Mars as the Abode of Life in 1908—popularizing the idea. Lowell posited that Mars was home to an ancient and advanced but dying or already dead Martian civilization who had constructed these vast canals for irrigation to survive on an increasingly arid planet, and this became an enduring vision of Mars that influenced writers across several decades. Science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl , drawing from

58166-576: The turn of the millennium. In the 1999 novel Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven, a time traveller goes to visit Mars's past but instead appears in the parallel universe of Mars's fictional past and encounters the creations of science fiction authors such as H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs . Stories collected in Peter Crowther 's 2002 anthology Mars Probes pay tribute to the works of Stanley G. Weinbaum and Leigh Brackett, among others. The 2013 anthology Old Mars edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois consists of newly written stories in

58420-452: The twenty-first century unfolds cannot be prophesied, because—undoubtedly—improbable, original, and masterful talents will work new variations on the matter of Mars." Mars has two small moons , Phobos and Deimos , which were both discovered by Asaph Hall in 1877. The first appearance of the moons of Mars in fiction predates their discovery by a century and a half; the satirical 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift includes

58674-494: The unknown. Nicky Jenner, 4th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars In the year 2000, Westfahl estimated the total number of works of fiction dealing with Mars up to that point to exceed five thousand. Depictions of Mars have remained common since then, though without a clear overarching trend—rather, says The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , Mars fiction has "ramified in several directions". Monster movies set on Mars have appeared throughout this time period including

58928-452: The upper mantle of Mars, represented by hydroxyl ions contained within Martian minerals, is equal to or greater than that of Earth at 50–300 parts per million of water, which is enough to cover the entire planet to a depth of 200–1,000 metres (660–3,280 ft). On 18 March 2013, NASA reported evidence from instruments on the Curiosity rover of mineral hydration , likely hydrated calcium sulfate , in several rock samples including

59182-467: The wedding of his daughter Cleopatra to Olympias's brother, Alexander I of Epirus , Philip was assassinated by the captain of his bodyguards , Pausanias . As Pausanias tried to escape, he tripped over a vine and was killed by his pursuers, including two of Alexander's companions, Perdiccas and Leonnatus . Alexander was proclaimed king on the spot by the nobles and army at the age of 20. Alexander began his reign by eliminating potential rivals to

59436-477: The western coast of Anatolia revolted until the news arrived that Philip had been murdered and had been succeeded by his young son Alexander. The Macedonians were demoralized by Philip's death and were subsequently defeated near Magnesia by the Achaemenids under the command of the mercenary Memnon of Rhodes . Taking over the invasion project of Philip II, Alexander's army crossed the Hellespont in 334 BC with approximately 48,100 soldiers, 6,100 cavalry, and

59690-420: The widespread presence of crater lakes across a large proportion of the surface, for which there is independent mineralogical, sedimentological and geomorphological evidence. Further evidence that liquid water once existed on the surface of Mars comes from the detection of specific minerals such as hematite and goethite , both of which sometimes form in the presence of water. In 2004, Opportunity detected

59944-406: The women and children sold into slavery . When Alexander destroyed Tyre, most of the towns on the route to Egypt quickly capitulated. However, Alexander was met with resistance at Gaza . The stronghold was heavily fortified and built on a hill, requiring a siege. When "his engineers pointed out to him that because of the height of the mound it would be impossible... this encouraged Alexander all

60198-445: The work of establishing himself as hēgemṓn ( Greek : ἡγεμών ) of a league which according to Diodorus was to wage a campaign against the Persians for the sundry grievances Greece suffered in 480 and free the Greek cities of the western coast and islands from Achaemenid rule. In 336 he sent Parmenion , Amyntas , Andromenes, Attalus, and an army of 10,000 men into Anatolia to make preparations for an invasion. The Greek cities on

60452-448: The year 2000, science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl estimated the total number of works of fiction dealing with Mars up to that point to exceed five thousand, and the planet has continued to make frequent appearances across several genres and forms of media since. In contrast, the moons of Mars — Phobos and Deimos —have made only sporadic appearances in fiction. Before the 1800s, Mars did not get much attention in fiction writing as

60706-414: The young Sun's energetic solar wind . After the formation of the planets, the inner Solar System may have been subjected to the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment . About 60% of the surface of Mars shows a record of impacts from that era, whereas much of the remaining surface is probably underlain by immense impact basins caused by those events. However, more recent modeling has disputed the existence of

60960-406: Was utopian fiction . Around the same time, the mistaken belief that there are canals on Mars emerged and made its way into fiction, popularized by Percival Lowell 's speculations of an ancient civilization having constructed them. The War of the Worlds , H. G. Wells 's novel about an alien invasion of Earth by sinister Martians, was published in 1897 and went on to have a major influence on

61214-402: Was adopted by on-screen portrayals of Mars colonies in the 1990s in works like the 1990 film Total Recall (a loose adaptation of Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale") and the 1994–1998 television series Babylon 5 , now both in terms of Earth-based governments and—likely inspired by the emergence of Reaganomics —especially corporations. Clarke's The Sands of Mars features one of

61468-421: Was also acquainted with Persian exiles at the Macedonian court, who received the protection of Philip II for several years as they opposed Artaxerxes III . Among them were Artabazos II and his daughter Barsine , possible future mistress of Alexander, who resided at the Macedonian court from 352 to 342 BC, as well as Amminapes , future satrap of Alexander, or a Persian nobleman named Sisines . This gave

61722-415: Was appointed commander for the coming war against Persia. He also received news of a Thracian uprising. Before crossing to Asia, Alexander wanted to safeguard his northern borders. In the spring of 335 BC, he advanced to suppress several revolts. Starting from Amphipolis , he travelled east into the country of the "Independent Thracians", and at Mount Haemus , the Macedonian army attacked and defeated

61976-414: Was his principal wife for some time, likely because she gave birth to Alexander. Several legends surround Alexander's birth and childhood. According to the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch , on the eve of the consummation of her marriage to Philip, Olympias dreamed that her womb was struck by a thunderbolt that caused a flame to spread "far and wide" before dying away. Sometime after the wedding, Philip

62230-425: Was in command of the advance guard of the army in Asia Minor and Cleopatra's uncle. Attalus was at that time corresponding with Demosthenes, regarding the possibility of defecting to Athens. Attalus also had severely insulted Alexander, and following Cleopatra's murder, Alexander may have considered him too dangerous to be left alive. Alexander spared Arrhidaeus, who was by all accounts mentally disabled, possibly as

62484-407: Was insufficient to merely exploit the internal contradictions within the imperial system as in Asia Minor, Babylonia or Egypt; he also had to (re)create a central government with or without the support of the Iranians. As early as 334 BC he demonstrated awareness of this, when he challenged incumbent King Darius III "by appropriating the main elements of the Achaemenid monarchy's ideology, particularly

62738-556: Was preparing to attack Illyria instead. During this turmoil, the Illyrians invaded Macedonia, only to be repelled by Alexander. Philip and his army joined his son in 338 BC, and they marched south through Thermopylae , taking it after stubborn resistance from its Theban garrison. They went on to occupy the city of Elatea , only a few days' march from both Athens and Thebes . The Athenians, led by Demosthenes , voted to seek alliance with Thebes against Macedonia. Both Athens and Philip sent embassies to win Thebes's favour, but Athens won

62992-503: Was probably the root cause of the incision in almost all cases. Along craters and canyon walls, there are thousands of features that appear similar to terrestrial gullies . The gullies tend to be in the highlands of the Southern Hemisphere and face the Equator; all are poleward of 30° latitude. A number of authors have suggested that their formation process involves liquid water, probably from melting ice, although others have argued for formation mechanisms involving carbon dioxide frost or

63246-414: Was published in 2021. Mars has also made frequent appearances in video games ; examples include the 2001 game Red Faction which is set on Mars and the 2014 game Destiny where Mars is an unlockable setting. In addition, Mars continues to make regular appearances in stories where it is not the main focus, such as Joe Haldeman 's 2008 novel Marsbound . Says Crossley, "Where imagined Mars will go as

63500-437: Was reported that InSight had detected and recorded over 450 marsquakes and related events. Beneath the crust is a silicate mantle responsible for many of the tectonic and volcanic features on the planet's surface. The upper Martian mantle is a low-velocity zone , where the velocity of seismic waves is lower than surrounding depth intervals. The mantle appears to be rigid down to the depth of about 250 km, giving Mars

63754-452: Was taken prisoner by Bessus , his Bactrian satrap and kinsman. As Alexander approached, Bessus had his men fatally stab the Great King and then declared himself Darius's successor as Artaxerxes V, before retreating into Central Asia to launch a guerrilla campaign against Alexander. Alexander buried Darius's remains next to his Achaemenid predecessors in a regal funeral. He claimed that, while dying, Darius had named him as his successor to

64008-406: Was the 1880 novel Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg . Mars became the most popular extraterrestrial location in fiction in the late 1800s as it became clear that the Moon was devoid of life. A recurring theme in this time period was that of reincarnation on Mars, reflecting an upswing in interest in the paranormal in general and in relation to Mars in particular. Humans are reborn on Mars in

64262-424: Was translated into several languages and was highly influential in Continental Europe , including inspiring rocket scientist Wernher von Braun , but did not receive a translation into English until the 1970s, which limited its impact in the Anglosphere . The 1910 novel The Man from Mars, Or Service for Service's Sake by Henry Wallace Dowding  [ Wikidata ] portrays a civilization on Mars based on

64516-818: Was treated as a guest, despite having defeated them in battle a few years before. However, it appears Philip never intended to disown his politically and militarily trained son. Accordingly, Alexander returned to Macedon after six months due to the efforts of a family friend, Demaratus , who mediated between the two parties. In the following year, the Persian satrap (governor) of Caria , Pixodarus , offered his eldest daughter to Alexander's half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus . Olympias and several of Alexander's friends suggested this showed Philip intended to make Arrhidaeus his heir. Alexander reacted by sending an actor, Thessalus of Corinth, to tell Pixodarus that he should not offer his daughter's hand to an illegitimate son, but instead to Alexander. When Philip heard of this, he stopped

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