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Comment by gunfighthacksaw | Hacker News Reader

For anyone born in the 20th century I’d think so.

If you’d have said there was water on mars in 1970 you’d have been met with disbelief. 1980? 1990? Later?

Though I distinctly remember reading in an encyclopedia from the '70s that certain large dark regions on the Martian surface were believed to be thick vegetation (: I'm not kidding!

From [1]: "As recently as the early 1960s, it still seemed possible to a few astronomers that the dark regions had some kind of plant life because they seemed to darken each summer as if plants were growing in response to sunlight."

[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia02362-the-dark-surfaces-o...

Yes, I remember reading books from the 60s my grandmother got from a charity shop. They had wonderful illustrations of Mars with vegetation and where the canyons discussed in the article were canals full of water. It's easy to forget just how much we've discovered about the other planets in the solar system in the last 50 years.

There is so much science fiction writing from the golden age and beyond, up to the 60s and 70s, which prominently features Martians and Martian cities. Mars having alien life was a massive source of speculation among the public at that time. While the stories are still great, reading them today I can't help but go "nah we've been to Mars, there's nothing there".

Makes me think about how soon sci-fi written today will get similarly outdated.

I remember a sci-fi novel from the 60s or 70s, where a forgotten punch card was the only artifact left over from aliens long gone.

I think that something similar awaits modern science fiction in 50 years.

I'm reading Red Mars at the moment, written in the 1990s and set in the 2030s, and a cluttered lab is described as having piles of floppy disks lying around. So, yeah.

Makes one wonder what science of today will be looked upon with quaint humor in 50 years' time.

Astronomy Picture of the Day on April 1st 2005: NASA finds water on mars[0].

[0] https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html

I think this is a failure of science education more than anything else. The polar ice caps of Mars were first observed in the 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mars_observation#Ea...

It was observed simultaneously as canals and vegetation were "observed", and roundly discarded by 1970s. Water on Mars remained unconfirmed until this century.

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