Ten thousand times a hundred thousand dusty years ago
Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.
It stroked the stones and spoke in tongues and splashed against my face,
Till ages rolled, the sun shone cold on this unholy place.
That was the planet Mars as channeled by the folk singer and science writer Jonathan Eberhart in “Lament for a Red Planet.”
Ever since the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli thought he spied lines that he called “canali” on Mars in 1877, earthlings’ romantic thoughts about our nearest cosmic neighbor have revolved around water and its possible consequence, Life as We Know It. We haven’t found life on Mars, but decades of robotic exploration have indeed strengthened astronomers’ convictions that rivers and perhaps even oceans once flowed on the red planet.
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