Is Mars Habitable? (1907)

Not proposing little green men who are unlikely but suggesting there may be bacteria like organisms underground which seems quite possible. A reason I think Musk shouldn't be allowed to build a human settlement there in a hurry. It should be more like a national park with no biological humans. We can always have robots and FPV goggles for the visitors.

(1000+ comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549)

That's not to denigrate all philosophy (much of it is useful, and even the wrongheaded stuff often contains useful methods and constructs in testing arguments and beliefs), or even the wrongheaded bits (useful not only as bad examples but also to explain much of current belief and ideology, and to show origins of contemporary arguments and topics). But it does provide a strong caution about the dangers of leaping off into rational thought with parlous thin empirical foundation, or of false premises. Wrong belief is often far more harmful than no belief.

As to Mars's characteristics ... I'm sufficiently old to have seen an immense evolution of understanding about the Solar System and Earth itself. In the mid-1960s, the theory of plate tectonics was just being formally accepted, the far-side of the Moon mapped for the first time (the story of National Geographic's map project published in 1969 is a wonderful account of this: part 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20090129220141/https://kelsocart...> part 2 https://web.archive.org/web/20090130150935/https://kelsocart...>) The Luna, Mariner, Zond, and Surveyor missions provided first close glimpses of the Moon, Venus, and Mars from the late 1950s to early 1970s. The Viking Mars landers (1975) and Voyager outer-planetary missions (1979--1988) absolutely revolutionised understanding, and that based on what was often just a very narrow and short glimpse. But the books I'd read as a child, published from the 1950s to early 1970s are now woefully out of date.