Post by Thomas Gangale

#Martian On this sol in 123 (1842 February 26): Nicolas Camille Flammarion was born; French astronomer, mystic, and psychic researcher; author of more than fifty books, including La pluralité des mondes habites (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds) (1868), Uranie (Urania) (1889), La planète Mars et ses conditions d’habitabilité, (The Planet Mars and Its Conditions of Habitability) (1892). He developed detailed maps of Mars and believed in an advanced civilization that had constructed the vast network of canals on their dying planet. In his novel Uranie, a young astronomer and his fiancée are killed in a ballooning accident and are reincarnated in new bodies on Mars. The projection of consciousness to Mars, rather than physical interplanetary transportation by spacecraft, was a common literary device in the spiritualist age of the late 19th century and early 20th century, the application of rocket propulsion to spaceflight not then being understood either by the general reader nor by many authors. The transmigration of the soul to Mars was also espoused in works by Eleanor Kirk (1901) and Louis Pope Gratacap (1903), and Ray Bradbury gave this idea a twist in his short story “Mars is Heaven!” (1948). https://lnkd.in/gaX92pp9