This is the memory palace. I'm Nate De Mayo

There were canals on Mars

It was right there in the papers in 1882

In astronomer an Italian like Galileo

Giovanni Sceperelli had seen them from an observatory in a palace on a hill in Milan

Had observed bands of shadow

Cris crossing the belly of the red planet

And made detailed notes for two years

Waiting until the planet's orbit brought it as close as it would be to this one until he was sure

There was a network of canali he wrote in Italian unlike anything seen on earth

And it was to the people gathered around new stands in New York or Sydney to the scientists at symposia and Harvard or Madras

It was the best evidence humanity had ever had but they were not alone

It was a big news day

Percival Lowell was a business man in a diplomat an an academic who'd spent years of his life obsessively studying and writing about Japan

But with news of Sceperelli's discovery

Lowell dropped Japan for a country further still

He built a telescope then the finest in the world and placed it on a mountain in Flagstaff, Arizona

A place of few clouds or smoke stacks or city lights or other things that tend to keep the stars from us

He was no dilatant despite the sudden midlife career switch. He was smart and deciduous and

Thuro in his investigations and by 1894 he was making a detailed study of Mars

tracking atmospheric changes and charting the monumental canals that traced its surface

Others are sued such precision religious scholars pondered the Martian soul

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