Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the

tropics.

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder.

Wish you were here.

Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is CBS, I am the World, I'm John Bachelor.

Mars, the planet that we all gaze at when we see it turn red, sometimes bright red,

depending upon the Martian dust storms. The fact that we gaze upon it

is a way of connecting us to our ancients, our progenitors, the people who first gazed on Mars

without our instruments in robots and success.

Someone who tells this story wonderfully.

I welcome Matthew Schendel, he is a space history curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and his new book is

for the love of Mars, a human history of the Red planet. The ancients did not shy away from interpreting

Mars so Matt congratulations and good evening. We go immediately to the Mayans who looked upon Mars as a Zumor, a Mars beast.

What did they make of that red planet in the sky?

Good evening to you. Thank you, John. Yeah, so you know the story of

the Mayans is very interesting. I was attracted to that story partly because you know the the Mayans have this incredibly you know robust

understanding of cosmology of you know the the role that the planets played in their world and, you know, I really wanted to learn a little bit more while I was writing this book about how they saw Mars and what it meant to them. And in reading a lot of the

anthropological literature about that relationship between the Mayans and the sky. I did find archaeologists who are making this argument

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