Planet of the B-movie fantasy

Profile: It's the cool place to go: five probes are on their way to the Red Planet, which is closer to us than it has been since the days when there were only a million of us on Earth. Shane Hegarty explores its appeal

The last time Mars came this close to Earth was in 57,617 BC. The peak of the Ice Age was still 40,000 years down the line and Homo sapiens consisted of roughly a million people, concentrated in Africa and not even the only human species around. They could not have understood how the red light that grew large in their unpolluted sky was another planet, the fourth of nine orbiting the sun and the nearest to the one they were standing on. We can only guess what it triggered in their imaginations. Stories may have sprung from its appearance, portents extrapolated from its vivid colour.

On Wednesday night we got an idea of how they felt. Across the world people took a little time to stand in their gardens and gaze through light-polluted skies at the bright red disc in the east, marvelling for a moment at the beauty of the universe before returning inside just in time to catch the next event in the World Athletics Championships.

We know a lot about Mars now, but not enough that it doesn't capture our imagination every now and again. This is going to be a busy year for the planet. It is a fashionable destination, the Croatia of the solar system, as five probes from Japan, the United States and Europe make their way towards it.

The first, the European Space Agency's Beagle 2, will land on Christmas Day. Its gifts to the planet will include a painting by Damien Hirst and a song by Blur, the English rock band. Then the lander will rather delicately stick a robotic finger into the Martian soil and do the only thing we want our Martian probes to do. It will search for life.

The life it will seek out will be not the B-movie monsters beloved of 20th-century imagination but evidence of tiny microbes capable of surviving in the more welcoming nooks and crannies of an otherwise hostile corner of the universe. The US spacecraft that quickly follow will search for subsurface water. If it is there, life may be too, triggering an unprecedented re-examination of our place in the universe. If it is not, it will not stop us from dreaming.

It was the ancient Assyrians, living in what is now Iraq, who interpreted Mars's colour as a harbinger of violence, seeing the orange-red "star" as a "shedder of blood". To the early Romans the "wandering star" represented the god of farming but, like the Vikings and the Greeks, they adopted it as their god of war.

It was with the development of the telescope that man began to wonder about the possibility of the planet's being inhabited. In 1659 Christiaan Huygens, a Dutchman, was the first to see the surface as anything other than a fuzzy red blob. He was also the author of a popular book, Cosmotheoros, which wondered whether extraterrestrial civilisations had furniture and musicians, thieves and murderers.

A close approach by the planet in 1719 fuelled an explosion of interest in the possibility of life on it. By then scientists had discovered that Mars has four seasons and ice caps, just like Earth, so perhaps it had people just like us too. By the mid-1800s the scramble for proof of civilisation had truly begun.

In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, spotted the "canals" streaking across the planet's surface at a time when the canal was seen by the modern world as the exemplar of progress. Schiaparelli nearly went blind squinting at the features through a telescope. In admiration Percival Lowell, a US astronomer, championed the canals theory, speculating that an intelligent race took water from the frozen poles to the more temperate equator and that changes in surface colour were a result of seasonal vegetation. He continued to argue his case long after it had been ridiculed and his eyesight also ruined.

Yet the belief in life on Mars had embedded itself in Western thought. In 1891 a wealthy Parisian space hobbyist called Clara Guzman offered a prize of 100,000 francs to the first person to make contact with aliens, although it was with the exception that the aliens could not be Martian, so certain was she of their existence. When, in 1898, H. G. Wells wrote The War Of The Worlds, in which the belligerent refugees of a dying Martian civilisation invade Earth, he was only feeding an already voracious appetite for aliens.

Through much of the early 20th century, though, scientists still believed life existed on the planet. In the meantime popular culture used Mars as the jumping point for pulp fiction and, later, B-movies. The most famous radio drama of all time, Orson Welles's 1938 adaptation of The War Of The Worlds, moved the Martian invasion from southern England to New Jersey - and prompted mass hysteria. Not realising they were listening to a play, people attempted suicide, abandoned their cars, made straight to the confessional box. Almost 900 people rang the New York Times to inquire about the end of the world.

Scientific and public optimism was finally deflated only by the probes dispatched during the 1960s and 1970s, which proved there were no canals, only a sterile world of meteor craters and rusty stone. Yet it did not stymie the creative urge. In science fiction Mars became the home of a lost civilisation, just waiting to be woken by Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are still those willing to believe that a "face on Mars" photograph popularised during the 1990s is not a trick of the shadows but the crumbling remnants of a once great society.

Scientific ambitions have moderated, but the central hope remains the same. Scientists wonder whether life existed on Mars before its atmosphere drifted off into space. Perhaps there is underground water or steam vents in which life may still eke out a meagre existence.

Mars still tantalises. It is close enough to see but not close enough to reach easily. It has always seemed a little more welcoming, the closest thing to home. Try to go for a leisurely stroll on our other near neighbour, Venus, and the 450-degree heat will melt whatever of your body is left after the atmosphere has crushed it. Mars, compared with other planets, is clement. Its gravity is a third that of Earth's, meaning an astronaut could walk clumsily, although an atmosphere composed largely of carbon dioxide would mean you couldn't leave the house without your spacesuit.

It represents both the next step in our evolution as space travellers and the frustrations of how slowly we have moved. Having been to the moon, we expected Mars to be the next stamp on our passports. But it has not happened - nor will it any time soon. Caught up in the emotion of the moon-landing anniversary, in 1989 George Bush Sr promised to put men on Mars by 2019. The idea was quietly dropped when someone calculated it would cost more than €400 million and kill the astronauts as solar particles tore at their DNA. It is increasingly suggested that the pioneers should be like early travellers to the Americas, who left knowing they would never return home.

Earth and Mars will next be this close in 2287. People will again come outside to look, but perhaps, by then, there will be humans on Mars to look back at us. Colonists might wander into their dusty red gardens for a peek at the bright blue disc in the sky, marvelling for a moment at the beauty of the universe before returning inside just in time to catch the next event in the Mars Athletics Championships.

What is it? Our nearest neighbour

Why is it in the news? It came closer to Earth this week than for 60,000 years, a mere 55,758,006 kilometres from us

Most appealing characteristic Its colour. It is the Red Planet because of rust, mainly of its rocks and soil

Least appealing characteristic Its stubbornness. It has long fuelled our fantasies but has yet to yield signs of life

Most likely to be seen Large in the eastern sky for the next few weeks

Least likely to beseen Filling spaceships with mighty little green men and pointing them in the direction of puny earthlings