Join us for our October 14 meeting! The first of two presentations is by Joe Aspler:

The Solar System Ain’t What it Used To Be

  From the earliest days of science fiction, space travellers travelled to the Moon, to Mars, to Venus, and to other planets as they were discovered. Early science fiction – before the late 199th century – treated the planets as just different earths. Science fictional tropes from the late 19th century right to the Space Age declared Mercury to be an oven on the side facing the sun and a freezer on the other. Venus was a planet of swamps, jungles, and dinosaurs. Mars was a cool desert planet, with all the water in the canals.

Then, science had its little say. Starting in the early 1960s, the first interplanetary probes knocked down the tropes of science fiction. Or as T.H. Huxley (1825 – 1895) put it: “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

But have no fear, there were plenty of other ways to look at the planets … and more planets to look at.