Why are humans so obsessed with Mars?

Humans don’t live on Mars/ Nor do cats/ Or walruses/ There is no Perestroika on Mars/ Therefore no illusion/ No pollution/ Problems but no solutions/ No evolution, no revolution/ Go, go, go to Mars/ Go, go, go to Mars —Mangal Graha, lyrics by Chandrabindoo There’s something about Mars. While every Mars mission, from US space agency Nasa’s Viking to India’s Mangalyaan, might have expanded the frontiers of science, they have also sadly made us realise that there are no Martians, whether itching to start a War of the Worlds or provide refuge from our nuclear winter. That canal fantasy so captivated us that Bengali writer Hemendra Kumar Roy fantasised in his novel, Meghduter Mortey Agomon, that Mars had green fields and jungles around 3,000- to 4,000-mile long canals while the rest of the planet was buffeted by red sandstorms. Missions like Nasa’s Mariner 4 in 1965 and Viking, which landed on Mars in 1976, enthralled us but also sounded the death knell for the Martians. Mars slowly started shifting in our minds from the planet that belonged to Martians, to an empty terrain we could turn into Earth-II.