Клуб «Глиттерати»| Glitterati Club
Meet Gavriil Tikhov, the passionate academic who convinced much of the Soviet public there was life on Mars.
Tikhov, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences who settled in Alma‑Ata after studying in Paris, helped found the field of astrobotany and argued that the blue‑violet “seas” seen on Mars were actually plant life. His poetic descriptions, in which he compared Martian plants to Russian flora, fired the public’s imagination.
Our young northern Russian pine saplings are completely lilac at their very earliest stage. For exactly the same reasons, the 'seas' on Mars are colored bluish‑gray.
From the late 1940s into the 1960s, newspapers and magazines (even the famous Ogonyok) treated Martian vegetation as nearly proven. Tikhov dreamed of a botanical atlas of Mars, speculated about “wild” vs. “cultivated” Martian plants, and even suggested how Venusian flora might look (yellow and orange).
Not everyone agreed. By 1952 biologist Olga Troitskaya pushed back, citing Mars’s extreme temperature swings. The debate spilled into popular culture: in the iconic 1956 film Carnival Night, a satirical character declares, “Is there life on Mars, is there not? Science does not know.”
After Tikhov’s death, the astrobotany section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was dissolved.
For GL’s Green Madness month, Tikhov is a perfect example of passionate delusion. Know any other spectacular cases where passion met madness about plants? Share them in the comments.
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