The Life Beautiful

On the same day, William Morris described to us some of the furniture and decorations of the Twentieth Plane—

I am indebted, kind ladies and gentlemen, for permission to enter here. I will seat myself in a Morris chair and be at home.

Now I feel we are brothers. I did on earth want people to understand these two laws of life, the life beautiful—

Combine utility with beauty and live in an atmosphere of rich simplicity.

Here we have furniture too. Shall I describe some? Robert Louis Stevenson is sitting in a chair I created by thought. The chair is simply a back, seat and legs but the back moves in motion as one moves. Here all things of utility conform to personal use, even as the winds conform to endless shapes on the earth plane.

We have substantial shrines of Art here—to wit, your mother's home. It is permanent; has been for centuries but this is of note. We often sweep out of our homes the articles in them and slowly recreate new things of beauty, such as beds shaped like shells, chairs like a sunflower, window sills like sands golden-heated by the intense sun, chiffoniers all glasslike with drawers that open as noiselessly as the fall of a flower petal. We have rugs something like a blend of fur, silk and the Kashmir of Arabia. We have here hooks to hang headgear on made out of crescent moonbeam shadows—

I could go on forever enumerating these external objects of beauty.

Our walls are made of glass, and as one dreams, thinks, loves and lives, the life is pictured on the wall as mural decoration, a moving picture of the tenants.

Stevenson, when he left the Islands of Hawaii to come to this plane brought with him the ukulele. He brought also the native song of the isle but improved it and often we hear him when alone. His tonal pictures pierce us to the quick. His eye has the same wistful expression it had in Samoa. He had that listening attitude as if he heard far off the call of one telling him her love. His is a soul like the ocean in sleep—boundless power, vast imagination, full-bosomed emotion and the consciousness of wisdom; such is the soul of Louis.

The Twentieth Plane—A Psychic Revelation, Albert Durrant Watson, M. D., George W. Jacobs & Company, Philadelphia, 1919

Here on Earth, we are used to the wind shaping our environment over time, forming smooth, sculpted rocks and rippling dunes. In this way, Mars is more similar to Earth than you might expect.

On the Red Planet, strong winds whip dust and sand from the surface into a frenzy, moving it across the planet at high speeds. These winds can hit 100 km/h, enough to create giant dust storms that settle across huge swathes of Mars, lasting for many days or even weeks.

As these winds travel they carve their surroundings, eroding and smoothing and gradually wearing away the planet’s surface features over millions of years.

Evidence of these processes can be seen in this image from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. The image shows part of the Arabia Terra region, which is scattered with craters of varying sizes and ages. The craters in this image, caused by impacts in Mars’ past, all show different degrees of erosion. Some still have defined outer rims and clear features within them, while others are much smoother and featureless, almost seeming to run into one another or merge with their surroundings.

The largest crater in this image also has the steepest rim. With a diameter of some 70 km, this crater dominates the left, southern, side of the frame. At first glance, this image seems to show something amazing—in this crater and in one of its neighbours to the right—is this a hint of blue liquid water? No, it is an optical illusion caused by image processing. The blue-hued patches lying within the ragged craters are actually dark sediments that have built up over time. Again, this is due to the winds, which carry dark, volcanic, basalt-rich deposits across the planet. This colour image was taken by Mars Express’s High-Resolution Stereo Camera on 19 November 2014, during orbit 13728. The image resolution is about 20 m per pixel—ESA/DLR/FU Berlin—Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic