When did we stop believing in life on Mars?

I seem to recall in my youth in the 1960's (I'm 47 now) that the "fact" of life on Mars was a given. I don't recall if there was still a belief in "Martians" at the time, but that there was vegetation that experienced seasonal changes was something that "everybody just knew". Am I remembering this all right?

Was it the widely held belief at least into the 60’s that Mars was at least alive and perhaps inhabited? Wasn’t this even taught in school?

__________________
Home of the Illumi-Llama:
The Illuminati-R-Us Forums

All I remember were the maps of the canals on Mars.

__________________
"It's time to receive our missions from The Head."

We used to believe a lot of things about Mars that have since turned out to be wrong. It was once popular to think that Mars had canals that were evidence of some kind of civilization. And, yes, we did imagine that Mars had seasonal vegetation growth.

The story about the canals was pretty much dashed as telescopes got better and better. And the possibility of verdant life on Mars was pretty much dashed with the Mariner missions in the 1960's. We now know that the apparent seasons were the results of seasonal planet-wide dust storms and not vegetation.

The Mariner missions showed us a Mars that looked very much like our own moon - a cratered, desolate place. Viking (1976), though, suggested that there was more to it - that perhaps Mars had once been a wet and possibly habitable planet. Unfortunately, lander experiments with Viking gave us a sterile surface that appeared hostile to even microbial forms of life today.

Today, with the confirmation of a watery past by the rovers, the possibility of either extant or extinct microbial life on Mars has improved. Perhaps within the next twenty years we will know for certain if Mars was once, or still is, home for life.

__________________
Anything may be possible, but not everything actually is. Some things are true and some things are not. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

Certainly there was still a general belief that there was some primitive plant life on Mars in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Popularising nonfiction books at the time such as Clarke's The Exploration of Space and Patrick Moore's Mars, talk about it quite freely.

Mariner 4 was a big blow, as a lot of the expected data about Mars was shown to be wrong. The Atmosphere was revealed to be thinner (again in the 50's, the consensus was a mostly Nitrogen atmosphere with around -50-80 millibars pressure) and the surface was heavily cratered, looking more moonlike than Earthlike.

But even just before the Viking landings, there were still some serious suggestions of advanced organisms. I remember a Horizon (BBC Documentary) programme circa 1975, explaining with animations how some crab-like creatures with big carapace shells to protect against the ultraviolet, culd shift from place to place, putting down 'roots' deep into the surface to draw out deep water and minerals. All pure speculation, but it still had a place in a mainstream science programme at that time.

__________________
"We need rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

I don't think we ever stopped believing, I think our expectations of what we could potentially find have become more realistic.