Martians: too basic
Charles Cros, a poet and inventor, petitioned the French government to fund the construction of a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and
Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,ooo francs to the Académie des sciences to be
awarded to the first person to communicate successfully with aliens, with the proviso that they couldn’t be Martians, whose
existence was already ‘sufficiently well known’.
From a review by Daniel Oberhaus in the LRB.
Martians: too basic