Expectations and Alien Life

All of the early stories about the encounters between the martians and the first humans to come to mars have the common thread of expectations not being met, and this leading to disaster. Ylla expects to meet the humans and fall in love, but her predictions lead to her husband killing both members of the first expedition. The second expedition is ruined when the humans expect to be welcomed as heroes, but martians expect anyone out of the ordinary to be insane. And the third expedition comes to ruin when they throw all of their reason out the window when their expectations are not met. Since what they find is not what they expect, they decide to accept anything, however unlikely.

The warning here from Bradbury is that we cannot allow either our expectations or lack-thereof to make us blind to reason when dealing with an alien life for, or the unexplained in general. The first two expeditions fail because the humans expect to be welcomed with open arms by the martians. The martians, on the other hand, choose to see the humans as a single madman of unbelievable brilliance instead of accept the possibility that he might be telling the truth. These problems could have been avoided had both races set aside what they predicted would happen, and accepted what did happen.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the third expedition. The astronauts, upon finding something that they cannot explain, accept the first explanation given to them, despite its extreme improbability. They could have saved their live if they had kept their skepticism, and tried to think rationally. The lesson is that when dealing with the unknown we cannot allow what we think we know, or what we are told, overpower what we can observe and reason for ourselves.