The name
Martian is given to the hypothetical native inhabitants of the planet
Mars.
There have been many fictional depictions of Martians in the past, including the famous invaders from H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, and also many people who have believed in the existence of real Martians. At this point in time it is generally accepted that Mars has no macroscopic native life, and even the presence of bacteria-scale life is speculative at best.
If Mars is one day colonized by humans, the generations descended from the settlers will most likely also be called Martians.
See also Mars in fiction, extraterrestrial life.
In a
computer network, packets with source addresses not routable by some computer on a network segment are referred to as
martians or "packets from Mars", on the grounds that they are of no evident "terrestrial" (i.e. normal) source. Martian packets can arise from network equipment malfunction, misconfiguration of a host, or simple coexistence of two logical networks on a single physical layer. For instance, if the
IP networks 192.168.34.0/24 and 10.2.3.0/24 network operate on the same
Ethernet segment, packets from 10.2.3.4 are Martians to the computer at 192.168.34.9, and vice versa.
The
Martians were a group of physicists and mathematicians who emigrated from
Hungary to the
United States in the early half of the
20th century. They included
Wigner[?] and
Edward Teller. They received the name from
John von Neumann who half-jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars.
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