♪ Acoustic Americana Music Guide ♪: ARTISTS CELEBRATING THE MARS LANDING, BUT, THINKING AHEAD… (with YOUR reader comments)

Reprinted from the Guide’s July 20, 2012 News Features edition, with comments received then and now.

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♪ 8) But, Do We Want to Find Life on Mars?
Sure, we love all the movies and science, but there's a lot more at stake

by Larry Wines

[Astronaut SALLY RIDE died of cancer just after this was originally published. The Acoustic Americana Music Guide respectfully dedicates it to her memory and pioneering legacy.]

Art, for over 100 years, mostly as sci-fi films, has been obsessed with the idea of Martians.

Hopes ride high for Earth’s final mission to Mars, which lands August 5. They must, since no funding is in the pipeline for anything to follow. Nothing else can go there for years, if not decades. This time, the mission’s hopeful purpose is addressing the question of finding life.

But if something else does live there, can we move-in and set-up shop?

Sure, we know what some of you are thinking: “Don’t ask Native American Indians or native Hawai’ians, or any indigenous peoples whose technology was not capable of facing that of the newcomer (i.e., invader), or any of the hundreds of thousands who died from imported diseases for which they had no immunity.”

Don’t worry. We understand that genocidal dynamics of human population interactions are different than encounters between unfamiliar organisms.

Still, this is not a science-fiction scenario. It’s real. NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, named “Curiosity,” is the last of the robotic Mohicans. The Obama administration pulled the plug on the manned Orion program as the replacement for the Space Shuttle, after the 1% enriched themselves at the expense of everything and everyone else in the 2008 financial meltdown, and demands for financial austerity set-in. And, of course, the do-nothing Congress allowed the funding to run-out for the then-ongoing series of interplanetary robotic probes.

It’s happened before, with Apollo’s veni, vidi, vici, that came and saw and collected and left, never to return. It’s as if Columbus came home with a potato and an ear of corn and nobody would ante-up to go back.

The dream of finding life “out there” beyond Earth is as old as humankind’s first wonderings about the night sky. It fires our imagination. It’s still the one discovery that could change everything. When SETI – the radio telescope Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – was threatened with being de-funded, a popular uprising demanded a way to keep it going.

That spawned Carl Sagan’s novel and the 1997 Jodie Foster / Matthew McConaughey movie, “Contact.”

That’s emblematic. It’s less about the success of Apollo and more about Hollywood.

Art and science are the shared province of innovators and dreamers and explorers. Both use technology, but neither IS technology. Art and science are creative quarters where dreamers dwell, the Valhalla from which others are inspired.

The late Carl Sagan became the post-Apollo rock star of space with the “Cosmos” TV series, advocating that we ask and search and learn by going. The “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” franchises made millions by combining Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood with technogeeky robotic sidekicks and the mystique of whatever is out there to be discovered – in the fantastic realm of color and music and light and the unexpected. The bar scene in the first “Star Wars,” populated with strange alien creatures, is among film’s most iconic creations, music and all. Underlying is the enjoyable idea that somebody is out there, wondering if somebody is over here, with the exciting prospects of meeting that unique someone in, well, the familiar metaphor of a bar. It’s the ultimate crossroads of human hope and longing for excitement that’s unknown and slightly dangerous. Those movies were dangerously sexy. Exploration is dangerously sexy.

Mars holds a central place in all that. For over a hundred years, it was always Mars that sent the alien invasion. In 1898, H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” was published. Orson Welles scared the hell out of people by dramatizing it as a radio play in 1938. George Pal’s 1953 film version won an Oscar and remains a classic. And, as recently as 2005, Steven Spielberg employed Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, and Tim Robbins in yet another film remake.

It’s a unique cultural history. Despite our scientific discoveries, invaders from Mars still don’t seem unbelievable, even today. Astronomers of another time saw canals on Mars, starting with Schiaparelli in 1877 – well, he labeled features he saw as “canali,” which means “channels” in Italian. English-speakers, being ethnocentric, read that as canals. In the 1890s, watery canals, like today’s California Aqueduct on steroids, became Percival Lowell’s obsession. He convinced himself they were dug by a Martian civilization that needed to get melt water from polar icecaps to the planet’s arid central regions. He drew elaborate maps of them.

Photographs from Mariner spacecraft in the ’60s found no canals, though the massive Valles Marinaris, as big as 100 Grand Canyons, aligns with a small segment of what people thought they saw through telescopes. Or rather, what they still see – astronomers say the mysterious optical illusion of an angular network of lines can indeed be seen when the light is right.

Point is, we have always been intrigued with finding life on Mars. More than anywhere else.

In 1976, NASA’s pair of Viking landers brought rudimentary laboratories to test for life. Their investigations were inconclusive. After a long absence, the tiny Mars “Sojourner” became Earth’s first mobile explorer of another planet in 1997. Additional ambulatory probes followed.

A couple of key probes were lost. Mars and the journey to reach it notoriously eats spacecraft. Still, gleaming red in the night sky, it maintains its Sirens’ call.

Those probes over the past 15 years have made people believe again. There’s even a must-see YouTube video depicting the journey of a Mars Exploration Rover (“Spirit” or “Opportunity”) splendidly choreographed to Holst’s “The Planets.” It’s as effective as any John Williams’ space-epic film score, though the viewer comments are inane, insipid, silly, crude and stupid. It’s at http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzZWOGcdC_PI&v=zZWOGcdC_PI&gl=US

Web ignoramuses aside, we have a history of wanting to find life on Mars. We aren’t even pursuing more likely places to find life, like the oceanic moons of Jupiter and Saturn. That really says something. Beneath its icy crust, Jupiter’s moon Europa has more liquid water than we have on Earth; Saturn’s moon Enceladus is similar, and there may be similar water worlds orbiting the two gas giants. Even Saturn’s cryogenically cold moon Titan, with its blue skies and liquid methane rainstorms and lakes and rivers, seems to have a thick water layer beneath its surface, kept liquid by internal heat and pressure.

Our Earth reckonings tell us that water is essential for life. Mars is too dry and too cold, with atmospheric pressure insufficient to enable liquid water to stick around on its surface. So we get excited every time we find evidence of water, past or present, anywhere on Mars.

But do we really want to find life on Mars?

If we find life there, is it safe and ethical to keep going back?

Safe and ethical are different, with an overlap. “Safe” includes preventing contact with organisms that may be toxic to one another. They could kill us – or we, them.

Despite deadly solar and cosmic radiation reaching its surface through a thin atmosphere and lack of a protective magnetic field, of all the planets of the Solar System, Mars is the only world besides our own that offers an obvious home for human settlement.

Still, colonizing Mars would be fraught with constant challenges and risks. It’s far worse than not going outside without your sunscreen. It’s much worse than anything Woody Guthrie experienced in the Dustbowl, since Martian dust storms last for months and the blown dust is ten times finer than talcum powder. Particles that tiny could wreck every kind of equipment and pressure seal and penetrate and short-out microcircuits. It’s a brutal environment.

Overcoming those challenges often comes down to one grand idea: there is very active advocacy for terraforming Mars – to make it hospitable and Earth-like.

A greenhouse effect, so disastrous if increased here, is just what Mars needs, and we certainly know how to induce it. Mars’ gravity, about one-third Earth’s, is sufficient to hold onto an atmosphere made thick enough to get future settlers out of pressurized space suits. The expected volumes of frozen water beneath the surface could sustain Earthlike life, eventually enabling clouds and rain. Dry lake and ocean basins might again hold water. And there are ideas about how to shield the surface from all that radiation.

If the Red Planet is a dead planet, sterile like the Moon, then why not? Imagine the travel posters your great-great-great grandkids could see: Ski Olympus Mons, the Solar System’s highest mountain! Vacation on the red-sand beaches of the Martian Riviera! Red Planet Red Wine, on the Tholian Orchards Taste Tour…

But what if we find life there?

That’s where ethics become the inescapable absolute.

Put the shoe on the other foot. Would we consider bringing alien life to Earth if it was toxic to our planet’s indigenously evolved life forms? Even if not toxic, would it affect life here? Even with assurances that technology could enable biological containment to keep it out of our ecosystem, could we justify the risk?

If there is life on Mars, however primitive, even as a faint coloration on the underside of a rock, can we introduce our own alien life to its environment, where it developed, where it lives? Are we arrogant enough to believe that Mars is a dying world, and whatever may be hanging-on is simply a diminishing remnant of a planetary ecosystem that is on its way out, anyway?

There is evidence that Mars experiences warmer, wetter cycles and colder, drier ones, all on a scale of millions of years. Dare we risk altering or destroying the evolution of life on Mars?

Once again, art got there first. It’s what Gene Roddenberry identified as Star Trek’s Prime Directive: you don’t mess with other life, elsewhere, unless it invites you to come in.

Even visiting risks contamination. At the end of their missions, the first Apollo astronauts exited their spacecraft in BIGs – Biological Isolation Garments – and spent time in a hermetically-sealed Airstream trailer, all to protect the rest of us from any “bugs” they may have brought back from the airless moon.

Travel times to and from Mars are from six months to a year, each way. Presumably, astronauts would be the first to know if something from Mars had made them sick. But who is to know if something from Earth had infected Mars?

It’s relatively easy to sterilize robotic spacecraft before we launch them.

But when humans go, it’s tricky and risky and uncertain. And the scale of cosmic history makes it mysterious. There are even hypotheses that say life from Mars may have “seeded” Earth. That was the premise of the classic 1967 science-fiction movie, “5 Million Years to Earth,” and it reappeared in “Mission to Mars,” a film that made $110 million in 2000. Scientists envision any cosmic Johnny Appleseed incidents as something far less dramatic than either film. Still, the spread of life across space is a field of scientific inquiry, called panspermia.

The famous “Martian Meteorite,” ALH 84001, found on the ice in Antarctica, is unquestionably from the Red Planet, determined by its chemical signature. It contains organic molecules and maybe fossils of life. In the earlier solar system, lots of things were bumping into each other, and materials were exchanged rather freely. If Mars had developed life at that time – it had oceans in its past – then the questions become profound.

Perhaps material blasted into space from a meteor or asteroid impact on Mars could have brought not just chunks of Martian rock, but the building blocks of life, or even simple cellular organisms, to Earth. Could life here have originated out there? Specifically, next door, on Mars? Scientists take that question seriously.

Okay, so nature may have cross-pollinated the planets.

But is it okay for us to do it?

It’s a question for all of humanity. For an all-too-brief time in the mid-00s, it appeared a new U.S.-Russian space race was taking shape, aimed at Mars. Russian space company Energia is developing Hnunep – “Clipper” – a minimalist space shuttle with stubby wings and plenty of shielding from radiation. Though designed for earth orbit, its builders envision going farther, as the essential crew vehicle to take cosmonauts to Mars and return them to Earth.

In America, the plug has been pulled on development of manned space vehicles with that kind of capability. Space X currently leads a small field of competitors vying for NASA contracts to privately transport astronauts to the International Space Station. No prize money has been offered to the private sector even to take us back to the Moon, much less to Mars.

But that’s not the whole story. The European Space Agency (ESA) is still funding technology to develop a crew-carrying Mars spacecraft. And the Chinese, anxious to gain world prominence following the darkness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, have announced their intention of building a lunar base and going to Mars, both on a rapid timetable.

Will Mars be “Claimed,” and what would that mean for life on Mars?

In 1967, when no one knew who would win the space race to the Moon, an international treaty prohibited any nation from claiming the Moon for itself. It was signed by the US, the USSR, and the UK, but not by China. The treaty language is supposed to apply to “any celestial body,” to prevent the kind of thing that happened with sovereign colonial empires in the Americas after 1492. But no specific treaty exists for Mars. Could the first ones there plant a flag and claim it as part of their national territory? Supposedly not, but it remains uncertain and may depend on who gets there first.

In 1997, three Yemenis sued NASA for trespassing on Mars with the “Sojourner” / “Pathfinder” mission lander. But that crazy claim was based on the assertion by the plaintiffs that they had inherited Mars 3,000 years earlier.

If claiming Mars, or a piece of it, deteriorates to the level of courts and lawyers, the ethical absolutes are gone. It will just be a question of how much toxic interaction will occur and how many alien species will be recklessly altered or exterminated, not whether it will be prevented.

Moreover, there’s Robert Zubrin, everybody’s favorite advocate for making us Martians. He says in his landmark 1996 book, “The Case for Mars,” that we should be selling Martian real estate as a means of financing exploration. There’s as much land on Mars as the amount of land not covered by water on Earth.

Even at $10 an acre, selling Martian land would raise $358 billion, enough for several missions with crewed landings, says Zubrin. It wouldn’t be the first time that people spent lavishly on questionable “property” – just look at the rush and rancor over the IPO for Facebook stock, pieces of an ethereal entity that doesn’t actually exist in any real sense.

Zubrin is the guy most likely to be taken seriously. He formulated the plan for “Mars Direct,” an approach that held up to ridicule NASA’s needlessly lavish, horrendously expensive, Bush-41-era “sometime-next-century” mission profile.

Much of the thinking about Mars spacecraft recently attributed to filmmaker James Cameron originated with Zubrin. And in the absence of a clear set of national space priorities, innovative thinkers like those two are prominent. And there are the Rutan brothers with their Scaled Composites company’s “Spaceship One” that won the X Prize for the first privately-funded space flight in 2004 (the editor was there). More recently, factor-in spacecraft manufacturers like Elon Musk of Space X, who has docked his new cargo ship at the International Space Station, and there’s Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic, whose energy is boundless. These are the ones who may drive the agenda from a sense of entrepreneurial adventure capitalism, rather than cautious science. That’s new, and engenders new implications.

Given our society, our economic system, and the way things work, how cautious can we afford to be? The reason people are not on the way to Mars right now is not technological. It is financial and political.

President Obama set a challenge to get astronauts to Mars by 2030, but it simply isn’t credible. No money has been appropriated to get things started.

In American government, long-term planning is four years. Try anything beyond that, and paralysis sets-in. Want to mine untold riches from the asteroid belt? Okay, if you can outsource construction of the spacecraft to build it cheap, then get there and bring back the goods in the first quarter of FY 2013. Huge bonus and stock options if you can, ostracism and permanent unemployment if you fail.

The objective dangers of interplanetary space exploration don’t even enter the discussion. Musk and Branson aside, the dialog, where there is one, is only about a costs-benefits analysis on a strict timeline, with exorbitant returns for investors and obscene bonuses and early bailout packages for executives – and building the hardware wherever it can be cheaply outsourced.

If you advocate spending to go somewhere, results better be forthcoming. That has specific implications. Our system does not look promising for protecting indigenous alien life. Similarly, if the Chinese decide to go to Mars, they are in part motivated by a national ego that will demand fulfillment of stated goals.

It’s all crazy, because we could be developing and building spacecraft instead of military hardware, employing our math and science grads and encouraging others to study those majors, and employing an industrial manufacturing base once again. Plus, civilian space technology, by law, spins-off across the economy, instead of being classified like military tech.

All those are strong economic arguments. They could take the driver’s seat, even if we start interfering with alien life.

Perhaps we, as a species, are not evolved enough ethically and morally to take our problems to other worlds. Or perhaps, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s visionary “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the evolution of humans from apes to astronauts to angelic beings is impossible unless we go.

If “Curiosity,” the final and most advanced and capable Mars probe we have ever sent, finds life out there after it lands August 5th, all these questions will instantly become the most profound ones we have ever faced as a species. And no doubt, it will take the artists to make society face the ethical issues the politicians and private sector capitalists will rush to ignore.

So, what’s the best outcome? How about this: NASA’s Volkswagen-sized robotic “Curiosity” rover picks up a rock, turns it over, and finds a beautiful, textbook-specimen fossil impression. Something like a three-inch-long fish. The perfect image is consistent from many camera angles and in different light. No question it’s a fossil. Aquatic vertebrate, a creature that had obvious means of locomotion, eyes to see, and a mouth to eat whatever else was once there.

Then, another rock is overturned, and there’s a perfect fossilized plant, something akin to a small palm frond. Maybe it grew underwater. Maybe it ingested the carbon dioxide atmosphere and swayed in the breeze along the shore.

But sample after sample – soil, sand, rock, dust, red, orange, white, black – is processed in the on-board lab, and there is nothing alive on Mars. Zip. Nada.

Of course, discoveries of dramatic fossils on Mars beyond the inconclusive ALH 84001 meteorite would provoke the creative imagination, and Congress would finally fund a real Mars program to beat everyone else there. And then (we hope) mission after mission continues to dig-up abundant fossils and absolutely nothing still alive.

That what would enable us to send people and to stay. Only the certainty that nothing is alive on Mars would make it okay to send our own life forms there, to stay and become spacefarers.

Best of all, this scenario would teach us that it’s possible for a planet with abundant, flourishing life to die. That would give us pause. That would make us appreciate this fragile blue ball on which we dwell. It would give us the evolved perspective to go forth elsewhere while being more thoughtful, more responsible, stewards here. That would be beautiful.

It’s not a casual flight of fantasy. We need that kind of perspective before we land on Jupiter’s moons. We need it before we bore through the ice crust of Europa for a submarine voyage in its vast ocean, before we meet whatever calls that salt sea its home, and hear it sing its sea chanteys and voice its longings, and share our songs of the green, terrestrial Earth.

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There’s a lot available online about NASA’s Curiosity lander that touches-down at 10:31 pm (Pacific) on August 5. It’s recommended you download now, because the server will likely be overloaded as the landing time approaches. You can even download a landing simulation game for X-Box.

Here are some key urls:

Info on a variety of activities, including virtual landing programs, are at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate.

You can follow the mission on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marscuriosity

and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.

A very full version of ways to play Martian is available at www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-205&cid=release_2012-205.

And the new NASA 3-D app that gives you the ability to experience robotic space travel is at www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-202&cid=release_2012-202.

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