Found In Space
This news ought to be conveyed calmly, rationally, cautiously.
But we’re only human.
LIFE ON MARS!
Even in the soberest language, the announcement--actually the announcement of the announcement--can’t help but read like a pitch for a blockbuster movie:
Today, at 1 p.m. Washington, D.C. time-- coffee-break time here--NASA holds a news conference to announce a “startling” finding: that traces of biological material have been discovered on a meteorite that came from Mars and has remained frozen in Antarctica for thousands of years.
This may be the first time that science earns better TV ratings than football, the first time that the journal “SCIENCE” outsells “MAD” magazine.
No responsible editor is breaking out the Second Coming-sized headline type. Biology textbooks are not being madly rewritten. For years, for decades, there will remain far more “what-if” than “what,” more “possible” than “proven.”
Navigate past all the caveats and asterisks, and still, if this is verified, it is thrillingly monumental--an ancient, microscopic, fossilized, organic fragment that could ultimately reorder our thinking about biology and space and society and religion--not to mention rendering some science fiction as quaint as a nickelodeon, and maybe at last, deep-sixing that cottage industry that makes millions on tales of little green men concealed in Air Force deep-freezes on bases in New Mexico.
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In the last quarter of this century, Mars, the planet of the Romans’ red god of war, has been within the reach of our technology. Before that, it was within the reach of our imaginations, exerting a pull almost as strong as the moon has on the tides.
Humankind has feared to be alone in the universe, and feared not to be. Mythmakers populated the silent skies with heroes and goddesses patterned among the stars. Science populates them now with space probes and scanning signals and exploratory hardware.
The Mars of imagination was never a dead place. It was Ray Bradbury’s Mars . . . H.G. Wells’ and Orson Welles’ Mars . . . Disneyland’s Mars . . . astronomer Percival Lowell’s Mars, a planet crosshatched with canals like Venice . . . and the fanciful, special-effects Hollywood movie Mars, its inhabitants of plastic and putty and wire and paint.
Mars was visible even to the unaided eyes of the ancients; its proximity made it comforting and alarming, everything wonderful and frightening about the dark night and the vast sky.
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At 10 a.m., television sets at the venerable Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Pasadena foothills will be tuned to the in-house NASA press conference feed.
If anyone gets to plant its flag on Mars, it should be JPL, with its long and fruitful and occasionally frustrating pas de deux with the Red Planet. The big push by Observer three years ago ended when it vanished into trackless space. The day after this November’s election, JPL is sending its Global Surveyor on a Mars mapping mission. And less than a month after that, a surface rover called Sojourner will be launched Mars-ward. Thereafter, for every 26 months over the next 10 years, JPL will send out another piece of exploratory equipment to the Red Planet.
Yet no Mars probe has ever brought back evidence of Martian vitality past or present, no “heat of life in the handful of dust,” in writer Joseph Conrad’s words.
Both today’s finding and the 1995 data that suggested the existence of liquid water on Mars came from Martian meteorites found here on Earth. If Johnnie Cochran were asking the questions in Washington today, they would be about interplanetary chain of custody and this meteorite called Allan Hills 84001.
Scoop up rocks on Mars, you know they’re Martian.
Scoop up rocks that break off from Mars 15 million years ago but don’t get around to hitting Antarctica until 13,000 years ago--well, you never know where else they’ve been, or whose hands have been on them, do you?
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We will turn off the TV sets today, and be left, as science ought to leave us, with more riddles than resolution.
The Martians that our minds have cast in movies and shaped in novellas are either menacing interplanetary bogeymen, or bemused and vastly superior beings.
How will it alter our sense of ourselves if it turns out that real Martians, at their most advanced, were a form of bacterium that could conceivably be genocidally obliterated by a few hundred milligrams of penicillin?
How long thereafter do we come to terms with the premise of major religions, eminent philosophers and almost every “Twilight Zone” episode ever made--that our most fearsome villains are within us?
And why, WHY couldn’t this have happened during Sweeps Week?
