Atlantis Dispatch 002:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates why on Earth we ever stopped looking for life on Mars.
New York Times front page. December 9th, 1906.
March 19th, 2021
…begin transmission…
Now that spring has sprung on Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, you might be dreaming of a well-earned vacation to get you through the dregs of our pandemic. How about Mars? Perhaps the Perseverance landing got you reminiscing back to 1956 when Disney, with the help of German rocketman Wernher von Braun, proposed a manned mission to the Red Planet, where ninety people in a ten-vessel flotilla would travel to Mars, (just like floating the San Marcos!), so that seventy could erect their inflatable homes on the surface, and live there, doing experiments, for four-hundred-forty-three days. Imagine the Martian bluebonnets in your future. You could even start a Martian seed bank!
Then again, maybe not. As you may recall from our first transmission, NASA announced that Percy’s prime directive is to find signs of past life. Not since the Viking landers traveled to the Red Planet in 1976, has NASA sent a mission to search for present life on Mars. But why not? Did we give up?
Yeah, sort of. When the twin landers set forth to search for life, they were charged with conducting two life-detection experiments. One of these, the Labeled Release Experiment, tested Mars’s blanket rock for a reaction that would emit methane, a gas which would suggest that Mars’s soil, like Earth’s, contained microorganisms. The lander sent back positive results. Yay! But when the lander returned the second experiment, the Molecular Analysis Experiment, the results were negative: the lander didn’t detect organic matter in the soil. Wah, wah...
As a result of the second experiment, NASA concluded that the emissions of the Labeled Release Experiment were not produced biologically. So, while the first Panasonic Boomboxes were blasting Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” NASA had already ruled out that possibility. Even though there have always been folks who’ve speculated, and scientists who’ve argued, that the Viking experiments actually demonstrated that there is life on Mars, NASA let the experiments go the way of Richard Nixon, and forged on.
The Viking probes also sent back the first pictures taken from the surface of Mars. To anyone hoping to go up for a Martian holiday, the images were pretty disheartening. Far from the grand canals of Mars that Perceval Lowell envisioned in his 1906 book Mars and Its Canals, Mars didn’t contain any Martian-made architectural structures. Though both Lowell, and his Italian counterpart, Giovanni Schiaparelli, drew maps of the canals they thought were there, in reality Mars turned out to be nothing like Venice. “Desolate,” became the new word on the Martian street. Gondoliers need not apply.
In the post-Viking era, a number of intrepid scientists have pushed back, however, and have suggested that we haven’t even begun to rule out present life on Mars. In 2019 a group of scientists held a conference in Carlsbad, New Mexico in which they concluded that there are significant unexplored refugia beneath Mars’s topsoil, including caves, deep subsurfaces, ices, and salts, that might contain indigenous microbial life.
SFI postdoctoral fellow Natalie Grefenstette, who contributed to the conference and its report, has argued that we have new techniques that might be better suited to find life on Mars than those we’ve used before. Until recently, as Grefenstette suggested on SFI’s Complexity Podcast, astrobiologists have been using limited tools and limited conceptions of life:
“It’s like you're going into a forest and you have a hatchet and you're told to look for humans as a proxy for life: Go look for life — and by that we mean humans. And you're chopping down trees to look for it. It's all around you, there's this beautiful life all around you, and you're not even noticing it because you're so focused on just one thing.”
In other words, don’t ditch your Bowie just yet. Life might be lurking in Martian mycorrhiza that we haven’t begun to recognize. But, at the same time, many astrobiologists including Grefenstette, have set their eyes on other environments — environments that might have or could support life. Rather than looking specifically for extant life or isolated hits of life’s chemical emissions, they are instead seeking “complexity.”
Most recently, the search set sail toward interplanetary icy oceans. NASA’s Ocean World’s program, for one, is premised on the idea that “the story of oceans is the story of life.” NASA will look to the oceans or potential oceans on Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, Titan, and Mimas; Neptune’s moon Triton; Dwarf planet Pluto; HAT-P-1 1b; Kepler 22b; Kepler 452b; and Kepler 62f. Who needs you, Mars? There’s water all over the place.
But, what about life on Mars? Silver screens, dancehalls, and all of that? Well, for now, it seems, since we haven’t found it, the next thing to do is to send some there. You might think, in light of these retro travel posters NASA designed at the Jet Propulsion Lab, that Mars might be the new setting for your destination home. Not so fast! Atlantis thinks you should hold off on hiring your geodesic dome architect for now. If it turns out that Mars is habitable, it’s not like we can live on the surface. There’s too much radiation. A habitable Martian city means urban underground planning.
So, no Martian canals, but how about some fancy new tunnels, a la the New York City subway? A piece of engineering so glorious and everlasting — who wouldn’t want to live there? No wonder Elon’s been building that underground highway in LA. Practice makes perfect! And heck, it only took us ninety-seven years to complete the Second Avenue line, at the bargain price of $2.5 billion per mile.
If you’re not a mole person, fear not. There’s still (so far) the option to remain on Earth. You can float the canals of Venice, look out – waaaay out – to those channels on Venus and that icy, oceanic Europan moon, and contemplate life as we know it. It’s the freakiest show...
Tune in next time, when Atlantis contemplates our interplanetary nomadism…