Here’s some exciting news. I think.
Mars appears to have been partially covered in water until 3 billion years ago, when its atmosphere was blown away by the solar wind. But a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that enormous amounts of water are still trapped in the pores of the volcanic rock beneath Mars’ surface.
Water implies the possibility of life. Michael Manga, co-author of the study and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says: “Water is necessary for life as we know it. I see no reason why (the underground reservoir on Mars) should not be a habitable environment. On Earth, that is certainly the case – deep, deep mines host life, the sea floor hosts life.”
What would it mean if we found life on Mars, even if it was only primitive organisms similar to those we find on the sea floor on Earth?
Neel V. Patel recently wrote in the New York Times that the discovery of life on Mars “would change the way humanity thinks about its place in the universe.” While he acknowledges that sending humans to extraterrestrial destinations is a worthy goal, NASA’s top priority should be answering the question of whether we are truly alone in the universe.
Patel’s point is a good one, but does it really matter? Finding life on Mars may be interesting and surprising, but would it change who we are and our place in the universe?
In fact, worrying about life, water, and other resources on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere carries an inherent danger: it distracts our attention from the only place in the entire universe where we know for sure that more or less intelligent life exists, and from the unfortunate fact that we are currently putting that life at significant risk.
The idea that there is life in the cosmos beyond Earth has always captured the imagination of humanity. We have loved to imagine that the Moon, Mars and other planets are way stations on the way to our destiny of conquering space and colonising distant moons and planets.
Accordingly, Elon Musk, the most famous visionary on Earth, has committed himself to landing humans on Mars within ten years and to establishing a metropolis for one million Earth inhabitants on the Red Planet within twenty years.
This ambitious goal is admittedly consistent with the narrative that has driven human migration since our ancestors left Africa some 80,000 years ago. Humans have regularly moved into new areas, inflated their resources there, used them up, and then moved on and repeated the cycle. According to this narrative, colonizing the Moon and Mars is the next logical step as our planet increasingly shows the strains of our overuse.
But is that so? When we leave Earth, does this earthly narrative make sense, if it ever did?
In 1492, the so-called New World must have seemed unimaginably far from Europe. But it wasn’t, and it wasn’t really “new.” It was still a place where humanity could thrive.
But the universe is different. Our Milky Way is a medium-sized galaxy in a universe that contains, by some estimates, 2 trillion others. Yet the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years wide. If our galaxy were shrunk to the size of the United States, on that scale our solar system would be the size of a quarter in your change drawer.
In short, the scale of travel beyond Earth is so vast that it defies the logic underlying the narrative that has spread humanity across the globe. This makes sense: we evolved here. Earth created us. And now we are creating whatever Earth will become. Earth is the place where our lives make sense.
Critics will, of course, say that this mindset would have kept our ancestors trapped in caves, afraid to venture out onto the savannas. Maybe. But imagining that we could escape an overburdened Earth by colonizing Mars is a fantasy that goes against our basic humanity.
Life on Mars? Good luck. We have our own problems here.
John M. Crisp, a columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Texas. ©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
