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John M. Crisp, an opinion columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Texas.
Here’s some exciting news. I guess.
It appears that until 3 billion years ago, Mars was partly covered by water, at which time its atmosphere was blown away by the solar wind. But a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that an enormous amount of water is still trapped in the pores of volcanic rock beneath the surface of Mars.
Water implies the possibility of life. Michael Manga, study co-author and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says: “Water is necessary for life as we know it. I don’t see why [the underground Martian reservoir] is not a habitable environment. It’s certainly true on Earth — deep, deep mines host life, the bottom of the ocean hosts life.”
What would it mean if we found life on Mars, even if it’s only primitive organisms similar to those that we find at the bottom of the ocean on Earth?
Neel V. Patel argued recently in the New York Times that the discovery of life on Mars “would change how humanity thinks about its place in this universe.” He concedes that sending humans to extraterrestrial destinations is a worthy goal, but NASA’s top priority should be answering the question of whether we are truly alone in the universe.
Patel’s point is well taken, but, really, does it matter? It might be interesting and surprising to find life on Mars, but would it change anything having to do with who we are and our place in the universe?
In fact, concerns about life and water and other resources on the moon, Mars and elsewhere bear this inherent danger: They distract our attention away from the one place in the entire universe where we know, for sure, that more-or-less intelligent life does exist, as well as the unfortunate fact that we’ve currently put it into considerable jeopardy.
Humankind’s imagination has always been excited by the possibility that the cosmos harbors life beyond Earth. We’ve been pleased to entertain the idea that the moon, Mars and other planets are waystations on the path to our inherent destiny, to conquer space and to colonize distant moons and planets.
Accordingly, Earth’s most prominent visionary, Elon Musk, is committed to landing humans on Mars within 10 years and founding a metropolis of a million earthlings on the Red Planet within 20.
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 territory, thrived, consumed and outgrown their resources and then moved on and repeated the cycle. According to this narrative, as our planet increasingly shows the stress of our overuse, colonization of the moon and Mars is the next logical step.
But is it? Once we leave the Earth, does this terrestrial narrative make sense, if it ever did?
In 1492 the so-called New World must have seemed unimaginably distant from Europe. But it wasn’t, and it wasn’t really New. It was still a place where humans could thrive.
But the universe is different. Our Milky Way is an average-sized galaxy in a universe that contains, by some estimates, 2 trillion others. Still, the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If our galaxy were reduced to the size of the United States, on that scale, our solar system would be the size of a quarter in your change tray.
In short, the scale of travel beyond the Earth is immense enough to make nonsense of whatever logic drove the narrative that spread humankind across the globe. This makes sense: We evolved here. The Earth created us. And now we’re creating whatever the Earth is going to become. The Earth is where our lives make sense.
Of course, critics will say that this sort of thinking would have kept our ancestors cringing in caves, terrified of venturing onto the savannahs. Maybe. But to imagine that we can escape an overburdened Earth by colonizing Mars is a fantasy at odds with our essential humanity.
Life on Mars? Good luck to it. We’ve got our own problems here.
