The Case for Mars (51 page)

Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt—all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them. The more people, the faster the rate of innovation. This is why (contrary to Malthus) as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has increased, and at an accelerating rate. Nevertheless, in a closed society Malthusianism has the appearance of self-evident truth, and herein lies the danger. It is not enough to argue against Malthusianism in the abstract—such debates are not settled in academic journals. Unless people can see broad vistas of unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to follow as a matter of course. And if the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, then each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The extreme result is tyranny, war, and even genocide. Only in a universe of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

MARS BECKONS

We have come recently to boast of a global economy without thinking of its implications, of how unfortunate we are in finding it. It would be more cheering if news should come that by some fre
ak of the solar system another world had swung gently into our orbit and moved so close that a bridge could be built over which people could pass to new continents untenanted and new seas uncharted. Would those eager immigrants repeat the process they followed when they had that opportunity, or would they redress the grievances of the old earth by a new bill of rights ... ? The availability of such a new planet, at any rate, would prolong, if it did not save, a civilization based on dynamism, and in the prolongation the individual would again enjoy a spell of freedom....

It would be very interesting to speculate on what the human imagination is going to do with a frontierless world where it must seek its inspiration in uniformity rather than variety, in sameness rather than contrast, in safety rather than peril, in probing the harmless nuances of the known rather than the thundering uncertainties of unknown seas or continents. The dreamers, the poets, and the philosophers are after all but instruments which make vocal and articulate the hopes and aspirations and the fears of a people.

The people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express. For four centuries they heard its call, listened to its promises, and bet their lives and fortunes on its outcome. It calls no more....

—Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Frontier
, 1951

Western humanist civilization as we know and value it today was born in expansion, grew in expansion, and can only exist in a dynamic expanding state. While some form of human society might persist in a nonexpanding world, that society will not foster freedom, creativity, individuality, or progress. Such a dismal future might seem an outrageous prediction, except for the fact that for nearly all of its history most of humanity has been forced to endure such static modes of social organization, and the experience has not been a happy one. Free societies are the exception in human history—aside from isolated pockets, they have only existed during the four centuries of frontier expansion of the West. That history is now over. The frontier opened by the voyage of Christopher Columbus is now closed. If the era of Western humanist society is not to be seen by future historians as some kind of transitory golden age, a brief shining moment in an otherwise endless chronicle of human misery, then a new frontier must be opened. Mars beckons.

But Mars is only one planet, and with humanity’s powers rising as they would in an age of an open Martian frontier, the job of transforming and settling it is unlikely to occupy our energies for more than three or four centuries. Does the settling of Mars then simply represent an opportunity to “prolong, but not save, a civilization based upon dynamism?” Isn’t it the case that humanist civilization is ultimately doomed anyway? I think not.

The universe is vast. Its resources, if we can access them, truly are infinite. During the four centuries of the open frontier on Earth, science and technology have advanced at an astonishing pace. The technological capabilities achieved during the twentieth century would dwarf the expectations of any observer from the nineteenth, exceed the dreams of as bornrom the eighteenth, and appear outright magical to someone from the seventeenth. The nearest stars are incredibly distant, about 100,000 times as far away as Mars. Yet, Mars itself is about 100,000 times as far from Earth as America is from Europe. If the past four centuries of progress have multiplied our reach by so great a ratio, might not four more centuries of freedom do the same again? There is ample reason to believe that they would.

Settling the Red Planet will drive the development of ever faster modes of space transportation; terraforming Mars will drive the development of new and more powerful sources of energy. Both of these capabilities in turn will open up new frontiers ever deeper into the outer solar system, and the harder challenges posed by these new environments will drive the two key technologies of power and propulsion ever more forcefully. The key is not to let the process stop. If it is allowed to stop for any length of time, society will crystallize into a static form that is inimical to progress. That is what defines the present age as one of crisis. Our old frontier is closed. The first signs of social stagnation are clearly visible. Yet progress, while slowing, is still extant: Our people still believe in it and our ruling institutions are not yet incompatible with it.

We still possess the greatest gift of the inheritance of a four-hundred-year-long Renaissance: To wit, the capacity to initiate another by opening the Martian frontier. If we fail to do so, our culture will not have that capacity long. Mars is harsh. Its settlers will need not only technology, but the scientific outlook, creativity, and free-thinking inventiveness that stand behind it. Mars will not allow itself to be settled by people from a static society—those people won’t have what it takes. We still do. Mars today waits for the children of the old frontier. But Mars will not wait forever.

SPECIAL ADDENDUM: THE MARS METEORITE DISCOVERIES OF 1996

On August 6, 1996, NASA administrator Dan Goldin released a statement to the press that read, in part, “NASA
has made
a startling discovery that points to the possibility that a primitive form of microscopic life may have existed in Mars more than three billion years ago. ...” The following day crackled with excitement. Headlines announced that NASA had discovered possible evidence for ancient life on Mars, more to come at a press conference that afternoon. Prior to the event, President Clinton stood on the South Lawn of the White House to share his enthusiasm over the NASA findings. If confirmed, he said, the discovery would rank as “one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered” and he vowed that the space program would “put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life on Mars.” Soon after, NASA presented to the world a nondescript chunk of stone. Mounted on a blue velvet cushion within the protective walls of a Plexiglas case, the potato-sized stone was introduced as ALH84001, a rare type of meteorite that had its genesis on the planet Mars. Rarer still was the cargo it carried. Over the course of the preceding two and a half years, a team of NASA researchers and outside collaborators examining the meteorite had uncovered mineralogical, chemical, and structural oddities that, taken together, amounted to strong evidence for biological activity in Mars’ distant past.

Seated before a packed auditorium at NASA’s Washi
ngton, D.C., headquarters, members of the research team—David McKay, Everett Gibson, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, and Richard Zare—each took to a microphone ttell their portion of the story of the stone. They presented five distinct lines of evidence in support of their interpretations—the stone’s Martian origin, the presence of carbonates indicating a water-immersed past for the stone, the existence within the stone of mineral grains that are typically of biological origin, the presence of organic compounds within the stone, and the existence of diminutive structures resembling bacteria that the team construed as microfossil remains of Martian life. From Mars to Earth to the White House—ALH84001 had indeed undergone a long, strange trip, matched only by the intellectual journey blazed by the NASA researchers.

The stone’s journey began some sixteen million years ago when an asteroid slammed into Mars and hurled chunks of the planet into space. About thirteen thousand years ago at least one of those pieces of another world plummeted onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Over time, snows buried the stone, enveloping it in the ice. That could have been the uneventful history of ALH84001: buried in the ice and later lost as the ice flowed toward the margins of the continent and eventually slid into the sea. However, the ice that carried the stone ran smack into the Allan Hills. Instead of being carried out to sea, the stone was carried toward the surface as the ice heaved upward. Winds roaring off the slopes of the hills ripped across the ice, scouring the surface clean and exposing the ancient stone from Mars. It was there, on the blue ice surface of the Allan Hills Far Western icefield, in the area dubbed the Pinnacles for its wind-sculpted, surreal ice blocks, that Roberta Score spied a rock that would make her the most widely known Antarctic rockhound in history.

Score, then working for Northrup Aviation and serving as the curator of the Antarctic Meteorite Lab at Johnson Space Center, was halfway through a seven-week, annual expedition to search for Antarctic meteorites. In the late 1970s, scientists recognized Antarctica’s unique properties as a meteorite hunter’s El Dorado. The ground mechanics that stranded ALH84001 worked on thousands of stones, and, once annual expeditions commenced, the number of meteorites available for research soared from the hundreds to the thousands.

But on this day, December 27, 1984, Score was not thinking about the mechanics of meteorite transport so much as of the winds that had carved out the striking ice sculptures of the Pinnacles. Her team had been searching the Far Western icefield, a sinuous expanse of nearly 100 square kilometers of exposed bluish ice. To search such a vast area, Score and her colleagues, each astride a snowmobile, would line up about 30 meters apart and drive slowly forward, scanning the ice in front for meteorites. If this sounds a bit tedious, it is. Score later recalled being on the ice as feeling like “you’re out on a frozen ocean—there’s no scenery of any kind.” So, it was a welcome relief when the team came to the Pinnacles. Finally, there was something to look at.

The team broke ranks and cruised through the area, their eyes still on the ice, but undertaking a bit of sightseeing too. While taking in the scenery, Score spied a softball-sized, greenish stone on the ice. The team had already collected a hundred specimens or so (and would collect about two hundred more), and, aside from its greenish color, there wasn’t anything terribly special about the stone. It wasn’t, as Score would later say, “oozing with life.” She collected the stone and bagged it according to practice (which approximates clean room conditions). In her journal that day, she noted that, “we found an unusual achondrite.”

The specimen Score collected alostones, he rest of the finds for the season were packed in dry ice and placed aboard a ship at the United States’ McMurdo Station. The ship carried the extraterrestrial cargo to Port Hueneme, a Navy installation just north of Los Angeles. From Hueneme they were flown to Houston and transported to the Antarctic Meteorite Lab where they were placed in the same cabinets that once housed the Apollo program Moon rocks. Flushed with nitrogen gas, the cabinets help dry the samples and to halt any weathering the stones might be undergoing. Once dry, the meteorites would be pulled from the cabinet, given numbers, described, and photographed by researchers in the lab. Chips would be taken and sent off to the Smithsonian Institution for classification of each stone. Once classified, the lab’s
Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter
would announce the availability of samples for study.

Perhaps she was somewhat prescient, perhaps just lucky, but the stone Score picked up by the Pinnacles stood out in her mind once she was back in Houston. She remembered the color, the green hue the stone held on the ice, telling her colleagues, “wait until you see this green rock.” When the stone was pulled from the cabinet, though, it proved to be a fairly pedestrian gray. (The combination of bright sun, dark glasses, and blue ice probably led to the greenish tinge she saw.) Still, it was large enough and interesting enough in of itself to win the designation ALH84001—Allan Hills’ numero uno, rock of the year for 1984. The stone made its debut in the second issue of the 1985
Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter
, classified as a diogenite, a subgroup of the achondrites, stony meteorites that are akin to terrestrial rocks formed from magma (such as basalts).

Life for ALH84001 was fairly sleepy until the spring of 1993 when researcher David Mittlefehldt noticed something odd in his study of the chemical composition of chromites—oxide minerals of chromium and iron—within diogenites. He had previously studied a sample of ALH84001 for its bulk chemical composition and, sometime later, had made what is termed a “grain mount” from a few leftover grains. Now, in his comparison of chromites from several diogenites, Mittle-fehldt noted that the iron in the ALH chromites was much more oxidized than from others. He suspected that he might have a SNC meteorite—a Mars rock—on his hands. He needed more than a hunch, though. He needed more samples.

Unbeknownst to Mittlefehldt, or anyone else for that matter, prepared thin sections of Allan Hills 84001 had been mislabeled as samples of another diogenite stone, Elephant Moraine 79002, and vice versa. Both meteorites happened to be part of Mittlefehldt’s study. So, while waiting for his request for Allan Hills to come in, the researcher happened to receive a new thin section of Elephant Moraine.