The Planets (12 page)

Vikings 1
and
2,
the first pair of twin robot scientists from Earth to search for life on Mars, reached the golden plains of Chryse and Utopia in
the summer of 1976, while I lay still entombed in the wintry Antarctic. They settled on landing sites named for classical fantasies and vague nineteenth-century impressions of my native world. Even now that on-site surveys have made sense of Mars’s actual topography, many romantic allusions persevere in the otherwise logical nomenclature scheme instituted by modern areographers. Thus the large dry river valleys discovered in the early 1970s, such as Ares Vallis and Ma’adim Vallis, recognize the war god Mars or the word “star” in various human languages—the sole exception being Valles Marineris, the greatest valley of all, which honors its discoverer,
Mariner 9,
the first artificial satellite ever to orbit a planet other than Earth. The smaller valleys take their names from Earthly rivers, either classical or actual. (Evros Valles, near my former home, shares its name with a river in Greece.)

Large, ancient Martian craters, newly visualized, now bear the names of scientists and science-fiction writers, including Burroughs and Wells, and small craters the names of small Earthly villages with populations of fewer than 100,000. On the smallest level, individual surface rocks spotted in the intimate photos taken by landed spacecraft have assumed whimsical names from cartoons and
storybooks, including Calvin and Hobbes, Pooh Bear and Piglet, Rocky and Bullwinkle, or nicknames based on their appearance: “Lunchbox,” “Lozenge,” and “Rye Bread.” Although my own name is specific and descriptive, occasionally I have been called “Big Al” and other such convenient nicknames in closed-door discussions among researchers.

By now some spacecraft have served such lengthy periods of active duty at Mars and relayed such steady streams of information as to enable Earthbound geologists and climatologists to monitor trends over time, notably the transient nature of the Martian polar caps. At the start of every autumn in the south, as much as one third of the atmosphere sifts like powdery snow from the salmon-colored sky in a white frost of carbon dioxide. The dry ice fluffs the south polar cap a yard thicker and coats the southern hemisphere halfway to the equator all through the winter, the south’s longest season. When spring comes, the white rime sublimes directly back into the atmosphere without pausing to melt. Soon it deserts the sky again, precipitating onto the north pole with the arrival of autumn there.

In other studies, Mars-stationed spacecraft have
tested the strength of my planet’s gravity field, measured the atmospheric content and pressure, clocked wind speeds, compared the heights of mountains to the depths of basins, listened at ground level for Marsquakes, and also detected an iron core, solidified now, and no longer capable of generating a magnetic field.

Indeed, so many spacecraft currently share the Martian domain, returning so many thousands of images, that the picture of the planet grows constantly more refined and more complex to Earthly eyes, with new theories adduced accordingly, so that the controversy among planetary scientists escalates as missions proliferate.

From a Martian perspective, the sum of all this scrutiny could be construed as a hostile invasion.
*
The Earth envoys, however, have found no entity sensitive to assault, and only the slightest, most equivocal suggestion of any biological activity. The reddish dirt of Mars, rich in iron peroxide and other oxidizing agents, routinely sterilizes itself and all new arrivals. Organic compounds carried to the Martian surface on meteorites or visiting spacecraft are destroyed at once by the highly reactive
chemistry of the present era. Any organic material that survived the chemical attack would no doubt succumb to physical dismantling by the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, since the Martian atmosphere provides no protection comparable to Earth’s layer of ozone.

Astrobiologists insist that life on Mars, like the once-plentiful water on Mars, could simply have gone underground to avoid these dangers, and may yet be discovered, extant or extinct, through diligent pursuit. Astronomers agree, asserting that even if Mars ultimately proves void of life, its unique environment will continue to lure robotic and human explorers to its frozen shores.

Some visionaries see in Mars a potential homestead on a high frontier, awaiting colonization.
*
Scientifically feasible programs for “terraforming” Mars to enhance its Earthly likeness propose the fabrication of suitable habitats by, for example, heating the Martian south pole with huge space-based mirrors that would focus and magnify the Sun’s light, forcing the residual polar cap of carbon dioxide to sublime like a geyser of greenhouse gas.
In the ensuing warmth, pure drinking water might pour from the ice at the north pole, or be mined from the abundant buried permafrost or chemically extracted from select areas of the planet’s hardened crust.

Planners say they can achieve the same effect another way, by preparing a safe environment for a few hardy strains of microbes, and releasing them into the Martian regolith, there to ingest available nutrients and excrete gases, including ammonia and methane, which would then thicken the atmosphere, enabling it to hold in more heat, thereby raising the ambient temperature to create a shirtsleeve environment.

Proponents of interplanetary manifest destiny expect that whether or not Mars has ever been inhabited by sentient Martians, Earthlings will eventually become Martians.
*

I picture them on the pitiless surface, dressed in specially engineered Mars protection suits, living in domed modules, toiling under an artificially generated magnetic field that shields them from harmful cosmic rays as they harness the energy of the wind and convert local stores of heavy
hydrogen to electric power. As they busy themselves in the desert, raising food crops in greenhouses and prospecting for troves of high-grade mineral ores, they continue their careful reconnaissance of the planet, traveling overland by tractor and on foot, scaling and spelunking, still half hoping, half fearing that they are trespassing.

I suppose it is their condition of being alive, and their sense of living such short lives, that drives their obsession to seek other life in every possible redoubt. Even if they succeed in preparing the way for their compatriots to join them in founding a great Martian civilization, they will continue straining for traces of whatever might have scrabbled in the reddish dust before they arrived.

*
See, for example, Frank Herbert,
Dune
(1965), and Edgar Rice Burroughs,
The Gods of Mars
(1918).

*
See Percival Lowell,
Mars
(1895)
, Mars and its Canals
(1906), and
Mars As the Abode of Life
(1908).

*
See S. Glasstone,
The Book of Mars,
NASA Special Publication 179 (1968).

*
See H. G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds
(1898).

*
See Arthur C. Clarke,
The Sands of Mars
(1951), Robert A. Heinlein,
Red Planet
(1949), and Kim Stanley Robinson,
Red Mars
(1993),
Green Mars
(1995),
Blue Mars
(1997).

*
See Ray Bradbury,
The Martian Chronicles
(1950).

W
hen Galileo, a Pisces with Leo rising, turned his spyglass to the dark over Padua in the winter of 1610, “guided,” he said, “by I know not what fate,” the planet Jupiter appeared to him, bearing four new moons no man had ever seen before.

Galileo thanked God for granting him these sights, and praised his new spyglass as the means. But surely the alignment of the planets through those January nights had also favored his success. For Venus, along with Mercury, hid below the horizon. Saturn set early in the evening, and by the time Mars rose, three hours before dawn, cold and fatigue had long since forced Galileo indoors. Even
the Moon, though almost full at the start of Galileo’s vigil, gradually withdrew, leaving bright Jupiter, aglow at opposition, to wander the stars alone.

No sooner had Galileo discerned the planet’s four companions than he saw what they augured for his own future: He might gain a position at the Tuscan court by naming them for his most important patron, the young Florentine Prince Cosimo de’ Medici. Given Jupiter’s prominence in Cosimo’s horoscope, which Galileo had already cast, the four moons must represent the boy and his three younger brothers, and therefore should be known henceforth as the Medicean stars.

“It was Jupiter, I say,” Galileo reminded Cosimo, “who at Your Highness’s birth, having already passed through the murky vapors of the horizon, and occupying the midheaven”—by which he meant Jupiter had risen to the dominant, most auspicious position in the sky according to Renaissance astrology—“and illuminating the eastern angle”—that is, affecting the ascendant sign—“from his royal house” (Jupiter being considered king of the planets), “looked down upon Your most fortunate birth from that sublime throne and poured out all his splendor and grandeur into the most pure air, so that with its first breath Your
tender little body and Your soul, already decorated by God with noble ornaments, could drink in this universal power and authority.”

Jupiter had thus conferred on Cosimo the expansive confidence and noble ethical concern that befitted a born leader. The positive effect of Jupiter, called “the greater benefic” by practitioners of the stellar art, was known to uplift a person from pettiness to greatness, as well as to promise health and sanity, levity, wisdom, optimism, and generosity.

“Indeed,” noted Galileo, “it appears that the Maker of the Stars himself, by clear arguments, admonished me to call these new planets by the illustrious name of Your Highness before all others. For as these stars, like the offspring worthy of Jupiter, never depart from his side except for the smallest distance, so who does not know the clemency, the gentleness of spirit, the agreeableness of manners, the splendor of the royal blood, the majesty in actions, and the breadth of authority and rule over others, all of which qualities find a domicile and exaltation for themselves in Your Highness? Who, I say, does not know that all these emanate from the most benign star of Jupiter, after God the source of all good?”

The uproar that followed Galileo’s announcement
of his discoveries caused a few commentators to wonder aloud how the four new celestial bodies would affect astronomy, on the one hand, and astrology on the other.

Soon the Medicean stars weighed in as astronomical evidence to support the unpopular heliocentric system of Copernicus. By showing they could circle Jupiter even as Jupiter continued his own heavenly rounds, the new satellites made plausible the idea of the Earth’s moving through space, together with its Moon, around the Sun.

Astrology broke with astronomy at this point, forced by its focus on human experience to retain the geocentric outlook. Nor did astrologers see any need to assign a new sphere of influence to the Medicean stars. Rather, they continued to esteem only Earth’s Moon, which they regarded as the ancient, familiar, feminine controller of emotional responses and everyday patterns of activity.

In Galileo’s own natal chart, for example, the Sun is in Pisces,
*
but the Moon lies in the sign of
Aries at the mid-heaven, indicating a highly imaginative, self-reliant, independent, and inventive individual with a restless mind, someone who goes beyond existing boundaries as a pioneer, an adventurer, even a sky warrior. At the same time, the Moon occupies the ninth of the twelve mundane houses—the house ruled by Jupiter and traditionally associated with knowledge and understanding. The Moon in the ninth house signifies strongly held religious and philosophic beliefs, as well as an advanced education and a long-lived mother, all of which Galileo had. The ninth house also encompasses travel to foreign countries, and although Galileo never left Italy, it could be argued that his telescope carried him on the farthest possible journeys.

The same Jupiter that swam as a small globe in the eyepiece of the spyglass resided, in Galileo’s horoscope, in the sign of Cancer—where astrologers say the planet is “exalted,” or most free to express itself through the individual’s experience—and also conjunct with Saturn in the twelfth house. Jupiter and Saturn aligned in the house of confinement spelled success for Galileo around the age of forty or fifty. (He was forty-seven when he published the astronomical findings that
brought him instant fame.) Together, Jupiter and Saturn implied that Galileo would face ideological crises (such as his later clash with the Inquisition, perhaps) and live in seclusion and solitude (as he did under house arrest his last eight years). The ebullient increase and fertility of Jupiter is tempered, in Galileo’s nativity, by the sobering nearness of Saturn.

Jupiter assumed its astrological mantle of benevolence and largesse in Babylonian times, around 1000
B.C.
—long before Sir Isaac Newton (a Capricorn) grasped the planet’s true physical enormousness by watching it pull on Galileo’s moons. The ancients had no way to assess the sizes of the planets or the distances between them, so their association of Jupiter with grandeur poses a mystery for astronomy and astrology to share.

As befits the planet of expansion, Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined. Compared to the Earth alone, gaseous Jupiter is more than three hundred times more massive than the solid Earth. The size difference between them seems even more portentous when measured in terms of volume, for Jupiter’s volume exceeds the Earth’s by one thousand-fold.

A world apart from the terrestrial planets,
Jupiter mimics the Sun in both composition and attitude: It consists almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, and reigns over its own replica solar system of at least sixty planet-like satellites—the four largest ones Galileo found, plus fifty-nine others discovered (so far) since the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Although many of Jupiter’s moons are rocky bodies, the gas giant itself has no solid surface, no terrain of any kind. The face it presents to Earthly observers is an expanse of pure weather: Every identifiable feature resolves into a cloud bank, a cyclone, a jet stream, a thunderbolt, or a curtain of auroral lights. On Jupiter, a storm may continue for centuries, innocent of landfall. No seasonal changes disrupt the weather patterns either, since the planet stands erect on its axis, only three degrees atilt.