Outside
An oasis in the sky stimulates the imagination. A series of discoveries refresh our yearning for the red planet.
There it was: Red glowing on the dashboard of the sky like an astrological warning light next to the full Blood Moon Friday. Mars.
It brightly cried out over 35.8 million miles of space, a gulf that people have longed for as long as they knew the lights in the sky were places. This week she is closest to Earth in 15 years.
This yearning is now renewed The discovery of a 12-mile-wide lake beneath the southern ice cap on Mars through the European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express orbit has been renewed for the last time, if at all. An oasis for interplanetary dreamers. It is known that microbes live in similar lakes on earth, and who knows? Could small Mars bugs swim beneath a mile of ice down there, keeping the cosmic rays out and holding the water of the Marswater?
Mars has always been the backyard of our imagination, the place we will one day live or from where invaders would come in flying saucers to enslave us and steal our waters. Our robots have crossed this space again and again.
It's not crazy in astrobiology circles these days to argue that the life that now surrounds the earth began on Mars and then some Pilgrim germs were brought here on a stray asteroid. We now know that the sky is an endless conveyor belt with cosmic rabble, the debris from planet to planet, star to star, personified by Oumuamua, the wandering comet from outside our solar system, cruising the ocean moving through the ocean last Winter. In the fullness of time everything becomes everywhere.
[ Log in to receive reminders of space and astronomy events on your calendar .]
So we could all be Martians, that could help explain the seemingly endless lure of the Red Planet. The dream of exile to return to what once might have been Eden. Elon Musk said he wants to die there, but he has not quite gone there yet.
I grew frightened and curious about the place after seeing the thumbnails. "Invaders From Mars." The film showed how a boy my age saw a flying saucer go under a hill, whereupon the townspeople, including his parents, were abducted and turned into robots. My parents never let me see the whole movie.
It was a tribute to a part of a mythology that was dated to the beginning of the century: Mars was the dying home of a dying civilization of superklugen beings – little green men – salvaged by canals that bring water from the poles. These visions spring from a misunderstanding of the work of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who in 1877 thought he saw long, thin lines which he called canali (canals in Italian) that bound the surface of Mars. Percival Lowell, a celebrity and astronomer, took the term seriously and started mapping what he thought was cities and canals on the planet.
All the good sci-fi melodrama disappeared when satellite imagery showed the real planet, crater and dust] Here are some hard facts. Mars is about half the size of Earth, so gravity is weaker there – just a third of what's on Earth, and so you could jump higher, that is, if you could take a breath. The Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and there is very little of it anyway, the pressure here is less than one percent of the air pressure. The temperatures on the ground range from 86 degrees Fahrenheit to -190 below. One day is 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds long and one year is 687 Earth days.
Mars is red because it is rusty. Mars dust is full of iron oxide.
It is, as a travel book would say, a land of dramatic contrasts, with the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympia Mons, 15 miles high, and the longest gorge, Valles Marineris, 2500 miles long and 4 miles deep.
As far as we know, it is inhabited mainly by our own robots, such as the Rovers and Vikings, which we have sent there, and the wreck of the lost lander. Some 45 space missions – not all that made it – were launched by humans on Mars. There are five on the agenda, including the efforts of China and the United Arab Emirates, which are scheduled for summer 2020.
If anyone else is interested, if there's something like an alien iPhone or monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey, "Sitting somewhere on a rock, we would not have found it yet.
Out of all these explorations It's a story that is equally insistent, it's about a planet that was once speckled by oceans and shaped by fast-flowing rivers, a world warmed by an atmosphere, but something has happened, and Mars has its glittering Water and its air are lost.
Now there are only the bare shores, empty filaments of tributaries, silent rocks and scattered wet spots on cliffs, if history has ever existed here, history goes on, it died or went away into the underground.
Instead of little green men we search for microbes that are OK with me, I just get lonely and maybe microbes will be n, what applies to cosmic society.
The Vikings, who landed on Mars in 1976, were famed for life on the Martian soil. And scientists are still arguing over whether one of the four experiments actually achieved a positive result.
Since then, every vestige of evidence for Martian life in the past or present has aroused the enthusiasm of the public and perhaps Congress for the space agency's budget. In 1996, scientists said they had discovered the microbe fossil in a meteorite from Mars in a press conference concluded with a statement by President Bill Clinton. But few scientists accepted that.
In June, the rover of Curiosity confirmed that in the Gale crater small amounts of methane are regularly released into the atmosphere, where he spends his time. On Earth, much methane comes from biological activity, like cows belch, but pure geological processes can do it.
The newly discovered underground lake, if confirmed by further observations, is only the latest in this parade of hopeful signs that we could have neighbors out there somewhere.
Lately, there has been much excitement about extraterrestrial life in the Outer Solar System, where many of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and the other gas giants are ocean worlds hiding under ice shells. Some of them, such as Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, seem to inject salty water fountains and perhaps microbes into space.
NASA is planning a probe into Europe, and many astrobiologists are pushing for a ride through the Enceladus sprays or for a mission to send drones to explore Titan's methane lakes, Saturn's largest moon. Nobody really knows what a strange life would look like or what it would require .
Like Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who has been searching for ET all her life, we like to say we only know one example of life in the universe. This is the amazingly complex web of DNA-based organisms on Earth.
"We are looking for # 2," she said.
We still do not know how or why life began on Earth or how widespread it is in the universe. It is a belief among astronomers and hopeful astrobiologists that life under the right conditions will find a way.
In the next 50 years, we will probably know whether Darwin's test tube has produced another result in our own neck of the cosmos, in our own solar system. The missions to Mars have been on the road every two years for decades.
We will not know for sure about Mars until someone walks on it and drills. I always thought I would never be able to see people on the moon, but that was before SpaceX started doing things with rockets – come back and land first – that I had only seen in old science fiction movies.
We may not find monoliths or a funky alien iPhone. We could only find dead microbes or fossil prints of them. But even that would be exciting to know that nature has ever tried.
But if they are alive – whatever that means – then some kind of spiritual and intellectual reckoning will come to us. Depending on how savage or familiar these alien creatures are, we may have to decide whether our affiliation with DNA-based organisms or something is even broader.
And maybe we have to decide if microbes or whole potential biospheres have rights. If we choose the ultimate imperialist project, we could try to make Mars habitable for humans by heating up the planet to melt the ice caps and release carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas – out of them and the red soil. The result would be a thick atmosphere that would keep things warm and humid and cause deliberate climate change.
Bruce Jakofsky of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Christopher Edwards of the Northern Arizona University of Flagstaff concluded that there is not enough to look at the data Twenty years of exploration of Orbiter and Rover uses carbon dioxide that is currently on the planet, thickening the atmosphere and warming it to more than about 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Terraforming Mars, they concluded, "will require technologies far beyond our current grip ."
We We must have centuries, if not millennia, to arrange everything as we have to.
Everything we know about geology and astronomy tells us that one day Earth will become uninhabitable.
If the Bow of Cosmic History Bending back to the Red Planet, one day we might be stuck in the metaphorical shoes of a family from Ray Bradbury's classic "The Marsian Chronicles" . They fled to Earth on a stolen rocket and took up life under the ruins of the ancient lost Marian culture .
To make up for the disruption, Dad offers to show his son a Martian. He takes him to a canal.
They look into the water and see their own thoughts.
Dennis Overbye has been with the Times since 1998 and reporter since 2001. He has written two books: "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, The Scientific Quest for the Mystery of the Universe" and "Einstein in Love, a Scientific Romance." @ overbye
