New Mars

Should aliens ever decide to land on Earth, they’d probably pick Contact to make their first appearance. Held in the Bay Area from March 1st-3rd, the 19th Contact Conference covered an ambitious array of topics including anthropology, astrobiology, planetary science and more, with speakers such as Apollo Astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Frank Drake and Robert Zubrin. Even though no extra-terrestrials were (visibly) in presence, they’d have been more than welcome as long as they could have survived an inevitable barrage of questions from the assembled scientists, authors and artists. New Mars staff writer Joel McKinnon reported from the first day of the conference.

	Rusty Schweickart

That’s Contact

Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart was relaxing in the hospitality suite in the Santa Clara Marriott early on Saturday morning. With him were several veterans of Contact conferences through the years. They were discussing ramifications of Schweickart’s exciting idea for ‘Genomic SETI’ that he had presented during his keynote speech the previous evening.

“Someone should calculate how long it would take for a colony from a civilized world, left undisturbed on a new planet, to regain the capability of space travel…” he mused.

“I’ve done it.” snapped sci fi writer and part time planetary scientist David Moore right on cue. “I estimate it to be about 100 years. I’ll go into detail in my talk this evening.”

“That’s Contact”, someone succinctly noted.

Indeed, that exchange did sum up the nature of the unusual but highly illuminating Contact conference, held annually in the Bay Area for the past 19 years. The event was founded by anthropologists Jim Funaro and Joel Hagen and has evolved- a truly suitable word- into a multidisciplinary conference including the arts, anthropology, astrobiology, science-fiction, SETI, planetary science, to name a few of the fields represented. Past speakers at the conference have included David Brin, Poul Anderson, Greg Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Chris McKay, Seth Shostak, and Carol Stoker, just to name a few. I was attracted to this years event by the lineup of presenters including the Mars Society’s Robert Zubrin and Penny Boston, Frank Drake and Seth Shostak from SETI as well as astronaut Schweickart’s keynote.

Warming up

I must confess that far too much occurred during the three full days of the conference for me to be able to cover it comprehensively, so I will concentrate on the first day of the session, known as Ames Day, as it was held at the NASA Ames Research facility at Moffit Field in Mountain View, California. I had never been to Ames but I had often heard of it, being the intellectual center of space science studies in the SF Bay Area. We met at the Moffit Training and Conference Center (MFCC) a fairly spacious warehouse like building dwarfed by the enormous Goodyear Blimp hangar just outside which appears to be at least a half mile long and almost as high.

I saw the familiar sight of NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay almost immediately upon entering the building. Chris was to be moderating the morning sessions- another inducement to my attendance. Chris is always a fascinating speaker. Soon after I saw more familiar faces including Mars Society President Robert Zubrin, here to present his Panspermia paper, and instructional technologist Gus Frederick from the Portland MS chapter. Gus, who seems to do a little of everything; teaching web development, space agriculture, 3-D space art, etc., was talking with Penny Boston, a microbiologist studying extremophiles in subsurface environments. I little knew at the time that her talk was to be one of the most stimulating of the day.

What is Life?

First up was Barry Blumberg, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute (NAI). He presented a list of characteristics that define life taken from Paul Davies highly recommended book “The Fifth Miracle;” autonomy, reproduction, metabolism, nutrition, complexity, organization, growth and development, information content, hardware/software entanglement, and permanence and change. This was to be the first of several such definitions of life presented during the day. Right away it becomes apparent that there is much to discuss if there is limited consensus on such a fundamental question of “What is Life?” Blumberg, a Nobel Laureate in Medicine in 1977, made a humorous misstatement in discussing autonomy. He used a “thrown cat” analogy in which he suggested that if you throw an inanimate object such as a rock up in the air it comes down in a predictable fashion, but if you toss a cat it could land on a roof, or over a fence, etc. A few quizzical eyebrows were raised and Dr. Blumberg corrected himself- it’s a bird not a cat. We all got the point but the right tone was set for the day- this is fun stuff.

Blumberg concluded his talk by describing the mission of the NAI; to further the understanding of questions of life on other worlds through collaborative research, training the next generation of researchers, provide scientific and technical leadership, coordinate the work of widely distributed researchers, and support outreach and education of the public.

U-loops and Snottites

Penny Boston and Robert Zubrin

Next up was possibly my favorite talk of the day. Penny Boston with “A Field Guide to Unknown Organisms- Earth, Mars and Beyond”. Dr. Boston immediately struck me as someone I wish I had met as an undergrad long ago. She is a very rigorous researcher- very serious about her work- but driven to study things far outside the mainstream and clearly enjoying it immensely. Penny described a menagerie of extremely bizarre life forms she has studied in extreme subsurface environments including such wondrous creatures as “u-loops and snottites”; the latter so named because of their resemblance to nasal emanations. This should give you an idea of Penny’s personality. Later that evening as we were proceeding to the banquet she was engaged in banter with a forensic analyst about studying fingertips removed from corpses, etc. I reminded them we were heading to dinner and she laughed and started a singsong “I can be grosser than you can.” That’s Penny Boston.

On the serious side, one of the most revealing aspects of Penny’s talk was her discovery of creatures that consume trace amounts of manganese and excrete it as crystals in coral reef like fashion. Amazingly, the amounts of the mineral available are undetectably small and yet they live off of them. Also, the life span of these creatures is on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. I had never conceived of biological forms that live in geological time. This immediately made me rethink automatic suppositions about the prospects of life on a Mars that has been “dead” for probably millions of years at least. Maybe that’s not really so long? Penny also discussed how many of these creatures seem to exist for indeterminable amounts of time inside the bare rock waiting for the chance development of a suitable habitat through solution-driven cavern development. It makes one wonder whether subsurface life originates from the surface or vise-versa. Penny says we really don’t know for sure which is true. If the latter, then many planets could have life deep in the rocks, just waiting for an appropriately benign surface environment to come out in full flower.

Oceans beneath the Ice

Chris Chyba then presented a talk on his investigations into the prospects of life on Europa. He broke it up into three sections; what we know, what we think we know, and what is very speculative. We know some amazing things about Europa. Its surface is nearly pure water ice with very few craters, meaning it is on the order of 50 million years old. The moon has a metallic core, a rocky interior, and a layer of water about 100km deep beneath the ice crust.

What we think we know is even more fascinating. Models of tidal heating caused by the proximity to Jupiter indicate the global ocean should be liquid water rather than ice. Other indicators that back this up are that the surface seems to rotate independently from the interior and magnetic field analysis shows conductive properties similar to Earth’s ocean.

What is very speculative? That life could very well exist in such an ocean. All the requirements are there; water, energy, the right chemical environment. There may even be thermal vents similar to those on Earth that are considered to be possible sources for early life here. Another interesting idea is that the Europa scenario could be similarly replicated on Ganymede and Callisto and may even be a “standard” pattern for large moons of the gas giants. That could be a lot of lively worlds, couldn’t it?

Catching a Breath

	An example of of Gus Frederick’s space art on exhibition

Wow! My head was already spinning and fortunately it was time for a break. I snagged Penny for a few follow-up questions and then she and Gus invited me to lunch. Of course I jumped at the chance. Over noodles we talked about a wide range of subjects, including whether machines; i.e., nanorobots, etc., could one day be considered alive, our mutual interests in caving- Gus studies lava tubes as prime candidates for human habitats on Mars- and the origin of the Mars Society in the Mars Underground days back in Boulder in the 80s. We discussed the phenomenon of the internet and I mentioned Michael Crichton’s idea voiced by a character in “The Lost World” that the internet is a very bad thing for humanity in that it removes the segregation of populations necessary for evolution to proceed. Penny disagreed with this idea vigorously, suggesting that the internet would eventually mature into a form in which much natural segregation would occur and that this is happening already. I hope she’s right. I don’t want my own use of the web to be just a part of the march toward humanity’s doom.

Finding Other Worlds

We got back a bit late and missed the intro by the afternoon moderator, Seth Shostak. This was a shame because Seth, the main spokesman for SETI, is a great speaker and a very funny guy. I did get to enjoy a presentation of his later in the weekend. We came in during space scientist Bill Borucki’s presentation on the search for earthlike planets around nearby stars. I hadn’t realized how much progress had been made in this field. Borucki discussed the upcoming Kepler mission in 2007 that will use a wide field of view telescope to analyze about 100,000 stars over a 4-year period. The precision should be sufficient to identify Earth sized planets within the habitable zone; that is within the appropriate range of distance from the local sun.

Beyond this, in about 2015, the Terrestrial Planet Finder expedition will send an array of telescopes into space with the capability of blocking out light from a star so that the light from an orbiting terrestrial sized planet itself could be imaged and analyzed spectroscopically. Evidence of O₃ (implying O₂) and CO₂ would be a strong indication of an earthlike atmosphere strongly implying similar life forms. Only a dozen or so years until we know they’re out there- even if they don’t try contacting us? Sounds well worth the effort to me.

After Bill came the illustrious founder of SETI, Frank Drake. Way back in 1960, Dr. Drake came up with the famous Drake equation. This equation has the form:

N = R^* * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L

where:

N= number of communicative civilizations
R^* = the rate of formation of suitable stars
f_p = fraction of those stars with planets
n_e = number of “earths” per planetary system
f_l = fraction of those planets where life develops
f_i = fraction of life sites where intelligence develops
f_c = fraction of planets where technology develops
L = the lifetime of communication civilizations

It all boils down to roughly N ~ L, that is, the number of communicative civilizations is roughly equal to the average lifetime of such civilizations. If we assume this is, say 10,000 years, then there should be about the same number of civilizations in our galaxy.

These calculations assume that life arose from essentially nothing here on Earth and would do likewise on other suitable planets. A couple of ideas presented further on in the conference might cause f_l, f_i, and possibly even f_c to be reconsidered. This leads us to Dr. Zubrin’s report on panspermia.

Panspermia

What is panspermia? This is the theory that life on Earth did not develop “from scratch” here on Earth but was instead seeded from outside our solar system. Robert began making his case by stating the fact that nothing simpler than bacteria has ever been found in the fossil record or in the present biota. Furthermore, some types of bacteria are “astronautically adapted.” If the life that evolved into life as we know it arrived from beyond our solar system then we don’t need to worry about how far from ideal the early life was for the spontaneous development of life (it should require a far more reducing environment).

RZ went on to demonstrate that there are several possible mechanisms in which astronautically adapted bacteria could “inseminate” our solar system and thereby the Earth and most likely Mars as well. Two of the most likely mechanisms involve the Oort Cloud- the field of icy bodies far out beyond the obits of the planets. It is more than just likely; it is probable - Zubrin contends - that our solar system has exchanged the seed of life with other solar systems several times in its history via the Oort Cloud.

One of the key moments in the conference for me was the Q&A segment for this talk, and particularly the tough challenge presented by Zubrin’s, co-member of the Mars Society board of directors, Penny Boston. She sternly rebuked Robert for including the “red herring” that we must invoke panspermia due to lack of evidence of pre-bacterial life on Earth. She claimed that higher orders of life often subsume lower orders within them and that’s why we don’t see the earlier forms standing alone. She spoke of the bias of large complex forms (us) to expect changes on a large scale rather than biochemical changes leading to the forms we see, but that may have no possibility of being included in the fossil record.

Robert reiterated his assertion that there is no evidence of pre-bacterial life now or in the past. Penny said that the jury is still out on this. The tiniest forms of life are the hardest to find because the evidence is swamped by background noise- especially true for the fossil record.

What I found very interesting in this exchange is that it shows the value of the multidisciplinary approach at the conference. Zubrin is an astronautical engineer and shouldn’t be expected to know everything about microbiology. For Boston it’s her specialty and she was accordingly able to call him on the perceived flaws in the thesis. I also was impressed that Penny and Robert were able to have such lively interchanges and remain good friends and working associates. I think this bodes well for the Mars Society.

Gus Frederick’s Martian Mead

Two very profound and moving presentations were given next. Psychologist Al Harrison spoke on the social implications of not finding intelligent extraterrestrial life and then conference organizer Jim Funaro spoke on the opposite thread. What happens if we do find it? One striking conclusion of his talk was in the importance of religion to the vast majority of humans on this planet, and what powerful effects such a revelation would have upon their belief systems.

Next, we broke and all headed over to the Santa Clara Marriott where the evening banquet, as well as the rest of the conference, was to be held. In the couple of hours preceding the banquet I had the pleasure of conversing with many old Contactees and the truly unique pleasure of sampling Gus Frederick’s home brewed Martian Mead, a powerful concoction developed under Martian greenhouse conditions with the aid of field mice. Gus will have to give you the details on this.

The Astronaut Speaks

After a fine dinner it was time for the big-ticket item, the keynote by Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart. Things were running a little late, so Jim Funaro suggested that Rusty had advised his audience to prepare by getting a little drunk. In retrospect this might have been a good idea- as Rusty’s presentation had some significant psychological impact.

I think Rusty’s talk took everybody a little off-guard. Instead of the typical astronaut talk about what it felt like to float in space, how awesome Earth looked from orbit, etc., we were presented with something a little more interesting. The title of the talk was “Legacy’s Children,” but it was to be quite a while until we all understood what that implied.

Schweickart started with the classic artist’s conception of the huge meteor hit that apparently wiped out the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago. From there he moved quickly to an animation that drew some gasps from the crowd. Using data derived from the ESA Hipparchus mission, consisting of reams of star and planet positions calculated now and for several million years into the future, the animation began with a plan view of the solar system showing the positions of the sun, Earth, and 8 nearby asteroids. When the picture was set in motion, the 8 asteroids were seen to spiral in on trajectories showing a near perfect collision with the Earth. At one point in the animation it looked like three asteroids collided with us nearly simultaneously. What this showed was actual data from the past year in which the closest Near Earth Objects (NEOs) had scarily close encounters with our home world. This was similar to the image shown in Robert Zubrin’s Entering Space, showing trajectories of many NEOs and captioned “the cosmic shooting gallery.” When I saw that image I was impressed. This demonstration, however, had impact at least a magnitude greater.

Rusty described the probability that at some point in the history of our civilization we would have to intercept one of these missiles targeted for a dead hit on us or else submit to extinction. To do so, we would employ sophisticated rocket technology to gently nudge the asteroid so it missed its target. As he put it, the math better be right, or you could nudge one that was going to miss so that it did hit us square on. Rusty made the assumption that it is probable that we will eventually be fully in command of this threat; having catalogued the paths of all known asteroids and comets and with the capability of picking up the unknown ones far enough away to take action to avert catastrophe.

Next, he showed an animation of our Sun in the context of the galaxy, and again showed how nearby stars, over the course of millions of years move significantly and have close encounters with our solar system. The most dramatic animation showed a view of the nearby cosmos looking out from the perspective of our Sun and showed how the stars move this way and that over the course the next 1.4 million years- much more movement than I would have expected.

Schweikert pointed out one tiny star that did not seem to be moving. Then, with perfect shtick, said “does it seem to be getting bigger?” What was being shown, of course, was the relatively unimpressive star Gleise 17 coming straight at us! As the animation proceeds it becomes a horrifying menace that appears to spell our doom. In reality, it too, would not be a dead on hit- but it would come close enough to cause perturbations resulting in a whole new batch of unknown potential impactors streaming in from the far reaches of space. Schweikert says that humanity, if still around in 1.4 million years, should easily be advanced enough to take on this sort of threat.

Eventually, however, something will get us. Rusty showed pictures of supernovae explosions and brought up the potential mega-threat of a gamma ray burster- a class of stellar event that is still poorly understood, but one that is known to have a deadly impact on nearby life- possibly across half the galaxy. His point? That someday we’ll know the party is over. We’ll have a demon we just can’t nudge. And we may know this far in advanced- possibly many decades or even centuries. What will we do?

Legacy’s Children

At this point Rusty introduced the concept of legacy; what tycoons who know they’re near death and presidents on the way out have to consider. How to leave a good feeling of what you did while you were around. Schweickart says we’re going to want to leave a legacy. How can we do this? Through a mega project to encapsulate our DNA and disburse it throughout the galaxy in the hope that it finds a new habitat to recreate the wonder of life once again. Maybe someday our distant descendants will have grown into an advanced civilization once again due to our efforts.

Interesting hypothesis thus far, but now Rusty introduced the twist. “What I’ve been doing is a ruse,” he said. “I’m not really talking about the future at all- but the past.” Another collective gasp from the audience as it sunk in. Ah- this may have already happened and we are the legacy! Furthermore, Rusty suggests, the designers of the genome bequeathed to us would likely feel compelled to include their signature. Within the huge amount of “junk DNA” might be the cosmic equivalent of “Kilroy was here.”

“What I’d like to propose,” Rusty suggested, “is Genomic SETI.” This would be an exhaustive effort to comprehend the “junk DNA” in an effort to find the hidden message from our unfortunate ancestors. “It’s a buck ninety-eight project and at the very least we’d learn a hell of a lot about our genes”. He didn’t suggest we abandon traditional SETI. Indeed, if this scenario is correct there could be countless sibling civilizations out there at roughly the same level of development, seeing as they all would have been seeded at roughly the same time. This would finally make sense of the Star Trek universe where Klingons, Romulans, Kardassians, etc. are all crudely anthropomorphic and roughly equally developed.

Not so fast…

	Robert Zubrin asking a question

Of course there were those who were not so impressed, among them the inimitable Robert Zubrin. He pointed out that gamma ray bursters would not destroy all life in our solar system. In fact, evidence suggests there have been several of these within our galaxy in the course of life’s development and yet we are still here. He also suggested that there was no need to invoke the doomsday scenario to explain our existence, as his astronautically adapted bacteria would do the trick quite nicely. The question remains, where did the bacteria originally come from? Zubrin concedes we do not know and that a thorough examination of DNA to search for signs that it was artificially engineered may be a worthy project.

Penny Boston explained to me later that she has great doubts that a “Kilroy was here” would survive billions of years of genetic drift. If such a message had once been included it would be completely scrambled by now. Others took the viewpoint that this might not be so because the message would be irrelevant to evolution and hence would be retained without being messed with. It’s the changes in DNA that are beneficial to new varieties of the organism that are retained, not the random changes of no consequence. I’d love to hear a trained geneticist’s view on this question.

‘And they’re all like that?’

I spoke with NASA space scientist Carol Stoker after the keynote. I mentioned how surprised I was by Rusty’s presentation, how I had expected a much more pedestrian spiel about being an astronaut. She said she had met almost all of the Apollo astronauts over the years and “they’re all like that.” She said it’s not true of the shuttle crews, but the Apollo guys have come back from their experiences transformed. “You’ve got Jim Irwin looking for Noah’s ark and Buzz Aldrin designing interplanetary voyage scenarios- they’ve all come back as shamans.”

We speculated together about what is different about Apollo. Maybe the fact that they went to another world? If this is what does it- what can we gain by sending people far across the solar system to a little red dot in the sky where they can look back and see their home as a little blue dot? Maybe they’ll become so enlightened they’ll return with the answers to Earth’s most pressing problems… eliminating hunger and war and planetary environmental destruction?

Later I cornered Rusty Schweickart and asked him his view on this speculation and he pretty much shredded it to pieces. “We’re all shamans, huh?” he guffawed. “Well, let me tell you it’s a little different than that”.

He said that the “Apollo guys” were composed of a mix of old Mercury and Gemini veterans with several new recruits added for the Apollo missions, and that those who had actually flown Apollo missions ran the gamut of personalities before and after their flights. He spoke of one unnamed astronaut as a “Valley Girl” who “if he ever had a serious thought he would have to lie down until it passed so he go out and party.” Another is an esteemed quantum physicist. He said the one thing that was true is that the view of Earth from space transformed his nascent environmentalism into a powerful psychic force. He said it is likely true that the vast majority of those who had seen the Earth from space had come back with a much greater appreciation of our home world as a unique geological and biological entity floating fragile in the bleak vastness of space.

I still believe that there may be something to the idea that sending humans to Mars and beyond could have unintended benefits to humanity in myriad ways, and one such way maybe in what it does psychically to the humans involved. I’ve come away from this event with a much greater respect for Rusty Schweikert, and by extension, with all of those who have ventured into space, as multi-dimensional human beings with plenty to say about our world and our species. We should listen to them.

Filed under: Articles on March 23rd, 2002