Water, Water Everywhere

Water, Water Everywhere

Just when you thought the Mars craze had passed, you get contact reestablished with Spirit (see Andy's post below) and the Europeans have apparently confirmed water on Mars (the last time you heard about it, it was just a suspiscion presumably).

My hope is that we can blame water on Mars on an impact-created exchange of molecules with Earth.

Let me tell you why.

As someone who writes and enjoys science fiction in a variety of forms, my fantasies are reliant on the idea that we are, as far as we know, alone. For one thing, this allows a region of mystery which one can fill with fiction. If we meet a bunch of lizard-chimps on Mars who tell us "You know what, we've traveled f-in everywhere and there are no f-in wookies," well, our ability to dream that there are wookies is hampered. For another, our entire relationship with the universe radically changes. Even if all we find are microbes or maybe tuna fish, they become an integral part of the story of us and the universe. It's like if you were to write stories about life in your apartment and suddenly your dying cousin Larry moves into your bedroom... Larry now figures into your stories; even if you never have meaningful conversations with Larry and generally despise him, you're stuck with him being part of your apartment life. You can't just write him out of the story, because, well, he's dying and that's a rude thing to do to someone terminally ill. This is how it will be with the microbes. You'll look up at the stars at night and think about the millions and millions of miles of nothing but burning gas and floating rocks and, oh yeah, a bunch of parasites next door. And when we finally discover some hot, super intelligent aliens half way across the universe, we're going to have to bring them home to our solar system and introduce them to the microbes, who will do nothing but swim in circles and drool.

What are we going to do? Ignore them? They're life! You can ignore Jupiter, you can ignore Pluto... but you can't ignore life. It just doesn't happen too often. And it happened twice in the same solar system and you want to forget about it? No. Impossible.

Life on Mars is going to be a part of our day-to-day interstellar realities whether we ask for it or not. We could hope that it won't be found, even though we would really like the initial thrill of discovery...

Which is why I can only root for life on Mars to be some kind of backwash of the cosmos.

And now you know.