Astrophysicist here. I've always found it striking that back in the 1970s, the first Viking lander on Mars carried a suite of life-detection experiments, one of which got a positive result consistent with microbial metabolism (the labeled release experiment). This was dismissed after the same lander's Gas Chromatograph–Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) found no organic material. But, in 2008, further experiments showed that the GCMS could feasibly have destroyed any organic compounds, leading to a false negative.
Gilbert Levin, the PI of the labeled release experiment, maintained his whole life that his experiment did find evidence for life on Mars.
I'm amazed that in the half-century since Viking, these results have never really been followed up. The community seemed to conclude that there was no evidence for life on Mars and stopped trying. It's only in the last decade, with our new ability to detect bio-signatures on nearby exoplanets, and with the hint of phosphene on Venus (etc) that the idea has started to seem less crazy.
With these new findings, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that Levin was right all along. Exciting times! But as you say, we need a serious sample return or crewed mission to get to the bottom of it.
Really liked this line: “Maybe this helps people contextualize it: If this exact same evidence had been found on Earth, the conclusion would be straightforwardly biological, and an abiotic explanation would be taken less seriously—….”
Makes you wonder what the threshold of proof really is.
I didn’t like this line at all; the reason the conclusion on Earth would be straightforward is because it is well established Earth already has abundant life. Hypothesis testing shouldn’t be ahistorical.
Ironically, I think this essay makes a convincing case for why we *shouldn't* send humans to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Right now, like you said, any signs of life there are preserved like a perfect museum. The rovers we've sent there have been carefully sanitized. But it's impossible to sanitize a human mission to such a degree, especially a large, permanent mission.Send more robots- send *lots* of robots- but don't send humans or any other organic material.
And this sentence is odd: "Our tech titans will need to refocus away from winning the race about who can generate the most realistic images of cats driving cars, or whatever." Right now the biggest tech titan of all is Elon Musk, and he's dead set on sending humans to Mars. Unfortunately he seems to want to send lots and lots of regular people there to colonize it, which has the chance to permanently destroy any signs of Martian life, or at least make it impossible to know whether it came from there or Earth.
It's an interesting consideration, and I almost wrote something about it. I think a lot depends on two questions:
1. Would a small human colony on one part of the planet really contaminate the planet, overall? Consider that we can get some evidence from early life here on Earth, after billions of years of such contamination. But I think yes, you're right that, if there was a city on Mars with "1 million people," I'd be concerned.
2. Do we actually have the political will to send robots for the centuries needed, and can they do the science? We just saw a great counterargument to this: supposedly, these samples were supposed to be returned. It now looks very unlikely for that to happen. Despite the up-front expense of a small human starter colony, they'd be able to do real confirmed science incredibly quickly, in comparison to decades of robotic visits.
I don't know the answer to the questions, but I'd be interested in a deeper dive on the contamination issues. How much would it be likely to interfere with our ability to come to firm conclusions? My initial leaning is that it's actually not a deal breaker and basically required to actually find anything out, because of #2, but I'd love to read a deeper dive into someone figuring that out based on the experiments necessary, the likely evidence, that sort of thing.
Look, our brains asking questions on Mars is already contaminating the planet. We need to dive in head first, assume long term colonization (yay!) and become self sustaining.
There'd have to be huge leaps in technology before a human colony can exist on Mars. Hell, just getting there the people would lose X amount of their body mass and would be shells of themselves and then the real work would begin and that work is not going to be easy. Its like the first settlements in America by the Europeans x10000.
This "pristine mars" argument is definitely reminiscent of our "indigenous ecology" obsession on Earth. You can't take humans out of any equation of science
We need a robotic sample-return mission to Mars. Back on Earth, sophisticated biochemistry analytical instruments can analyze the samples. Let's do this! Sending humans costs roughly $100 Billion - and what tests can mere humans do?
The way that we are doing science on Mars is basically:
-> Have an idea.
-> Plot out 10 year plan to instantiate the idea.
-> Have another idea in response to something that came up from the first idea.
-> Plot out a 10 year plan to check that.
-> And so on, forever.
This is wildly ineffective. That's why I say in a literal day a human scientist could make far more progress. Humans can iterate. That's the massive power of a human being, still, compared to AI and robots. You can go do an experiment, and then you can look at the results, then do another experiment in response to those results. That's what people do on Earth. Even if we got the sample back, we'd basically be confined to just checking the results. In the long run, this sample doesn't matter that much, other than providing more reasons for human exploration (which I think are already good enough).
A human could check, e.g., check abiotic causes around in the area, looking for better or clearer evidence, ruling things out, take different samples quickly, adapt to anything that comes up. And they could do it in days. Right now we can't even *turn over the rock.* A human just, like, plop. Other side!
"You can go do an experiment, and then you can look at the results, then do another experiment in response to those results" Erik - Your enthusiasm is wonderful. However, a human can't do most experiments. Massive, expensive, analytical equipment is needed, such as a PCR to amplify DNA or other replicating molecules, a mass spectrometer to identify molecules and proteins, and culture incubators to grow microbes and analyze them. Look up the cost of a gas chromatograph. And on and on. They must be on Mars. A microscope? A robot can take such images and relay them back to Earth.
I had all those things in my gene cloning lab in college, which I was a TA of, and it was quite humble! A PCR machine is like, the size of a printer now. I looked up the price of a gas chromatograph and it was between $2,500 - $15,000, according to Google. The actual equipment you need for any of this science is very small and very cheap, relatively speaking. These are all experiments that are easy to run, straightforward, and can be done on all sorts of common equipment. The hard part is doing them remotely on another world.
Erik - The start-up cost of a biology lab - for a beginning professor - is $1 million to $2 million. Also renovating the lab space costs ~$1000 per square foot. One also needs 5 to 10 research assistants (e.g. grad students and postdocs) to operate, assess data, and interpret all the results. And that lab only performs one type of analysis. Restricted. On Mars, even the mere construction of the laboratory requires personnel: Excavating ground, building the structure of the laboratory, putting in electricity, water, a clean room, internet, and even air! Where are all the contractors? There are none. Who installs the lab benches, the fume hoods, the vast array of needed chemicals. Who builds the living quarters? And on and on.
All the experiments are easy, no harder than the astronauts do on the international space station. They could be done mostly by a single person. And most labs are not restricted to a single kind of analysis. Again, you could do most of what's required with basically just a couple key pieces of equipment from my old undergraduate college labs. What I certainly agree is that getting to Mars is hard. But 99.99% of the difficulty is precisely that. This is not difficult or expensive science once you are on Mars and have a habitat and a couple pieces of equipment the size of printers.
He's a bean counter, Mr Hoel. He can't help it, the world is full of them. If you tried telling him about a rose or a poem he'd possibly want to know why he should listen, or whether he could sell it. The universe calls to our souls, and we have to go out there. That is nothing to do with "reasons" to avoid the "expenditure", or to do with any kind of established religion, it's just to do with being in some kind of touch with some level of your soul.
True! People routinely haul flash drive-size Nanopore sequencing devices across harsh environments for remote sequencing in the field. The experiment rests on the hypothesis that life on Mars uses DNA similar to ours, but given the billions of years of asteroid exchange between the two bodies it strikes me as a highly reasonable hypothesis. The fact that we haven't sent miniaturized sequencing equipment to Mars is outrageous. What are they waiting for.
The point is not just to analyze the sample, but to unify people. I think that's what Eric had in mind. Sending a team to Mars is better in that regard than just getting samples back...
I agree. We humans must go. However, sending humans requires dozens of robotic missions that drop-off life-support. Think Moon: Humans go - and bring back lunar rocks for analysis.
"Some act like vultures, cackling over the dead. Or snakes, who strike to kill without warning, then slither away. Or spiders, who wait up high for victims, patient and hooded and with the blackest of eyes."
This is a base caricature of vultures, snakes, and spiders. If you are not familiar with animal behavior I suggest you use other analogies. You are an excellent writer otherwise.
Why does it take more than a small team of scientists? By "let's go" you mean just a few scientists, but everyone starts routing for them as a way to unify us? I have another project that might do the job of unifying us that involves figuring out how to localize our economy and get people to actually depend on their family and community members. It's both a tech project and an organizational project. It would probably be cheaper than getting a team to Mars, and it actually addresses our problems scientifically, instead of trying to distract us from them with this sort of Kurt-Vonnegutesque project.
The technical definition of a cult (used by law enforcement) is scoring high on the ABCDEF survey. I suppose that could happen, but actually the basic principles are to have subsidiarity (as much freedom of lower levels as possible, consistent with optimizing the higher level utility function, which is anti-cult) AND to limit the number of parts at each level (family, village/tribe, federation of villages) to keep transaction costs low. The idea is to organize ourselves similarly to how multicellular organisms organize themselves (and perhaps how brains do too), for reasons having to do with optimizing complexity management, or w-maxing in Bennet's terms. Some companies already do this internally. A eusocial insect colony would be more like a cult, because there is not much subsidiarity. Right now, our organization does not have enough levels between a nation or a global market, and individuals. It's not a cult either, but it has problems like proliferation of free riding (individuals that are misaligned with the greater whole).
So I ask you, what do YOU mean by a cult? Any attempt to unify people? Then religions would count as cults. So would science. So would projects like the one Eric is proposing. Or do you mean attempts to unify people which are also destroying people's individuality? Then what I propose is not a cult.
I think that we have markets that are meant to optimize for exactly what you are looking for to "replace"going to Mars. Are you and your friends and family suffering? It looks like you are looking for a cause that does not exist. I would suggest less central control from UN and Climate fanatics might be a better way to address this pulsing "need" that is going to organize the world.
Local markets are almost non-existent anymore. Most of our stuff comes from impersonal factories and institutions, there is no relationship with those who make it (if they are even human). So what you say is false, capitalism as it is currently organized selects for global markets at the expense of local ones (because capital currently requires mass production, which requires mass consumption, and mass consumption requires global markets). So no wonder we have billions of lonely, disconnected from each other and from nature humans. No wonder we have psychopaths rising to power (whether in government or companies). No wonder we can't control climate change (and your Market=God cult pretends it isn't happening). Because all of the intermediate levels (families, tribes/villages/federations and now even coherent individuals, with the attention economy) are sick or gone. It's as if our bodies decided to eliminate organs, cells and organelles, and we were left as a soup of organic molecules. That is what capitalism is doing.
It's fixable. We don't have to chuck capitalism. We have to learn from what multicellular organisms do and realize why they do it.
You asked if I and my family are suffering. Why, yes, but I fear your question is not motivated by compassion. Perhaps you want to use our suffering as a rhetorical weapon to say we have choices, living as we do in a democracy. But we can't choose to do things that depend on other people without them choosing them too. And as long as they are part of the Cult of Progress, they will not choose anything else, no matter what the suffering.
We do not need to go to Mars. Going there will destroy the health of the voyagers, at very least. We are not technologically capable of sending people safely to mars, let alone getting them back safely. Bone loss, cognitive damage, DNA damage, etc. are inevitable with current technology. No, what we need to do is get the damn sample return mission funded and up and running!
I agree. We are hundreds of years away from human habitation IMO. There's no reason not to just send wave after wave of increasingly better robots there first and possibly to set up the first colony if that was the goal.
I highly recommend "The End of Astronauts" by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees for a deep dive re: why robotics should precede human exploration and colonization. In short, manned spaceflight can cost up to 100x more than unmanned robotic missions. The money has to work. I wrote about this recently and made the argument for sending "AI-stronauts" (AI-characters + robotics) to maintain human interest until Mars and other planets are made suitable for human habitation. See here: https://quests.substack.com/p/launch-ai-stronauts-into-space
I am suspicious of the intrinsic perspective to Just Do This — go to Mars to study how life elsewhere did or didn’t form, why? When? Fortunately no one has to go to Mars just yet for the answer. I found the answer in my analysis of 9/11/2001. How you ask? What’s the answer? I found out the contents of a code from Plato’s Republic his number of the Tyrant, nuptial number were programmed into complex math comparing gps coordinates of Orions Belt on Earth and Mars. We will easily have the same problems there on Mars until my data is whistled into society before we let the current elite nutballs take us there on their watch Eric. Earth is becoming like Mars because the true warning of 9/11 is not being heard. Crop circles tried to warn us. Movies like Pi and Donnie Darko expose the “ dark web”. The current mafia taking us to Mars is a joke. Get you kid brain out of Barsoon and look into how The War of Worlds was made to come to life!
Astrophysicist here. I've always found it striking that back in the 1970s, the first Viking lander on Mars carried a suite of life-detection experiments, one of which got a positive result consistent with microbial metabolism (the labeled release experiment). This was dismissed after the same lander's Gas Chromatograph–Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) found no organic material. But, in 2008, further experiments showed that the GCMS could feasibly have destroyed any organic compounds, leading to a false negative.
Gilbert Levin, the PI of the labeled release experiment, maintained his whole life that his experiment did find evidence for life on Mars.
I'm amazed that in the half-century since Viking, these results have never really been followed up. The community seemed to conclude that there was no evidence for life on Mars and stopped trying. It's only in the last decade, with our new ability to detect bio-signatures on nearby exoplanets, and with the hint of phosphene on Venus (etc) that the idea has started to seem less crazy.
With these new findings, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that Levin was right all along. Exciting times! But as you say, we need a serious sample return or crewed mission to get to the bottom of it.
Would be remarkable to see him vindicated.
The Viking test is always the first thing that comes to my mind when I read articles like this.
Literally, to the bottom of it
Anything to propel us into Expanse world ASAP
I can't wait to sign up for the indentured servitude where they will deduct me even for the oxygen!
I'm sure Erik is thinking more on an international crewed Mars exploration program, something like The Martian if you like fiction comparisons.
Or, at the very least, For All Mankind. Stealing an asteroid sounds fun!
Really liked this line: “Maybe this helps people contextualize it: If this exact same evidence had been found on Earth, the conclusion would be straightforwardly biological, and an abiotic explanation would be taken less seriously—….”
Makes you wonder what the threshold of proof really is.
I didn’t like this line at all; the reason the conclusion on Earth would be straightforward is because it is well established Earth already has abundant life. Hypothesis testing shouldn’t be ahistorical.
Ironically, I think this essay makes a convincing case for why we *shouldn't* send humans to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Right now, like you said, any signs of life there are preserved like a perfect museum. The rovers we've sent there have been carefully sanitized. But it's impossible to sanitize a human mission to such a degree, especially a large, permanent mission.Send more robots- send *lots* of robots- but don't send humans or any other organic material.
And this sentence is odd: "Our tech titans will need to refocus away from winning the race about who can generate the most realistic images of cats driving cars, or whatever." Right now the biggest tech titan of all is Elon Musk, and he's dead set on sending humans to Mars. Unfortunately he seems to want to send lots and lots of regular people there to colonize it, which has the chance to permanently destroy any signs of Martian life, or at least make it impossible to know whether it came from there or Earth.
or in other words: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
It's an interesting consideration, and I almost wrote something about it. I think a lot depends on two questions:
1. Would a small human colony on one part of the planet really contaminate the planet, overall? Consider that we can get some evidence from early life here on Earth, after billions of years of such contamination. But I think yes, you're right that, if there was a city on Mars with "1 million people," I'd be concerned.
2. Do we actually have the political will to send robots for the centuries needed, and can they do the science? We just saw a great counterargument to this: supposedly, these samples were supposed to be returned. It now looks very unlikely for that to happen. Despite the up-front expense of a small human starter colony, they'd be able to do real confirmed science incredibly quickly, in comparison to decades of robotic visits.
I don't know the answer to the questions, but I'd be interested in a deeper dive on the contamination issues. How much would it be likely to interfere with our ability to come to firm conclusions? My initial leaning is that it's actually not a deal breaker and basically required to actually find anything out, because of #2, but I'd love to read a deeper dive into someone figuring that out based on the experiments necessary, the likely evidence, that sort of thing.
Look, our brains asking questions on Mars is already contaminating the planet. We need to dive in head first, assume long term colonization (yay!) and become self sustaining.
There'd have to be huge leaps in technology before a human colony can exist on Mars. Hell, just getting there the people would lose X amount of their body mass and would be shells of themselves and then the real work would begin and that work is not going to be easy. Its like the first settlements in America by the Europeans x10000.
This "pristine mars" argument is definitely reminiscent of our "indigenous ecology" obsession on Earth. You can't take humans out of any equation of science
Thank you for clear and impressive article, which has again lighted my mental microbes back into the reality of life on Mars.
What a wonderful article. Thank you.
Thank you for joining the choir.
We need a robotic sample-return mission to Mars. Back on Earth, sophisticated biochemistry analytical instruments can analyze the samples. Let's do this! Sending humans costs roughly $100 Billion - and what tests can mere humans do?
The way that we are doing science on Mars is basically:
-> Have an idea.
-> Plot out 10 year plan to instantiate the idea.
-> Have another idea in response to something that came up from the first idea.
-> Plot out a 10 year plan to check that.
-> And so on, forever.
This is wildly ineffective. That's why I say in a literal day a human scientist could make far more progress. Humans can iterate. That's the massive power of a human being, still, compared to AI and robots. You can go do an experiment, and then you can look at the results, then do another experiment in response to those results. That's what people do on Earth. Even if we got the sample back, we'd basically be confined to just checking the results. In the long run, this sample doesn't matter that much, other than providing more reasons for human exploration (which I think are already good enough).
A human could check, e.g., check abiotic causes around in the area, looking for better or clearer evidence, ruling things out, take different samples quickly, adapt to anything that comes up. And they could do it in days. Right now we can't even *turn over the rock.* A human just, like, plop. Other side!
"You can go do an experiment, and then you can look at the results, then do another experiment in response to those results" Erik - Your enthusiasm is wonderful. However, a human can't do most experiments. Massive, expensive, analytical equipment is needed, such as a PCR to amplify DNA or other replicating molecules, a mass spectrometer to identify molecules and proteins, and culture incubators to grow microbes and analyze them. Look up the cost of a gas chromatograph. And on and on. They must be on Mars. A microscope? A robot can take such images and relay them back to Earth.
I had all those things in my gene cloning lab in college, which I was a TA of, and it was quite humble! A PCR machine is like, the size of a printer now. I looked up the price of a gas chromatograph and it was between $2,500 - $15,000, according to Google. The actual equipment you need for any of this science is very small and very cheap, relatively speaking. These are all experiments that are easy to run, straightforward, and can be done on all sorts of common equipment. The hard part is doing them remotely on another world.
Erik - The start-up cost of a biology lab - for a beginning professor - is $1 million to $2 million. Also renovating the lab space costs ~$1000 per square foot. One also needs 5 to 10 research assistants (e.g. grad students and postdocs) to operate, assess data, and interpret all the results. And that lab only performs one type of analysis. Restricted. On Mars, even the mere construction of the laboratory requires personnel: Excavating ground, building the structure of the laboratory, putting in electricity, water, a clean room, internet, and even air! Where are all the contractors? There are none. Who installs the lab benches, the fume hoods, the vast array of needed chemicals. Who builds the living quarters? And on and on.
All the experiments are easy, no harder than the astronauts do on the international space station. They could be done mostly by a single person. And most labs are not restricted to a single kind of analysis. Again, you could do most of what's required with basically just a couple key pieces of equipment from my old undergraduate college labs. What I certainly agree is that getting to Mars is hard. But 99.99% of the difficulty is precisely that. This is not difficult or expensive science once you are on Mars and have a habitat and a couple pieces of equipment the size of printers.
He's a bean counter, Mr Hoel. He can't help it, the world is full of them. If you tried telling him about a rose or a poem he'd possibly want to know why he should listen, or whether he could sell it. The universe calls to our souls, and we have to go out there. That is nothing to do with "reasons" to avoid the "expenditure", or to do with any kind of established religion, it's just to do with being in some kind of touch with some level of your soul.
True! People routinely haul flash drive-size Nanopore sequencing devices across harsh environments for remote sequencing in the field. The experiment rests on the hypothesis that life on Mars uses DNA similar to ours, but given the billions of years of asteroid exchange between the two bodies it strikes me as a highly reasonable hypothesis. The fact that we haven't sent miniaturized sequencing equipment to Mars is outrageous. What are they waiting for.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cbuck/p/lets-look-for-dna-on-mars
Great discussion! The Mars Society's Robert Zubrin has been urging crewed missions for decades. Go to the Conference in LA over Columbus Day weekend.
The point is not just to analyze the sample, but to unify people. I think that's what Eric had in mind. Sending a team to Mars is better in that regard than just getting samples back...
I agree. We humans must go. However, sending humans requires dozens of robotic missions that drop-off life-support. Think Moon: Humans go - and bring back lunar rocks for analysis.
This was excellent
I really wish you had not included this:
"Some act like vultures, cackling over the dead. Or snakes, who strike to kill without warning, then slither away. Or spiders, who wait up high for victims, patient and hooded and with the blackest of eyes."
This is a base caricature of vultures, snakes, and spiders. If you are not familiar with animal behavior I suggest you use other analogies. You are an excellent writer otherwise.
This is what i call reddit-rot.
Why does it take more than a small team of scientists? By "let's go" you mean just a few scientists, but everyone starts routing for them as a way to unify us? I have another project that might do the job of unifying us that involves figuring out how to localize our economy and get people to actually depend on their family and community members. It's both a tech project and an organizational project. It would probably be cheaper than getting a team to Mars, and it actually addresses our problems scientifically, instead of trying to distract us from them with this sort of Kurt-Vonnegutesque project.
Sounds like a cult! Where can I join your Utopian localized economy? Sorry bro. Lame
The technical definition of a cult (used by law enforcement) is scoring high on the ABCDEF survey. I suppose that could happen, but actually the basic principles are to have subsidiarity (as much freedom of lower levels as possible, consistent with optimizing the higher level utility function, which is anti-cult) AND to limit the number of parts at each level (family, village/tribe, federation of villages) to keep transaction costs low. The idea is to organize ourselves similarly to how multicellular organisms organize themselves (and perhaps how brains do too), for reasons having to do with optimizing complexity management, or w-maxing in Bennet's terms. Some companies already do this internally. A eusocial insect colony would be more like a cult, because there is not much subsidiarity. Right now, our organization does not have enough levels between a nation or a global market, and individuals. It's not a cult either, but it has problems like proliferation of free riding (individuals that are misaligned with the greater whole).
So I ask you, what do YOU mean by a cult? Any attempt to unify people? Then religions would count as cults. So would science. So would projects like the one Eric is proposing. Or do you mean attempts to unify people which are also destroying people's individuality? Then what I propose is not a cult.
I think that we have markets that are meant to optimize for exactly what you are looking for to "replace"going to Mars. Are you and your friends and family suffering? It looks like you are looking for a cause that does not exist. I would suggest less central control from UN and Climate fanatics might be a better way to address this pulsing "need" that is going to organize the world.
Local markets are almost non-existent anymore. Most of our stuff comes from impersonal factories and institutions, there is no relationship with those who make it (if they are even human). So what you say is false, capitalism as it is currently organized selects for global markets at the expense of local ones (because capital currently requires mass production, which requires mass consumption, and mass consumption requires global markets). So no wonder we have billions of lonely, disconnected from each other and from nature humans. No wonder we have psychopaths rising to power (whether in government or companies). No wonder we can't control climate change (and your Market=God cult pretends it isn't happening). Because all of the intermediate levels (families, tribes/villages/federations and now even coherent individuals, with the attention economy) are sick or gone. It's as if our bodies decided to eliminate organs, cells and organelles, and we were left as a soup of organic molecules. That is what capitalism is doing.
It's fixable. We don't have to chuck capitalism. We have to learn from what multicellular organisms do and realize why they do it.
You asked if I and my family are suffering. Why, yes, but I fear your question is not motivated by compassion. Perhaps you want to use our suffering as a rhetorical weapon to say we have choices, living as we do in a democracy. But we can't choose to do things that depend on other people without them choosing them too. And as long as they are part of the Cult of Progress, they will not choose anything else, no matter what the suffering.
> nationwide, in the name of humanity
Again? Maybe the US was once fit to go places in the name of humanity but this is long not the case.
Yes. In fact, collaboration with China will be vital for such a mission to succeed.
No thanks. I think the trust level with China is a bit low since Covid.
You mean the virus strain paid for by American Tax Payers?
We do not need to go to Mars. Going there will destroy the health of the voyagers, at very least. We are not technologically capable of sending people safely to mars, let alone getting them back safely. Bone loss, cognitive damage, DNA damage, etc. are inevitable with current technology. No, what we need to do is get the damn sample return mission funded and up and running!
I agree. We are hundreds of years away from human habitation IMO. There's no reason not to just send wave after wave of increasingly better robots there first and possibly to set up the first colony if that was the goal.
100% on board with you.
I’m convinced that the answers to our questions about early biogenesis literally aren’t here, they are over there, on the planet next door.
Let’s go!
And the international Mars Society Convention happens to be next week, at the USC campus in Los Angeles!
I highly recommend "The End of Astronauts" by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees for a deep dive re: why robotics should precede human exploration and colonization. In short, manned spaceflight can cost up to 100x more than unmanned robotic missions. The money has to work. I wrote about this recently and made the argument for sending "AI-stronauts" (AI-characters + robotics) to maintain human interest until Mars and other planets are made suitable for human habitation. See here: https://quests.substack.com/p/launch-ai-stronauts-into-space
I am suspicious of the intrinsic perspective to Just Do This — go to Mars to study how life elsewhere did or didn’t form, why? When? Fortunately no one has to go to Mars just yet for the answer. I found the answer in my analysis of 9/11/2001. How you ask? What’s the answer? I found out the contents of a code from Plato’s Republic his number of the Tyrant, nuptial number were programmed into complex math comparing gps coordinates of Orions Belt on Earth and Mars. We will easily have the same problems there on Mars until my data is whistled into society before we let the current elite nutballs take us there on their watch Eric. Earth is becoming like Mars because the true warning of 9/11 is not being heard. Crop circles tried to warn us. Movies like Pi and Donnie Darko expose the “ dark web”. The current mafia taking us to Mars is a joke. Get you kid brain out of Barsoon and look into how The War of Worlds was made to come to life!