"Is there life on Mars?"

Note:

This is actually not related to anything I was doing lately in particular; it is nothing more but an essay which I recently wrote as my submission in an essay competition aimed at answering the following question, "What are the prospects of finding life on other planets?" The essay had to be limited to (just!) 800 words and the final submission was actually a curtailed version of the following write-up. I doubt that I will win since I am not that good in these kind of scientific discussions but I did my best...so there you go!

“Is there life on Mars?” was the question put forward by David Bowie in his 1971 surreal song with (almost) the same title. Such a question coming from Bowie might not have been much of a surprise since his obsession with space has been evident in many ways throughout his career: his Ziggy Stardust personification of a rock star sporting make-up and costumes which made him seem to have come from an alien planet and the more obvious Space oddity album, to name a few. The relative light heartedness of Bowie’s fixation on extraterrestrial life is the subject matter of many members of the scientific community who have been allocating endless efforts in an attempt to find an answer to the query.

Indeed, the quest for life on other planets other than Earth has not been limited to the slightly eccentric people like glam rock idols in the like of Bowie; extraterrestrial life has fascinated people from all walks of life and on all levels imaginable. Consider international politics, for example. The Americans have a long-lasting link with the quest for life on other planets or even visits of vehicles and species from such planets to Earth. The infamous Roswell incident, the consistent secrecy associated with the Area 51 military base and annual multi-billion dollar NASA budgets suggest that an interest in the mission for finding extraterrestrial life is up and running in the States. In literature, John Gray’s relationship manual Men are from Mars, women are from Venus of 1992 has become a modern classic, where the two genders comprising the human race are associated with two planets within our solar system – an extension of a concept explored by the classical Romans, who associated Venus with beauty and Mars with war. In more recent times, the movie industry has also sought to create a portrayal of how the relationship between Earthlings and alien residents of the celestial body Pandora in the blockbuster Avatar, although, understandably, in that movie the real aliens are actually us humans!

However, the hope of finding life beyond Earth has more serious effects than American conspiracy theories about UFO landings or James Cameron’s capabilities in creating special effects. The foremost preamble which comes to mind is, “What is life?” and hence be able to postulate on whether life can be found on other planets. Indeed, Professor Robert Hazen of the George Mason University of Virginia wrote, “I think the chances are good we won’t know alien life when we see it” and this is possibly the most fundamental question one has to ask and fulfil a prerequisite for identifying life beyond Earth. The very notion of life cannot be limited to the concept of an intelligent life form which is known as homo sapiens and which, debatably, commences at the moment of conception and ceases at a point when, again even more arguably, when oxygen fails to reach the brain. Even in the much wider picture, life cannot be limited to anything built from a basic unit – the cell – which is based on some chemical combination to form DNA. It is true that whatever substances defining this molecule decompose at extreme elevated or freezing temperatures and thus unlikely to survive outside of Earth, but what if there is another life building block which is not DNA and can survive otherwise hostile conditions too close or too far away from our Sun or any other solar system in the universe?

Beyond all the biological and scientific theories involved in this investigation, there is another realm which is even beyond the microscopically visible: the metaphysics. Virtually all of the world’s major religions have a form of creation narrative in which a supernatural, divine power formed the Earth and all life within it. The Christian Church, which for centuries dominated the Old World in its theocratic ways and even considered theories of progressive scientists such as Galileo Galilei (who, at the time, challenged the Church teaching that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe) to be heretical, has come a long way: in recent years, Vatican astronomer Fr. Gabriel Funes SJ stated that intelligent life forms created by God could exist in space. Even with such expectant comments from one of the world’s largest religions, many moral issues are surely associated with any eventual discovery of life beyond Earth and which might require reshuffling in current schools of thought limited by Kant’s deontological ethics. What rights would extraterrestrial beings have should these not possess any compatible linguistic capabilities through which they might communicate with us?

The original question cannot be fully explored with the limitations of this short essay but I can confidently draw one definite conclusion: rather than devote our efforts, financial and intellectual, in the hope of finding life on other planets, us humans ought to focus on safeguarding life on our planet: protecting the Earth’s finite resources and ensuring a better quality of life for ourselves and future generations. In failing to do so, we might be forced to emigrate to some other planet, be it fit for us or not, and optimistically happily cohabit with whatever life-form we find there!