The Case for Mars Read Online Free PDF

geologic evidence indicates that this warm and wet period of Mars’ history lasted through the first billion years of its existence as a planet, a period considerably longer than it took life to appear on Earth. Current theories of life hold that the evolution of life from nonliving matter is a lawful, natural process occurring with high probability whenever and wherever conditions are favorable. If this is true, if the theories are indeed correct, then chances are life should have evolved on Mars. It may still lurk somewhere on the planet, or it may be extinct. Either way, the discovery of Martian life, living or fossilized, would virtually prove that life abounds in the universe, and that the billions of stars scintillating in a clear, dark night sky mark the home solar systems of living worlds too numerous to count, harboring species and civilizations too diverse to catalogue. On the other hand, if we find that Mars never produced any life, despite its once clement climate, it would mean that the evolution of life is a process dependent upon freak chance. We could be virtually alone in the universe.
    Given the importance of the question, the search for life past or present will be intensive, for there are manylanerent places to look. There are dry riverbeds and dry lake beds that may have been the last redoubts of the retreating Martian biosphere, and thus promising places to look for fossils. Ice sheets covering the planet’s poles may hold well-preserved frozen remains of actual organisms, if there were any. There is a high probability that subsurface ground water, geologically heated, may exist on Mars. In such environments living organisms may yet survive. What a find such organisms would be, for they are sure to be very different from anything that has evolved on Earth. In studying them, we would discover what is incidental to Earth life, and what is fundamental to the very nature of life itself. The results could lead to breakthroughs in medicine, genetic engineering, and all the biological and biochemical sciences.
    The search for life and resources will necessarily involve a bit more than ambling a few meters along the Martian landscape and drilling a hole or two. The first explorers to Mars will have to range across the Martian landscape, beyond the horizon of their small base. The pressurized ground rover, which provides a shirtsleeve environment for astronauts, will allow the astronauts to explore far and wide on week-long sorties from their base. The rover burns methane/oxygen fuel, the same as the ERV. Ten percent of the stockpile of the methane/oxygen fuel produced by the ERV chemical plant will be allocated to support ground exploration. With this much fuel to run their car, the astronauts will be able to explore a vast area around their base, racking up over 24,000 kilometers on the vehicle odometer before the end of the first mission. As the rover crew travels, they will leave behind them small remote-controlled robots which will allow the base crew, and those of us on Earth, to continue to explore a multitude of sites via television.
    The enormous amount of exploring the astronauts will undertake will necessarily result in a staggering amount of information, all of it new, undoubtedly unique and certainly more than any one crew member could digest. Each astronaut will confer regularly with panels of the world’s top experts in his or her assigned fields, creating a massive flow of information between Earth and Mars. Of course, crew members will also send and receive personal messages, but because there is a time lag in the transmission of radio waves between Mars and Earth, they will have to put up with delays of up to forty minutes before they get their answer. That will be troublesome for people accustomed to telephone conversations, but no problem at all for those who still know how to write a decent letter.
    SEPTEMBER 2009
     
    At the end of a year and a half on the Martian surface, the astronauts