Little green quests

Little green quests

Are there little green men patrolling the evidently barren landscapes of the Red Planet? In his hugely speculative yet information loaded book The Mars Mystery, Graham Hancock recollects a telling anecdote. A newspaper editor once telegraphed an astronomer: "Wire one hundred words collect. Is there life on Mars?" Too tremulous to disobey the command, the astronomer sent in his thesis, "nobody knows" repeated fifty times.

In those two words he just about summed up the limits of human knowledge about the social scene on earth's favourite planet. Till now. Three years ago NASA's Mars Pathfinder completed an avidly tracked 119-million-mile journey and sent back three-dimensional shots of the planet's rocky vistas. If the first instinct for most of us then was to detect green creatures waving their smirky hellos, scientists raised hopes about their invisible presence. They pointed to windblown dunes and rock forms captured by the Pathfinder to hypothesise the existence of water in the past. The possibilities were endless, but it was emphasised repeatedly that this was merely a hypothesis.

Now, however, comes a dramatic announcement from NASA. Two astronomers claim that they have found evidence that water flows on the surface of Mars. This is breathtaking for two reasons. Mars, as Elton John sang in the 1970s, is "cold as hell". With temperatures normally in the region of minus 27 degrees C, with some regions braving minus 137 degrees C, any water present would rationally have to be in the form of ice or gas. But these NASA scientists are claiming convincing proof of liquid water. This naturally leads to the second reason for the excitement. Water, it is believed, is essential for the existence of life.

Thus, the immediate logic: where there is water, there must be life. This is, of course, reason enough to plan ever-more ambitious missions to Mars. Therein lies a niggling query. NASA has come under immense pressure to cut back its plans of despatching a mission to Mars every 26 months after two recent plans went expensively awry. Is it a case of garnering public support for the requisite funds?

These may be administrative questions, but they solicit no support from those who have faith in the inexorable march of science and technology. For them, missions to Mars are critical in answering fundamental questions. The most intriguing of these is: is life on earth, in fact, imported from Mars? Could it be, some scientists have been asking for some years now, that it came on a meteorite from Mars? Hancock notes that meteorite ALH84001, which probably broke away from the surface of Mars 15 millions ago, has "possible microscopic fossils of bacteria-like organisms that may have lived on Mars more than 3.6 billion years ago".

And so, with plans afoot to send earthlings to Mars to scour for possible cousins, NASA has decided that sending food along will be too expensive. It has accordingly zeroed in on 15 crops astronauts will grow on Mars in a conditioned environment.The possibility of liquid water will no doubt give a fresh lease of life to these plans. Bon appetit to them!