Voices
technology-wise, and wise-wise.
By 1900, astronomer Percival
Lowell was energetically shopping the idea that canals laced
the martian surface, the handiwork of aliens desperate to irrigate a dry world.
However, sophisticated inhabitants fell out of favor (with
scientists, if not with filmmakers) once spacecraft revealed the
landscapes of Mars to be desiccated deserts, efficiently sterilized by deadly ultraviolet light
from the Sun. The surface was
inhospitable, to put it gently.
Nonetheless, it was still possible
that microbial Martians were
living a few hundred feet underground, where watery aquifers
could shelter life happy to do its
thing in the dark.
Consequently, expert opinion
shifted. Our best chance for finding Martians was not to sit behind a small telescope in Flagstaff,
Ariz., as Lowell did, but to send
drilling apparatus to Mars that
could suck muck from far beneath
the surface and examine it microscopically. That’s a tough task, of
course. It hasn’t been done — or
even planned in detail.
Mars still remains the astrobiology community’s number
SETH
SHOSTAK
HUFFINGTON
12.22.13
one choice for “nearest rock
with life,” but there are many
researchers who argue that the
moons of Jupiter are better bets.
In particular, Europa, Ganymede
and Callisto are all thought to
hide vast oceans of liquid water
beneath their icy, outer skins.
Europa is the most promising
case, and has the thinnest skin.
The best known approach to
examining this moon’s watery
No, this is not about
hairless aliens that have come
to Earth in saucer-shaped
craft, but less sophisticated
life just next door.”
habitat envisions a robotic probe
that would melt a hole through
10 miles of granite-hard ice,
and lower some sensors to look
around. Again, not yet on the
drawing boards.
But either way, our favored approach to finding biology beyond
Earth involved drilling down deep
— either through rock or ice.
However, discoveries bandied
about at the American Geophysical Union meeting held earlier
this month in San Francisco have