No talk about Mars is complete unless you begin with Giovanni Schiaparelli and his canali. It has become almost a cliché in the field of exobiology, at least in terms of Mars, that ancient history, complete with Percival Lowell’s maps, should be trotted out one last time.
The talk I saw today did more than that however. Rather cleverly, Dr. Ed Cloutis put together a narrative of the driving forces of Mars exploration. He spoke about the early conjectures about Martian life, which he referred to as a drug inspired fantasy, and then went into the gritty details of the various missions from Mariner and Viking 1 and 2 onwards, outlining how each one built upon the knowledge gained from the last and how each made a contribution to the field. His talk was complete with photos and lists of instruments on board each of the missions, and the narrative lines he drew were coherent and believable.
What struck me most profoundly, however, was how little we know, despite decades of research. Rover after rover, orbiter after orbiter, and we have a list of chemical signatures and values associated with temperature and humidity. I am reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars in which the princess explains the origin of her knowledge about Earth, and John Carter is
shocked to learn the rather mundane reason: “Why, every school boy on Barsoom knows the geography, and much concerning the fauna and flora, as well as the history of your planet fully as well as of his own. Can we not see everything which takes place upon Earth, as you call it; is it not hanging there in the heavens in plain sight?”
Mars is also in plain sight for us, albeit some distance away. Robert Zubrin has campaigned for ways to bring it closer with his Mars Direct plan, and the Mars One team plan to begin a televised colony in 2025. it is a testament to the various space agencies around the world that we know as much as we do, and it is a testament to our own intransigence that we know so little.
