Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism and to access all of our posts.
I’ll do another post about the Kirk shooting later this week. In today’s post I wanted to talk about something that has me excited, and which frankly is a welcome distraction: aliens!
Teeny, tiny, probably extinct aliens. But aliens nonetheless.
A few days ago, NASA announced that the Perseverance rover has collected rocks which appear to contain minerals which on Earth are produced by living organisms as a byproduct of consuming organic matter. This means that billions of years ago, when the area that the rover is traversing was a river delta, ancient Martian microbes may have pooped these minerals out.
The implications of this finding would be momentous. If there was once microbial life on Mars, then logically it can have come from one of two places – the same place as life on Earth, or somewhere else. If life on the two planets came from the same place, that suggests it was transferred between them at some point, perhaps by an asteroid. If it developed independently, then it might represent a completely different branch of the tree of life – and studying it could have momentous consequences for understanding ourselves.
And there’s more. If life did develop on Earth and Mars independently, then that suggests that life develops relatively easily. It occurring on two planets in the same solar system suggests either that there’s something really weird about that system, or that the galaxy ought to be teeming with aliens.
That leads to the question famously posed by Enrico Fermi: Where is everybody? The standard answer is to posit that even though life may arise fairly easily, there is some sort of cosmic “great filter” which leads it to go extinct before it develops sufficiently high levels of technology to make itself known to us. Possible great filters include the use of nuclear weapons or gamma ray bursts from stars - although if you ask me, the true answer is probably the development of social media.
Having definitive proof that life had once existed on Mars, even perhaps growing to understand it (“to be taught, if fortunate”, as the audio recording on the Voyager probe says), would give us tremendous insight into these cosmic questions.
Unfortunately - and you knew this couldn’t all be good news - the Trump administration may be in the process of destroying our ability to get that insight.
In order to learn more about these rocks, scientists need to return them to Earth. NASA had a mission in its early stages called the Mars Sample Return designed to do just that. But last year it was put on hold amid spiralling costs. Then, in its budget proposal for this year, the Trump regime eliminated the mission entirely.
Unsurprisingly given its general war on data and research, NASA under Trump has downgraded its science mission in order to focus on putting Americans on the Moon and Mars. That, undeniably, would be pretty cool - but it’s also arguable whether it’s the best use of NASA’s dollar right now, given the tremendous potential for further robotic exploration of the solar system.
At a press conference in which he discussed the rock finding, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy - who is moonlighting as chief of NASA - sounded non-committal when asked whether and how the rocks might be retrieved. That leaves the sample, and the human race, in limbo, with potentially the greatest scientific discovery in human history accessible but languishing for want of the political will to go get it.
And it’s not only on Mars that Trump’s NASA team seems happy to let big questions go unanswered. There’s also an ongoing dispute in scientific circles about whether the clouds of Venus might host life. A few years ago, a team found large quantities of a gas, phosphine, whose presence seems hard to explain as the product of anything other than bacteria. The finding has been attacked, and then the original team have struck back.
There’s no way to known without going, and NASA has two missions - DAVINCI and VERITAS - which plan to do just that. Unfortunately, Trump wants to axe those missions too.
Hopefully, the Mars rock finding might cause the Trump people to rethink their priorities, or at least make Congress try to force them to. Another prod might come from the fact that China is already planning its own rock sample retrieval mission for the late 2020s. But there’s a strong chance that Trump’s emphasis on big, flashy ideas like putting American boots on Mars crowds out more useful science.
It would be a momentous mistake, and a sign of humanity’s deep dysfunction, not to pursue this opportunity to know the universe and ourselves better.
Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism and to access all of our posts.
More from America Explained:
Going to the Moon isn't exciting anymore
Manned missions to Moon don't generate the excitement they once did. That's because the real action is much further away.
In general USA isn’t very interested in getting to know the other… It wants to impose its values. At this point in time very conservative christianity-derived values. Dear marsians, be aware you have to choose blue or red, male or female. No exceptions, no excuses!