The ALCAIDE’S CAFE

Well, Spirit has landed, is fit as a fiddle, and as soon as NASA can get Rover out of its travel cage, it will get on with sniffing out the nature of the planet Mars, and the potential for life as we know it here on the watery blue marble, Earth.

I notice that a lot of folks have missed one of the finer points in the science of these two missions to Mars. The Fox News reporter, Trace Gallagher, epitomizes the problem. Starting right off with his Jan 5 reports he repeatedly explains, “Of course, if they can prove there once was water on the red planet, they are a long way towards proving their was life on Mars.” Wrong! That is totally wrong!

Unfortunately, he’s not too likely to be corrected. Most of the media, and most of the scientists involved in NASA’s endeavors, and in those sciences that should know the difference between what Gallagher and others are saying and the truth, don’t mind. It both inflates the apparent ability of the Mars missions (hence political popularity) and deflates the confidence and faith of the Christian and Jewish believers in a Creator God as put forth in the book of Genesis. Since most folks in the science camp, and in the media, are atheists and evolutionists, and think of Christians and Jews who are creationists as ignorant, behind the times, and political (hence economic) foes, it fits other agendas to just let the misunderstanding to continue. They like both the inflation and deflation!

So what’s the truth? Well, the simple fact of it is that, while water is probably a necessary condition for the support of life (certainly as we know it here on earth), water is far from a sufficient condition. Life is a heck of a lot more than water. It’s a heck of a lot more than organic compounds, or lipids, or even amino acids, even if suspended or collected in a watery environment. The simple fact is, there is nothing more complex, or structured, or “super” natural than life. A lot of scientists, from before the days of Darwin and Wallace have tried to demonstrate that life is not all that big a thing. In their time, they thought it could simply pop up out of mud and water. This past century, Urey Miller revived the idea thinking he could produce life by zapping the right combo of gasses and water and stuff with “lightening”. Though he never succeeded, he started a still-thriving run of “marsh-water chemists” still trying to prove the same idea, “life is inevitable” if the primal earthy soup is right, and should be expected nearly everywhere, given enough time.

Before you join their ranks, or fall for their spin, stop and reflect a moment. Sure, a watery solution of lipids or other organics can bead up or coalesce into water filled spheres. Sure, life is largely built upon amino acid architecture. But from everything we’ve seen here on earth, we know life is also an incredible amount of information encoded in DNA, and activated by almost mysterious processes including RNA and other information or action producing biochemical software. That is, all forms of life that we know of, even the absolute simplest single cell or viral packet, start with thousands of thousands of bits of intelligibly and precisely ordered and activated information/software. Your computer is simple compared to life. It takes a lot more than just getting a few chemicals, even organic chemicals, to coalesce or congeal by happenstance to produce life. Water just happens to be what life on earth needs for those organic software programs to perform, once the chemical hardware is assembled, just as electricity is what your computer requires for its software to perform once the wiring and silicone chips are assembled. Finding lakes on Mars would hardly be the holy grail of our 30 to 40 year program of searching Mars. Lakes would only be a good place, the bulls eye of a good target for our best hopes in a search for life as we know it from our limited earth-bound experience.

Now, that’s why scientists have allowed themselves (and their Rover) to become like bloodhounds on the trail of extraterrestrial water, but I think that they’ve erred rather grievously in letting that happen. Maybe its because that’s the easiest thing to do, look for life in forms that we can most easily recognize, but I think we should be putting a lot more effort into defining life in ways that we might recognize it in some other chemistry! Life need not be water, or carbon, or “organic chemistry” based. It could be silicone, or iron, or some other minerals, and utilizing the medium of some very different liquids. Even more, it needn’t even rely on liquid as the vehicle or source of motility/activity for living processes to take place. Life might just as easily be built upon electron or other atomic elements, and could be utilizing other motility mediums … such as quantum activity! What is the truly only necessary element for life is the information, the “DNA” and “RNA”, whether it be organic or sugar based or something else! Wouldn’t it be a shame if Mars were populated by all sorts of life that simply went on around our explorers, unperceived and ignored because it was more of an electronic field or built out of “non-organic” materials?

Next Post: The Search for ET: two threads in history
Posted January 9, 2004 03:30 PM