Blues for a Red Planet

Blues For a Red Planet

Many years ago, so the story goes, a celebrated newspaper publisher sent a telegram to a noted astronomer: Were collect immediately five hundred words on whether there is life on Mars. The astronomer dutifully replied: Nobody knows, nobody knows, nobody knows… 250 times. But despite this confession of ignorance, asserted with dogged persistence by an expert, no one paid and heed, and from that time to this, we hear authoritative pronouncements by those who think they have deduced life on Mars, and by those who think they have excluded it.

Some people very much want there to be life on Mars; others very much want there to be no life on Mars. There have been excesses in both camps. These strong passions have somewhat frayed the tolerance for ambiguity that is essential to science. There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time. Some scientists have believed that Mars in inhabited on what has later proved to be the flimsiest evidence. Others have concluded the planet is lifeless because a preliminary search for a particular manifestation of life has been unsuccessful or ambiguous. The blues have been played more than once for the red planet.

In the orchards of the gods, he watches the canals (Enuma Elish, Sumer, c. 2500 B.C.) Image: © Megan Jorgensen

A man that is of Copernicus’ Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlightn’d by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy… that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours… But we were always apt to conclude, that ‘twas inn vain to enquire after what Nature had been pleased to do there, seeing there was no likelihood of ever coming to an end of the Enquiry… but a while ago, thinking somewhat seriously on this matter (not that I count myself quicker sighted than those great men of the past, but that I had the happiness to live after most of them, me thoughts the Enquiry was no so impracticable nor the way so stopt up with difficulties, but that there was very good room left for probable Conectures.

(Christiaan Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c. 1690).