Mars Sample Return 5
A speculative tale based on the history of the Viking Lander experiments and recent NASA plans
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading! In today’s chapter of Mars Sample Return, Joan seeks support from an eyewitness to the battles over whether life was discovered on the Red Planet.
Jacob McCartney opened the door to his one-story duplex, blinking in the light of the low-angled sun. His gray hair grew sparsely around a bald crown and his horn-rimmed glasses made Joan think of an owl. He wore a light blue button-down shirt and tan slacks, slippers instead of loafers.
“You must be Ms. Lee,” he said with a smile that made Joan believe he really was glad to see her. “Please, come in.”
“Call me Joan. Thanks for seeing me, Mr. McCartney.”
“Please, call me Jake. Here, let me just turn this off.” He went into the living room next to the entryway and turned off the TV, which had been playing a nature documentary. So McCartney was old-school — no voice commands, and he obviously cared about nature.
“It helps pass the time,” he said with a note of apology. “I used to watch PBS News Hour, back before they killed public media. Then it was CNN, before it became just another de facto mouthpiece for the Family. At least they left us David Attenborough. Can I get you coffee? Tea? Soda? I’m afraid I don’t have any of these fancy waters you kids drink.” He seemed so eager to get her something, Joan couldn’t decline.
“Tea would be great!” She hadn’t meant to sound so eager, but Jake seemed as keen to wait on her.
“Please, sit,” he said, gesturing at the sofa as he headed to the back of the apartment.
The living room and adjoining dining room were overfilled, not to say packed, with furniture and knick knacks, the signs of a couple who could have culled more when they downsized. But everything was well cared for, clean and dusted, if crowded. On a shelf were family photos, one of a much younger Jake and a woman who must have been Mrs. McCartney, another of the McCartneys and two teenage girls.
“You have a lovely family,” Joan said, nodding at the photos as Jake returned with the tea on a tray.
“Ah,” he paused, tray in hand, looking at the photos. “My Ellen passed, what?...” He got an abstracted look for a moment. “Yes, nearly five years ago now, this coming January. But my daughters take good care of me. Christina sends a girl around every week, and Stella keeps my fridge full of casseroles.”
Joan smiled at the name as Jake set the tea down in front of her. “Stella for star, or Stella for Paul’s daughter?”
“Both!” Jake said with a twinkle in his eye.
“What do they do?”
“Stella is married to an engineer, and Christina is a consultant. I don’t really understand what that is. Somehow she got in good with the Family, despite her father being a Deep-Stater.”
“Were you let go during the purges?”
“No, I’d retired a few years before, thank God. I’ve always wondered what it’s like at NASA these days.” His hopeful look made clear that he’d meant it as a question.
“I can’t really compare, since I’ve been there less than a year.”
“It’s all Mars, Mars, Mars now, though, right?”
“That’s true.”
“There’s so much more we have to know about! Venus, the moons of Jupiter. Other star systems and galaxies. We used to study it all.” He shook his head and took a sip of his tea. “And your specialty is?”
“Spectrography of exoplanets, focused on bio-signatures.”
“Not much call for that these days, is there?”
“The James Webb keeps chugging along. We get new data every day. I’m just glad I’m not a cosmologist. They keep having to reassess everything.”
They spent a while going over the latest advances in spectroscopy and the recent thinking on biosignatures.
Jake set down his empty tea cup. “But you wanted to talk about Mars today, right?”
“That’s right…” Joan explained her doubts about the original Viking experiments and the consensus of “no current life” on Mars.
When she finished, Jake regarded her with a wry smile. “Gil, Gil… what a rebel! Although, you’d hardly have known it from his conservative exterior.”
“Did you know him well?”
“Not at the time, no. I was only an intern in the Viking years. But I was around later when he was trying to convince HQ to support sending his experiment on that Russian mission. I knew him to say hello to. But the talk after he left the building! He’d always been an outsider, never employed at headquarters or one of the centers around the country. Not even an academic post. That had to’ve hurt his cause. But he’d never let it go. Finally, when Dan Goldin came in, he was shut out almost entirely. And the articles he kept publishing didn’t help.”
Joan set down her tea, long cold now. “So? Do you think he was right?”
Jake’s wry smile grew wider. “Let me ask you a question instead. Are you ready to touch the third rail of NASA politics?”
“Is it really that bad?”
Jake nodded. “I’m not saying it’s any sort of conspiracy. There’s just a conservative institutional bias against finding life anywhere other than Earth. Any slightly plausible non-biological explanation always takes precedence over the biological ones. That’s what Sagan meant when he said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but the agency takes his old saw to the extreme. For any one phenomenon, a given non-biological explanation might be correct. But when you look at all the instances where this has happened, you begin to recognize a pattern, from Viking with the Mars bacteria, to the Martian meteorites in the ‘90s, to Oumuamua and the sudden invention of ‘dark comets,’ to biosignatures on Venus and exoplanets — every time an exobiologist claims to have discovered life, they’re smacked down with some non-life explanation, no matter how flimsy.”
“But that’s the pattern we’d expect to see if life doesn’t exist elsewhere.”
“True, but then you’d expect the evidence for a lack of life to be more conclusive, rather than all these near misses.”
“So? What do you believe about life on Mars?”
“As a scientist, I have to say the jury is still out. We should have kept looking for more evidence, but we didn’t. It’s hard to find extraordinary evidence if you’re not looking for it. Now, in my heart of hearts…” He paused to consider his next words. “Before the Viking mission, the leaders of its biology team concluded that no life existed in Antarctica. But they were wrong, as later research showed. So why would we trust them when they concluded there’s no life on Mars? Meanwhile, Gil’s experiment accurately identified bacteria in Antarctica. Is it such a stretch to think his experiment also worked on another planet?”
“You think it’s really that simple?”
“Sometimes, Occam’s Razor is the best tool we have.”
On the way home, buoyed by Jake’s certainty, Joan opened her little-used social media app, Blastr. She composed a quick message without thinking too much about it.
Exobiologist here. Is it possible we actually discovered life on Mars way back in 1976?
Now we’re going to bring soil from Mars back to Earth. Is that safe? I don’t think so! What do you think?
Her finger hovered over the Share button, but then she thought better of it. Shouldn’t she take her concerns to someone at NASA? She was no rebel. She closed the message, saving it in drafts.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, please consider hitting that like button, sharing it with your friends, or even subscribing or upgrading your subscription. And please leave a comment with your thoughts.
Mars Sample Return will be back in two weeks with Chapter 6.
Next week, we’ll take a listen to another tune in my Protest Songs series, this time “Workers’ Song” as performed by Dick Gaughan.
Good choice, Joan. Don’t post it to social media!