The Hindu : The red planet beckons

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jun 06, 2003

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The red planet beckons

By C.V. Gopalakrishnan

Thiruvananthapuram June 5. The world would be looking forward to what the European Space Agency 's (ESA) unmanned Beagle 2 space probe will beam from Mars, on which it should hopefully be landing within the next six months.

But a great deal has been discovered about the red planet by scientists. The tasks assigned to Beagle 2 include on-the-spot verification of the same and the throwing of more light on whether life of the kind known or wholly different and unknown to us exists or had existed at any time in the past. (Incidentally, there is still no answer to recurring questions about life, wholly different in kind and incomprehensible to us would not have evolved elsewhere in the universe presumably because it is beyond the imagination of even the most brilliant minds on earth).

The breathtaking pace of advance in space science and technology within a decade could be seen from the incredible reduction in time from the several years which, it was thought, a flight to Mars would need to just six months for Beagle 2. The hazardous requirements of space flight to Mars spelt out earlier also necessitated and provided for a halt at the moon before it could be resumed.

We do not have all the information we might be looking for on the fuelling of Beagle 2 but it appears that the nuclear-powered rockets have brought the planets of the solar system almost next door.

A dead planet?

There have been no conclusive findings about existence of any form of life on Mars and the indications are that it may be a dead planet. But there may be surprises in store. If, as it has been found, the planet has poles which are ice-covered (suggesting the availability of water even in small quantities), the presence or evolution of life cannot be ruled out.

The discoveries so far made include the presence of some vegetation on the planet. "The seasonal colour changes," writes Arthur C. Clarke in his latest Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds, "recent spectroscopic evidence, give this a high degree of probability." The probability is that there is a struggle for existence — as Charles Darwin had stated in his Origin of Species with this difference that while on Earth the struggle was towards creation of higher forms of life, on Mars it might be towards its eventual extinction.

The logic of such a discovery would, of course, be that there should earlier have been higher forms of life on Mars millions of years earlier than they had evolved on Earth. "It is much more likely," Clarke writes, "that if Mars has ever produced intelligent life, we have missed it by geological ages."

With the evolution of life in any form in the different planets which have been in existence for several billion years being spaced out across many millions years, "the probability of culture flourishing on two of them at the same (like Mars and Earth) must be extremely small". The kind of vegetation on Mars, however, does suggest the possibility — and future space exploration would probably reveal it as a certainty — of the evolution of animal life very different from that on Earth.

They may have no lungs since there is no air to breathe. It is also possible that if whatever life had evolved on Mars millions of years earlier than on Earth and the planet is fast dying out, it might be because of its "animal" life being just parasitic, feeding on its vegetation.

The atmosphere of Mars is known to be very thin and is dangerously inadequate for humans space explorers to survive without oxygen masks.

Mars has two moons — Phobos and Deimos. Very little is known about how beautifully lit Mars should be with its two satellites. It is a pity that such magnificent nights of Mars should be in what is until known to be a lifeless planet.

Optical illusion

It must, however, be pointed out that there had been glittering visions of Mars being a fertile planet full of life with its "canals" "discovered" by the nineteenth century astronomer, Percival Lowell.

The "canals" were later found out to be a case of optical illusion, which persisted for well over a century, with teachers and school children getting excited about lives in other worlds out there.

The illusion, it is stated, could well have resulted from the largely mental picture built up by Lowell from the fleeting patterns he got from his telescope and of which Clarke has given an arresting description of such "Eidectic imagery".

"From 1965 to 1972," he writes, " Mars was a cosmic fossil like the Moon — no, not even a fossil, because it could never have known life. The depressing image of a cratered, desiccated wilderness was about as far removed from the Lowell-Burroughs fantasy as it was possible to get."

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