Lonely Planets

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by David Grinspoon


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  Hunten had a scary reputation but he is one of the smartest guys

  there is, and I always found it rewarding to get his scientific advice

  when my ego could stand it. After a few moments of silent prayer in the

  hallway, I knocked on his door and said, “I have something I’d like to

  get your comments on, but I’m worried you might think it’s a little

  flaky.” He glanced at the Grinspoon and Sagan abstract, cleared his

  throat menacingly, and grunted, “Well, considering who the two

  authors are, I wouldn’t doubt it,” without cracking a smile. I suppose I

  set myself up for that. Though I temporarily felt two inches shorter, as

  usual Hunten followed the sarcasm with a thoughtful critique that

  helped me improve the work. It ended up expanding into a chapter of

  my Ph.D. thesis.

  My thesis, completed in 1989, touched on exobiology in several

  places. Half of it was about how terrestrial planets get their oceans, and

  the other half was on the climate of the early Earth. In my flowery

  introduction, I related my research to the habitability of planets and the

  search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In the rest of the thesis I stuck to

  the “serious” scientific problems at hand. I did, after all, wish to gradu-

  ate. As I reread my dissertation now, it looks like a work of astrobiol-

  ogy, only we didn’t call it that back then. Times have changed.

  Ultimately, the public attention gained for planetary exploration

  helped offset the perceived drawbacks and risks of exobiology.

  Scientists took note of Sagan’s clear success in helping maintain official

  backing for our planetary missions by tapping into the public’s sense of

  wonder. Although it is hard to avoid some sarcasm when one of your

  own starts showing up as a regular guest on Johnny Carson’s show,

  alongside Tony Bennett and the dancing ferrets, most people in the field

  came to appreciate the role that Carl had played in relating planetary

  exploration to the masses.

  Exobiology is over forty years old now. It was born at the same time

  as planetology, and though we have sometimes tried to ignore it, it has

  been here all along. The ideas promoted by Sagan throughout his career

  are just now, seven years after his death, being embraced by many at

  NASA headquarters and in the planetary science community as the cen-

  tral themes motivating our solar system exploration strategy.

  Astrobiology

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  It will be especially interesting to see whether it is

  astronomy that absorbs biology, or the other way

  Image unavailable for

  around.

  electronic edition

  —FRED HOYLE

  Image unavailable for

  Nothing takes the past away like the future.

  electronic edition

  —MADONNA,

  “NOTHING REALLY MATTERS”

  S A Y Y O U W A N T A R E V O L U T I O N

  True story: During the First Astrobiology Science Conference at

  NASA’s Ames Research Center in April 2000, President Clinton was, by

  coincidence, landing at the adjacent Moffett Field Air Base, where Air

  Force One parks when the president comes to the San Francisco area.

  In a scene right out of The X-Files, one of his Secret Service men, who

  had stopped a suspicious-looking scientist, was heard to shout anx-

  iously into his walkie-talkie, “What the HELL is astrobiology!?”

  It’s a good question. Popular books and magazines announce it as a

  new scientific revolution. In the introductory chapter of Rare Earth,

  entitled “The Astrobiology Revolution and the Rare Earth Hypoth-

  esis,” we read, “A whole new science is emerging: astrobiology, whose

  central focus is the condition of life in the Universe. . . . We are wit-

  nesses to a scientific revolution. . . . It is very much like the early 1950s, when DNA was discovered, or the 1960s, when the concept of plate

  tectonics and continental drift was defined.”

  But where is the revolution, and will it be televised? What is the new

  world-melting idea? We think of Copernicus banishing Earth to the

  margins of space, Darwin linking all past and present life together,

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  Einstein warping light and time, Bohr dissolving solid matter at its

  smallest into shadowy waves of quantum probability. These ideas

  destroyed our notions of space, time, matter, and life. They left us per-

  manently changed. What about the “astrobiology revolution”? What’s

  the big idea? That other planets may be inhabited? That is certainly a

  pretty rad thought, but we’ve been kicking it around for at least twenty

  generations.

  Well, then, is all this “revolution” talk based on the premise that we

  are perched on the edge of a devastating new discovery that will rock

  our universe? Thirty years ago, Carl Sagan wrote in The Cosmic

  Connection that the study of extraterrestrial life had “finally come of

  age.” The preface to David Darling’s 2000 book, Life Everywhere: The

  Maverick Science of Astrobiology, stated, “Poised on the brink of a

  momentous breakthrough that will change forever how humankind

  thinks about itself and the universe around it, astrobiology is quickly

  coming of age.” Which causes me to wonder: Just how long can we

  stay poised on a brink? We don’t know if we’re any closer to finding

  life now than when Viking was on its way to Mars in the 1970s. When

  we do make the big discovery, bag an ET, which could be tomorrow

  afternoon in time for the evening news, or two centuries from now*—

  that will be the start of the real revolution.

  If astrobiology is not a revolution, then what is it? Perhaps a new dis-

  cipline, a novel field of research. Try telling that to anyone who was

  already pursuing exobiology before the new hubbub began in the late

  1990s. Some recent descriptions of astrobiology tend to ignore exobiol-

  ogy’s checkered history and present it as a virgin birth, sprung immacu-

  lately into the world. In truth it is more of a resurrection. Is that all it

  is? Have we just dusted off exobiology, given it a new name, and sent

  out press releases?

  No, it’s more than that. Astrobiology may not be, as advertised, a sci-

  entific revolution, but it is an important new movement—marking a

  shift in attitude about ET life. Exobiology had always survived on the

  *In general I say the sooner the better, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about a major discovery between now and the publication date of this book. . . . When Kubrick was working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, he actually tried to buy an insurance policy against the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence would be discovered before the film opened, rendering his work obsolete.

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  fringes of planetary society. It was fed scraps but made to sleep outside.

  Reborn as astrobiology, it has rather suddenly been invited inside the

  main house and embraced as the mascot of our space science enterprise,

  receiving official encouragement and generous funding in the bargain.

  In 1998 the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was started with an

&
nbsp; initial annual budget of $5 million. By 2002 this had increased to $15

  million (this does not include the much higher cost of spacecraft mis-

  sions). As NASA has funneled money into astrobiology, planetary sci-

  entists are discovering a latent interest in the astrobiological implica-

  tions of their research. Biologists, chemists, and earth scientists are

  joining in the feast. Nothing like a new watering hole to get all the jun-

  gle animals to pay attention, come together, and talk about life. For

  some, it was a chance to finally receive funding—and community

  approval—for research they had always wanted to do. For others it was

  a chance to branch out into an area they had never considered working

  in. Since the late 1990s, planetologists, biologists, and others have con-

  verged several times a year at large astrobiology conferences, and two

  new journals have started up, Astrobiology and the International

  Journal of Astrobiology. Now astrobiology is going worldwide. Centers

  affiliated with NASA’s institute have sprung up in Spain, France,

  Australia, the UK, and Japan. In May of 2001 the First European

  Workshop on Exo/Astrobiology (a title that hedges its bets) was held in

  Frascati, Italy.

  Increasingly as well, astrobiology has become the public face of

  NASA, in press releases, schools, TV documentaries, and museum

  exhibits—astrobiology is the new hook. Across a wide spectrum of

  activities, aliens are in at NASA, like never before.

  But, why now? The mid-1990s saw a convergence of several surprise

  breakthroughs. Each, by itself, would have generated sparks, but

  combined, they ignited a conflagration. These were, in order of impor-

  tance, (1) the discovery of possible fossils in the Martian meteorite

  ALH84001, (2) the discovery of the first planets outside our solar sys-

  tem, and (3) Galileo’s images confirming the likely presence of an ocean

  on Europa. When all these occurred within a two-year period, the

  excitement was cumulative. Something happened.

  What happened was that Dan Goldin, NASA’s administrator at the

  time, took heed of the lavish press coverage and the enthusiastic public

  reaction to these discoveries. Halfway through his nine-year tenure at

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  NASA (1992 to 2001), Goldin seemed to become convinced that exobi-

  ology, rechristened as astrobiology,* should largely define NASA’s mis-

  sion and its public image. We were given a green light to write press

  releases and funding proposals highlighting the question of alien life.

  This fanned a positive feedback loop between media, science, and

  government, all egging each other on. An astrobiology spin helped get

  their science in the papers. The new wave of public visibility pleased

  NASA administrators and made it easier for them to sell their programs

  to Congress. This translated into increased funding. Suddenly, astrobi-

  ology was not only hip but profitable. A renewed research focus, more

  headlines, and more funding all followed.

  It helped that, by the nineties, the second generation of planetologists

  was becoming well established in the field.† The insecurities about

  being taken seriously by other sciences, and the reluctance to be associ-

  ated with the search for alien life, were fading away. Also, since the

  time of Viking, planetary science (and science in general) had become

  much more media savvy. Scientists realized, especially after the Cold

  War fizzled, that they could not take public support for granted. No

  American planetary missions were launched for a decade between

  Pioneer Venus in 1978 and Magellan in 1989. Through the crucible of near extinction, planetary scientists became better adapted to the media

  age. In the nineties it became de rigueur to issue a press release anytime

  a paper was published that might possibly be seen as newsworthy.

  When “the Mars rock” was greeted with global headlines in 1996, it

  suddenly seemed that the only angle that mattered was the life angle.

  Stories about all areas of planetary science were being reported with an

  alien-life spin. Any result that could be cast in terms of the search for

  life had an excellent chance of making the news.

  Meanwhile, out at Jupiter, Galileo had recently entered orbit and had

  its first close encounters with Europa. The spacecraft, sharp-eyed but

  autistic, was slowly sending down a stream of new images that

  increased the circumstantial evidence for an underground ocean slosh-

  *Wes Huntress, the former NASA associate administrator for Space Sciences, apparently suggested this title for NASA’s renewed commitment to what had formerly been called exobiology.

  †It cracks me up to see my grad school contemporaries leading planetary missions, chair-ing important committees, and pontificating at meetings. They act like real scientists, but I am not fooled.

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  ing beneath Europa’s cracked icy face. Galileo scientists were encour-

  aged to talk about what this could mean for life there, in a way that

  would have been frowned upon seventeen years earlier during the

  Voyager encounters. Times had changed and attitudes had shifted.

  Planetary encounters in the late 1990s were much more strategically

  packaged for the public than they had been in the 1970s. The rocks at

  the Mars Pathfinder landing site, where the little Sojourner rover romped in July 1997, were given cute, media-friendly cartoon names

  like Scooby-Doo and Yogi. The rocks at the Viking lander sites had

  mostly just been assigned numbers.* The new rocks weren’t any cuter

  than the old ones, but a later generation of scientists, raised on car-

  toons, video games, MTV, and computers, was more tuned in to the

  rhythm and the value of catchy sound bites.

  At times we have gone overboard, conspiring with the media to exag-

  gerate or distort the significance of our results. It gives them easy head-

  lines and us an ego boost, visibility, and easier access to funding. For a

  while, it seemed that nearly every discovery of the Galileo mission,

  from magnetic fields to intriguing surface patterns on the moons, was

  somehow spun for the press with an extraterrestrial-life angle. I real-

  ized that this had gone too far a couple of years ago when I received an

  e-mail from my eleventh-grade English teacher, Martie Fiske.† An avid

  follower of science news, she was annoyed by the twentieth story she

  had read that year with the headline “Galileo Discovers New Clues to

  Possible Life in Europa!” Martie asked me, “Why do you people keep

  feeding us the same story over and over again?”

  Though it can be taken to questionable extremes, all in all it’s a wel-

  come change that scientists have become more aware of how their

  work relates to the concerns of John Q. Public. Newsworthy angles are

  now sought for results that might otherwise seem obscure. Sometimes

  the right spin can reveal a human-interest angle lurking in the most

  arcane research.

  The movement was encouraged by the (accurate) perception that

  new funding was available for old projects successfully recast as astro-

  biology. To some extent, success in
securing funding has gone to those

  *Actually, four rocks at the Viking 2 site were named Mr. Badger, Mr. Mole, Mr. Rat, and Mr. Toad after characters in The Wind in the Willows, but these never received the prime-time star billing that the Pathfinder cartoon-character rocks got twenty years later.

  †A teacher who changed my life by getting me to read the right books at the right time.

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  who could most eloquently describe, in astrobiological terms, whatever

  research they were already doing. This is not a bad exercise to have to

  go through—relating your work to the big picture. At any rate, it’s

  what we call good academic survival skills, and if you don’t have them,

  you’re probably doing something else.

  We’ve all done some of this repositioning. For over a decade, with

  funding from various NASA research programs, I’ve been making com-

  puter models simulating the evolution of the environments of terrestrial

  planets. These models can also be used to explore questions about the

  early habitability of local planets, as well as the habitability of Earth-

  like planets (still hypothetical, but not for long) around other stars.

  Recently I’ve received money from both NASA and the National

  Science Foundation to use my models in the service of astrobiology—

  something I used to mention only as an aside in my proposals.

  V I V A !

  Astrobiology may at times have been falsely hyped as a scientific revo-

  lution or a brand-new discipline, but it is a refreshing and encouraging

  development. A revolution really is going on—not a scientific revolu-

  tion, but a revolution in the culture of science, one that is healthy for science in a number of ways.

  First, the biocentric tilt of NASA allows us to come clean about our

  true reasons for wanting to explore and understand the cosmos.

  Questions about life in the universe have always been behind our

  exploration of space. We just haven’t always been free or willing to

  admit it. The rise of astrobiology as a highly visible backbone of

  NASA’s space exploration efforts represents a new alignment of our

  public priorities with our private dreams. Even when we explore desic-

  cated, sun-broiled Mercury or frigid and fragile little comets—places

  we don’t really expect to find life—we are searching for ourselves out

  there, trying to understand just how we’ve arrived on the cosmic scene.

 

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