Posthuman Blues

I've received a lot of email about JPL's big Mars press conference. People are getting excited. In Space.com's words, "something wonderful" will likely be revealed. Many expect JPL to come clean regarding some of the curiously fossil-like formations seen under the Opportunity rover's microscope. Others expect -- at the least -- confirmation of liquid water.

I'm skeptical. Public interest in the Mars rovers has been steadily waning since Spirit landed in early January. JPL direly needs one of its patented staged "news" conferences to ensure that the rovers aren't totally forgotten. As I've written in Meta Research Bulletin and elsewhere, acknowledging a life-friendly Martian environment is academic suicide for JPL geologists, whose continued research hinges on Mars being barren and lifeless.

So I expect the conference to offer the same speculations JPL has been tirelessly masticating since the Viking missions. Specifically, the possibility of water in Mars' remote geological past. Or maybe -- if we're lucky -- the possibility of water in Mars' relatively recent past. Of course, "recent" will mean something like ten million years ago, but we'll still be expected to gape in amazement at the sheer wonder of it all.





Reality, however, appears to defy JPL's arid rhetoric. Strong evidence suggests liquid water on Mars right now. Will JPL dare admit it? Consider what's at stake. Conceding that Mars has the chemistry necessary for life is tantamount to an open invitation for microbiologists to join JPL's zealously guarded ranks. For scientists supposedly enamored of "searching for life" on the Red Planet, the JPL team has always been careful to exclude the life sciences from its post-Viking Mars ventures.

Neither of the MER rovers has any life-detection instrumentation whatsoever. Plans for future probes also carefully exclude instruments with the potential to tell us anything conclusive regarding the prospect of life. For far too long, Mars science has been the stuff of lofty peer-reviewed journals and endless debate. In this light, conclusive findings are the last thing JPL wants; best to keep Mars exploration enigmatic and sketchy so the academic press can continue to spew forth its never-ending post-hoc scenarios. After all, there's grant money on the line, careers to maintain. And so biologists -- the very people equipped to lead a "search for life" on another world -- are kept at the gates like so many annoying trespassers, forced to grapple with JPL's predigested geological musings.

There's an apt saying that sums up JPL's myopia: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like nails." So it is with Mars. When all you have is a rock abrasion tool and a proton spectrometer, everything looks like . . . rocks.