Posthuman Blues

Meme Therapy asks: "Do you think it likely that the first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be made by a rover?"





Likely? No. Possible -- yes -- but only if we redefine the role of rovers in unmanned space exploration.

Despite repeated landings (and attempted landings) on Mars, the only craft that contained the equipment needed to properly test for life -- Britain's Beagle 2 -- wasn't a rover. Alarmingly, future rover designs from JPL exclude direct life-detection capability, despite NASA's mantric insistence that its Mars exploration program is the "search for life."

More exotic "nanoprobes" slated for hypothetical future expeditions are fun, conceptually, but they also beg the question: Won't we be there by then?

I think extraterrestrial life will probably be discovered by human explorers -- if not on Mars then almost certainly among the moons of the outer solar system. We could perhaps find it sooner by using a properly equipped rover, but the scientists using rovers for Mars research are geologists with little academic interest in the prospect of life; this is debilitating and needs to be addressed. The search for life demands the inclusion of new and seemingly novel disciplines, from botany to archaeology.