Posthuman Blues

A last-minute addition to the Mars book. (You read it here first!)

Claims of life on Mars are given further weight by the presence of monster-sized "black spiders" spreading over the planet's surface. Intrigued by the tentacular features, often seen bunched together like nerve ganglia or trees in a macabre forest, Mars enthusiast Greg Orme began a careful study of the many enticing features, amassing dozens of examples on his website. Intrigued, Arthur C. Clarke cited the spidery outcroppings as possible smoking-gun evidence of life, and acted as consultant when Orme co-authored a paper on the "spiders" for Mark Carlotto's online journal "New Frontiers in Science."

Whatever the spiders are, they appear to have no earthly counterpart, raising the possibility of bizarre, uniquely Martian geology. As Orme notes, the spiders look overwhelmingly like living things. But looks can be deceiving, especially in black-and-white orbital photos. While most skeptics have been curiously silent on the subject, some have chosen to attack the messenger by insinuating that Clarke, famous for his prescient scientific predictions (including plantlife on Mars), is simply musing a bit too loudly in his old age.

Along with the "banyan trees" advocated by Clarke, the spiders challenge conventional models of both Mars and life itself. If the spiders are enormous, ground-hugging trees, then exobiology must allow for relatively complex organisms on the Red Planet, drawing official science one grudging step closer to the prospect that Mars was habitable in the not-too-distant past. Such thinking, heretical by JPL's standards, may loom on our horizon as NASA concocts new instruments to send to Mars to test for subsurface water.

Eventually, the question of Martian plantlife must be faced squarely. If the spiders are alive, how do they manage? The tangled "legs" responsible for their nickname (offered by NASA itself in evident befuddlement) seem to snake directly into the surface. Perhaps the spiders have adapted to the Martian cold by producing an enzyme that lets them thaw permafrost into life-sustaining water. On the other hand, Martian biochemistry may mock terrestrial analogy. It would be marvelous discovery if Martian organisms avoided conventional photosynthesis altogether; we would be confronting truly alien extraterrestrial life. Given the biotech revolution, a discovery of this sort may even have practical benefits for humanity.

Studying such specimens would ultimately force us to reconsider the prevalence of life in the galaxy and beyond. The spiders, if they are indeed organisms, may come to remind us that our preconceptions of what life can and cannot be are woefully narrow.