life on mars postmodernism essay

Year 2 Media

Postmodernism in The Bridge and Life on Mars

Media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent’ (hyper-reality) Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

postmodernism is characterised by repetition (intertextuality), Parody, Nostalgia

Postmodernism says that Creativity and orignal thought is gone

How far are ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘The Bridge’ post-modern texts?

Life on Mars Uses intertextuality and cultural code to create audience appeal through nostalgia- Coca-Cola, smoking inside, Old cars

• David Bowie- Soundtrack
• Parody of cop shows ‘ The Sweeney’ and ‘ The Professional’

Technical codes and Visual codes also help convey postmodernism: Mise-en-scene

hyper-reality is a mediated view of a world. Life on Mars is a reconstruction of the 70’s but it could deceive and influence our generation’s representation of the 70’s.

The Bridge: The world that ‘The Bridge’ creates is a hyper reality which gives people more representation of Denmark/Sweden – Could link to Steve Neale

• Links to other crime drama – Nordic Noir
• Saga has similarities to crime detective ‘Sherlock’ – high functioning sociopath

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Black Fox Literary Magazine

Blog Post , Book Review · May 31, 2018

Book Review by Lauren Sartor: “Life on Mars” by Tracy K. Smith

The poetry in Tracy K Smith’s book, Life on Mars , examines the limitedness of the human species. The poetry speculates on the smallness of humankind, the incapacity of human intellectuality, and the irrationality of human emotions. The language is accessible and creatively used, with strong use of alliteration and internal rhyme.

These poems use distance of time and space to question the importance of human existence. In “The Museum of Obsolescence,” human concepts of “Love” and “Disease” are installations in a futuristic museum.  In “The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” the narrator states “So much for us. So much for the flags we bored.” The message to the reader is humbling: human’s greatest preoccupations are ephemeral and of little ultimate consequence. Perhaps the best example is in the poem titled “The Universe is a House Party.” Hypothetical aliens visit with parental condescension an overenthusiastic universe. Below are the last three stanzas:

The universe is expanding. Look: postcards and panties, bottles with lipstick on the rim, How marvelous you’ve come! We won’t flinch At the pinprick mouths, the nubbin limbs. We’ll rise, Gracile, robust. Mi casa es su casa. Never more sincere. Seeing us, they’ll know exactly what we mean. Of course, it’s ours. If it’s anyone’s, it’s ours.

Throughout Life on Mars , the poems continually doubt the usefulness of human knowledge. Many of the poems contain rhetorical questions (e.g. “Does God love gold?;” “Time never stops, but does it end?;” “What lives beside us passing for air?;” “What happens when the body goes slack?;” etc.). These questions are unanswerable, yet the poems suggest that humans vainly seek the unknowable for the sake of solace. This is especially poignant if one views this book as a work of mourning for her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. Seen from this light, the vastness between the knowable and unknowable extends beyond the realm of science and into the realm of living and dead, daughter and father. Below are some stanzas from “The Speed of Belief.” It takes up the majority of the second section and is dedicated to the author’s father.

What heat burns without touch? And what does it become? What are they that move Through these room without even The encumbrance of shadows? If you are one of them, I praise The god of all gods, who is Nothing and nowhere, a law Immutable proof. And if you are bound By habit or will to be one of us Again, I pray you are what waits To break back into the world Through me.

The reliance on human emotion is equally futile. The narrator often views the emotional as naïve, destructive, and unprogressive. In “The Museum of Obsolescence” humans have “faulty eyes … telltale heat;” in “No-Fly Zone,” a woman fears what has already left; in “The Speed of Belief,” the narrator reflects that as a young girl she finished her father’s breakfast, completely unaware of the grief caused by her grandfather’s death. The poem “Challenger” best exemplifies this harmful irrationality of human emotion.

She got herself so wound up. I think She likes it. Like a wrung rag, or a wire Wrapped round itself into a spring. And the pressure, the brute strength It takes to hold things that way, to keep them From straightening out, is up to her To maintain. She’s like a kettle about to blow. All that steam, anxious to rise and go. I get tired watching it happen, the eyes Alive with their fury against the self, The words swelling in the chest, and then The voice racing into anyone’s face. She likes to hear it, her throat hoarse With nonsense and the story that must Get told again and again, no matter. Blast off! she likes to think, though What comes to mind at the moment Is earthly. A local wind. Chill and small.

The two polarities, the intellectual and the emotional, become functional toward the end of the book. Each start to occupy similar spaces. While the emotional occupies a bigger chunk of each poem, the intellectual is slipped in almost as a steering mechanism, a rational break in the emotional spaceship (if I may). In “Willed in Autumn” the narrator daydreams a pastoral life with her lover but “writes it down so it will stay true.” She also lets her lover go off alone because she knows that they are too sensitive to currently be reconciled. “Everything that Ever Was” ends with the stanza “Under the soil is a little tickle of knowledge / The great blind roots will tease through / And push eventually past.” Also, in these sections of the book, the narrator deals with more personal and immediate issues, such as writer’s block and her romantic relationships. Living becomes rational and the solutions attainable.

The vocabulary in Smith’s book is amazingly simple. This was perhaps a conscious move to balance the extraordinary subject matter with ordinary language. Much of the sound relies on internal rhyme and alliteration.  The use of both tightens the poem. While the alliteration is easily recognized, the internal rhyme can be harder to pinpoint. This is either due because a poem may use more nuanced rhyme or because many similar sounds are incorporated. Below is an example of the latter. It is from the poem “It & Co.”

Have gone looking for It everywhere: In Bibles and bandwidth, blooming Like a wound from the ocean floor. Still, It resists the matter of false vs. real. Unconvinced by our zeal, It is un- Appeasable. It is like some novels: Vast and unreadable.

In both senses of the word, Life on Mars is a fantastic read. The subject matter goes from grand to modest as the book reads on. Questions are constantly asked, and perspectives are challenged, but neither are resolved by the narrator. This is perhaps the real beauty of the book: the agency it demands from its reader.

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Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions

• First Online: 01 January 2022

Cite this chapter

• Jens Temmen 6  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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Focusing on three different life narratives and practices of Mars colonization—the NASA rover missions, the technoliberal campaign to settle the red planet by space entrepreneur Elon Musk, and the critical activist project “Planetary Personhood”—Jens Temmen analyzes how, in the context of climate change debates, human colonization of other planets has been reframed as inevitable and necessary to ensure the survival of humanity. Temmen’s contribution focuses on how these “astrofuturist” narratives negotiate the utopian vision of space colonization as a transformative posthuman experience of escape from the terrestrial limits placed on humanity, and it discusses whether life writing as a format allows for a thorough and critical posthuman inquiry of humanity’s anthropocentrism.

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The Universe Decentered: Transcultural Perspectives on Astrobiology and Big History

Missions and Explorers: “Amundsen” as a Key to Reading Alice Munro’s Other Stories

Astrofuturism

Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 36.

Ibid., 35, 37.

See Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 36, 40. See Kilgore, “Astrofuturism,” 1, quoted in Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 35.

Davenport, The Space Barons , 4, 123, 143–144.

See Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 37, 40. See Redmond, “The Whiteness of Cinematic,” 348.

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 9.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 2.

See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 20.

Similar to the idea of “greenwashing” products as environmental-friendly, the concept of “double red washing” refers to how the privatization of the space industry is promoted by Musk and others as the only way to achieve the colonization of the red planet, and to how both the privatized space industry and Mars colonization are depicted as progressive measures aiming for greater social justice (see Marx, “Elon Musk is Planning”).

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 43–44.

Opportunity’s sister rover “Spirit” had shut down in 2009 already.

See “‘My battery is low.’”

See Simon, “Opinion.”

See Butler, “Precariousness and Grievability.”

Butler analyzes how in times of war and crisis, the notion of a grievable death is a political issue of enormous significance. Focusing on 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq, Butler describes how public mourning can be used as a way of supporting the war effort and of constructing nationalist (non-)belonging, but also as a mode of dehumanization of the lives that are specifically constructed as ungrievable. Even though Butler’s work is deeply immersed in the specific context of warfare, her assumptions are valid for the way in which the rovers and their demise figure as a ledger for nationalistic sentiments of belonging and pride.

The playlist consists of the music that NASA staffers had sent to Opportunity along with its wake-up command after the storm had crippled him and includes songs such as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” “Staying Alive” by the BeeGees, as well as Wham!‘s “Wake Me up Before You Go-Go.”

Simon, “Opinion.”

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 19.

Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 19.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 5, 19, 34.

Braidotti, The Posthuman , 2.

Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 20.

See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 2.

The way that the rovers seem to break barriers between technology, human, and animal, make them comparable to other posthuman icons, such as the cloned sheep Dolly, which, according to Braidotti, is an entity “no longer an animal but not yet fully a machine,” 74. The rovers, no longer a machine but not yet fully human, seem to be on that same spectrum.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 6. See Markley, Dying Planet , 270.

Braidotti, The Posthuman , 43–44.

See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 7, 170–171.

Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 25.

Ibid., 171.

Ibid., 176.

Keeling, “Queer OS,” 157.

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 9, 124, 125–126. See Mbembe, Necropolitics .

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 1, 6. Atanasoski and Vora’s work focuses predominately on self-reproducing robots which are projected to be a vital part of the first steps to Martian colonization, but which have not yet been constructed or deployed (see ibid., 2). The way that NASA frames the current Mars rovers as links in human evolution, allows, I would argue, for a broadening of Atanasoski and Vora’s argument to apply here as well.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 18, 68.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 18. See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 31–32. A prominent and striking example is the influential essay by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, titled “The Significance of the Martian Frontier,” which advocates for Martian colonization through frontier discourses in general and by directly drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s infamous frontier thesis in particular, 13.

The concept of terra nullius is a core tenet of settler colonialism that relies on framing the Indigenous populations of newly “discovered” lands as less-than-human and therefore without claim to their own land (see Robertson, Conquest by Law ).

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 2.

See Temmen, “From HI-SEAS to Outer Space.”

See Saraf, “‘We’d Rather Eat Rocks.’”

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 68.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 6.

Even though space agencies around the globe rely (and have relied for a long time) on private industry contractors, space travel is not a privatized business, but regulated on a national and international level. Private businesses can partner with national agencies, but they cannot conduct space travel on their own. While Musk and others have become important players as contractors, their vision includes completely privatizing space travel, which would, in their perspective, break a detrimental nation-state monopoly on space travel.

Davenport, The Space Barons , 4.

Ibid., 4–5.

See Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth , 175–176.

Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 18.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 11.

Davenport, The Space Barons , 1–2.

See Davenport, The Space Barons , 2.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 1.

See Davenport, The Space Barons , 49–60, 117.

“When Slow Violence Sprints.”

Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth , 176.

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 5–6. See Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 221–222.

See Heise, Sense of Planet , 25. See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 16.

Nonhuman Nonsense, “Planetary Personhood.”

See New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office, “Te Urewera Act 2014.”

See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 14.

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Temmen, J. (2021). Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions. In: Batzke, I., Espinoza Garrido, L., Hess, L.M. (eds) Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_8

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The Universe in Verse: Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith Reads from “Life on Mars”

By maria popova.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the remarkable astronomers known as the Harvard Computers , women who did significant cosmological work long before they could vote — made a discovery that allowed astronomers to calculate the distance between Earth and faraway galaxies for the first time. Her data later became the foundation upon which Edwin Hubble formulated what is now known as Hubble’s Law — the first observational indication that the universe is expanding.

Half a century after the inception of Hubble’s Law, in the late 1970s, engineers began work on an astronomical apparatus more ambitious than any previous human attempt to observe the universe: the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in 1990.

One of those early engineers was the father of Pulitzer-winning poet Tracy K. Smith .

At The Universe in Verse , Smith read the final section of her long, beautiful poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” — a title borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — found in her sublime poetry collection Life on Mars ( public library ). The poem is Smith’s quest to bring lyrical and cinematic language to, as she herself frames it, “this real mystery, the universe that we belong to, that we’re at home in and yet such strangers of, in a way.” Please enjoy:

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5) When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white. He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks, His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Raegan years, When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find. His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died. We learned new words for things. The decade changed. The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time, The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is — So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

In a stroke of glorious serendipity, the background against which Smith read her poem at The Universe in Verse featured a crisp, stunning image of the Rosetta Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a generation after those first imperfect photographs — a feat of science and engineering that would have made her father proud, built, like all progress, on the toilsome trial and error that preceded it, by the pink, exhausted eyes that pushed past the failings.

Other highlights from The Universe in Verse include Amanda Palmer’s reading of Neil Gaiman’s feminist poem about science , astrophysicist Janna Levin’s reading of Adrienne Rich’s tribute to women in astronomy , Rosanne Cash’s reading of Rich’s homage to Marie Curie , playwright Sarah Jones’s chorus-of-humanity tribute to Jane Goodall , and poet Diane Ackerman’s ode to our search for extraterrestrial life .

— Published May 12, 2017 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/05/12/tracy-k-smith-life-on-mars/ —

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Post Modern Theory

Many Films and Television Programmes exhibit postmodern traits. Descriptions of the most significant Postmodern themes in Television and Films are below:

Pastiche - Means to combine, multiple elements. In postmodernist media this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can often reference pop culture as part of the narrative.

Spectacle – Television creates spectacle from time to time to grab attention and keep audiences coming back for more.

Faux TV – Mockumentaries, television shows about television shows and fake news.

Magical Realism – is where the magic, the supernatural or ultra advanced technologies are often presented in real world mundane settings.

Anti-Hero – Postmodern productions often blur the lines between good and evil, light and dark, for both characters and viewers.

Examples of Post Modernism in Television

Life on Mars – Set 25 years before production, homage to British 1970’s cop shows.

The Simpsons – US TV’s longest running sitcom, often uses popular culture references

The Jeremy Kyle Show – Sets up hapless/ uneducated guests to embarrass themselves in trashy situations and to fight each other.

Big Brother – Postmodern game show, mixes reality TV with dystopian novel 1984. Housemates, bitch, plot and scheme to win a cash prize.

The Office – Mockumentary sitcom parodying reality TV documentaries set in work places such as The Call Centre and The Airport

Modern Family – Mockumentary sitcom of a large extended family made up of stero-typical characters

Magical Realism

Humans – Drama set in modern world where life like androids are used as servants by the human population.

Game of Thrones – Medieval set fantasy where dragons mix with political intrigue and ancient mythologies.

Breaking Bad – Chemistry teacher Walt evolves throughout the series progression into drug lord. This driven by his terminal cancer and wish to cement a legacy.

Sons of Anarchy – Jax Teller rises to become leader of a motorcycle gang who use drug money to control the town in which they live.

Key Theorists

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French sociologist, cultural theorist, author, political commentator. His best known theories involve hyperreality and simulation. Baudrillard described hyperreality as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”.

Hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition of what is real and what is fiction are blended together so there is no clear distinction to where one ends and the other begins.

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Text to Text | “Life on Mars” and Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day”

By Brooke Mackin

• Oct. 17, 2017

Browse all our Text to Text lesson plans.

What would you be willing to sacrifice in the name of science?

For the six participants in a NASA-funded behavioral research study that simulates a trip to Mars, the hope is that the sacrifices they endure benefit the greater good. The eight-month project, named HI-SEAs (for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation ), places these scientists in isolation on Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, a location chosen for its Mars-like conditions. There, strict restrictions cut them off from the rest of Earth’s comforts and connections. Through a continuing series of 360 videos , The Times is covering the research mission.

Our Text to Text series pairs often-taught literary, historical, scientific and cultural pieces with articles from The New York Times. In this one we match an excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s 1954 short story, "All Summer in a Day ,” which explores the potential sacrifices required to live on Venus, with the “Life on Mars” series.

Traveling to another planet was once only imaginable in the realm of science fiction. Today, scientists are pursuing this as a real possibility , perhaps even by 2024. Will life on Mars be a reality for this generation, or the next? What might be gained from this exploration? What must be given up? Currently the HI-SEAS mission seeks answers to these questions — some of the same asked through Ray Bradbury’s short story in 1954.

The Times 360 videos show that “home” for the HI-SEAS participants is a 1,200-square-foot structure called “the habitat.” Any time one of them wants to venture into the outdoors, they must first don a full-body spacesuit. Communication with outside colleagues, friends and family is restricted to email with a built-in 20-minute delay that mirrors the length of time it would take for transmissions to pass between Mars and Earth. How will the participants handle the extreme isolation of the simulation? Data gathered from the experiemtn will inform how astronauts will be selected for long-duration space travel in the future.

Bradbury’s short story was written at a time when space exploration was gaining significant momentum, as the Cold War raged and the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. picked up speed. Just 15 years after “All Summer in a Day” was published, the 1969 Apollo 11 mission succeeded in sending the first humans to the moon.

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Lapham’s quarterly, life on mars.

Nikola Tesla imagines a dialogue.

I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind.

I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night.

It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. 

At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars, nor would there be any great difficulty in recording signals transmitted to us by the inhabitants of that planet, if they be skilled electricians. Communication once established, even in the simplest way, as by a mere interchange of numbers, the progress toward more intelligible communication would be rapid. Absolute certitude as to the receipt and interchange of messages would be reached as soon as we could respond with the number “four,” say, in reply to the signal “one, two, three.” The martians, or the inhabitants of whatever planet had signaled to us, would understand at once that we had caught their message across the gulf of space and had sent back a response. 

What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come?

Nikola Tesla

From “Talking with the Planets.” In early 1899 Jacob Astor gave the inventor funds to further develop electric-light technology; Tesla used the money instead to leave New York, build a huge Colorado laboratory, and begin research into high-frequency electricity and wireless transmission. Some came to believe the signals Tesla heard in this experiment were actually from Guglielmo Marconi’s radio device, which was being tested at the time in the Atlantic. Later research showed, however, that Tesla may have heard pulses emitted by Jupiter’s moon Io.

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Life on Mars: A Definite Possibility

Was Mars once a living world? Does life continue, even today, in a holding pattern, waiting until the next global warming event comes along? Many people would like to believe so. Scientists are no exception. But so far no evidence has been found that convinces even a sizable minority of the scientific community that the red planet was ever home to life. What the evidence does indicate, though, is that Mars was once a habitable world . Life, as we know it, could have taken hold there.

The discoveries made by NASA ’s Opportunity rover at Eagle Crater earlier this year (and being extended now at Endurance Crater) leave no doubt that the area was once ‘drenched’ in water . It might have been shallow water. It might not have stuck around for long. And billions of years might have passed since it dried up. But liquid water was there, at the martian surface, and that means that living organisms might have been there, too.

So suppose that Eagle Crater – or rather, whatever land formation existed in its location when water was still around – was once alive. What type of organism might have been happy living there?

Probably something like bacteria. Even if life did gain a foothold on Mars, it’s unlikely that it ever evolved beyond the martian equivalent of terrestrial single-celled bacteria. No dinosaurs; no redwoods; no mosquitoes – not even sponges, or tiny worms. But that’s not much of a limitation, really. It took life on Earth billions of years to evolve beyond single-celled organisms. And bacteria are a hardy lot. They are amazingly diverse, various species occupying extreme niches of temperature from sub-freezing to above-boiling; floating about in sulfuric acid; getting along fine with or without oxygen. In fact, there are few habitats on Earth where one or another species of bacterium can’t survive.

What kind of microbe, then, would have been well adapted to the conditions that existed when Eagle Crater was soggy? Benton Clark III , a Mars Exploration Rover ( MER ) science team member, says his “general favorite” candidates are the sulfate-reducing bacteria of the genus Desulfovibrio . Microbiologists have identified more than 40 distinct species of this bacterium.

Eating Rocks

We tend to think of photosynthesis as the engine of life on Earth. After all, we see green plants nearly everywhere we look and virtually the entire animal kingdom is dependent on photosynthetic organisms as a source of food. Not only plants, but many microbes as well, are capable of carrying out photosynthesis. They’re photoautotrophs: they make their own food by capturing energy directly from sunlight.

But Desulfovibrio is not a photoautotroph; it’s a chemoautotroph. Chemoautotrophs also make their own food, but they don’t use photosynthesis to do it. In fact, photosynthesis came relatively late in the game of life on Earth. Early life had to get its energy from chemical interactions between rocks and dirt, water, and gases in the atmosphere. If life ever emerged on Mars, it might never have evolved beyond this primitive stage.

Desulfovibrio makes its home in a variety of habitats. Many species live in soggy soils, such as marshes and swamps. One species was discovered all snug and cozy in the intestines of a termite. All of these habitats have two things in common: there’s no oxygen present; and there’s plenty of sulfate available.

Sulfate reducers, like all chemoautotrophs, get their energy by inducing chemical reactions that transfer electrons between one molecule and another. In the case of Desulfovibrio, hydrogen donates electrons, which are accepted by sulfate compounds. Desulfovibrio, says Clark, uses “the energy that it gets by combining the hydrogen with the sulfate to make the organic compounds” it needs to grow and to reproduce.

The bedrock outcrop in Eagle Crater is chock full of sulfate salts. But finding a suitable electron donor for all that sulfate is a bit more troublesome. “My calculations indicate [that the amount of hydrogen available is] probably too low to utilize it under present conditions,” says Clark. “But if you had a little bit wetter Mars, then there [would] be more water in the atmosphere, and the hydrogen gas comes from the water” being broken down by sunlight.

So water was present; sulfate and hydrogen could have as an energy source. But to survive, life as we know it needs one more ingredient carbon. Many living things obtain their carbon by breaking down the decayed remains of other dead organisms. But some, including several species of Desulfovibrio, are capable of creating organic material from scratch, as it were, drawing this critical ingredient of life directly from carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) gas. There’s plenty of that available on Mars.

All this gives reason to hope that life that found a way to exist on Mars back in the day when water was present. No one knows how long ago that was. Or whether such a time will come again. It may be that Mars dried up billions of years ago and has remained dry ever since. If that is the case, life is unlikely to have found a way to survive until the present.

Tilting toward Life

But Mars goes through cycles of obliquity, or changes in its orbital tilt. Currently, Mars is wobbling back and forth between 15 and 35 degrees’ obliquity, on a timescale of about 100,000 years. But every million years or so, it leans over as much as 60 degrees. Along with these changes in obliquity come changes in climate and atmosphere. Some scientists speculate that during the extremes of these obliquity cycles, Mars may develop an atmosphere as thick as Earth’s, and could warm up considerably. Enough for dormant life to reawaken.

“Because the climate can change on long terms,” says Clark, ice in some regions on Mars periodically could “become liquid enough that you would be able to actually come to life and do some things – grow, multiply, and so forth – and then go back to sleep again” when the thaw cycle ended. There are organisms on Earth that, when conditions become unfavorable, can form “spores which are so resistant that they can last for a very long time. Some people think millions of years, but that’s a little controversial.”

Desulfovibrio is not such an organism. It doesn’t form spores. But its bacterial cousin, Desulfotomaculum, does. “Usually the spores form because there’s something missing, like, for example, if hydrogen’s not available, or if there’s too much [oxygen], or if there’s not sulfate. The bacteria senses that the food source is going away, and it says, ‘I’ve got to hibernate,’ and will form the spores. The spores will stay dormant for extremely long periods of time. But they still have enough machinery operative that they can actually sense that nutrients are available. And then they’ll reconvert again in just a matter of hours, if necessary, to a living, breathing bacterium, so to speak. It’s pretty amazing,” says Clark.

That is not to say that future Mars landers should arrive with life-detection equipment tuned to zero in on species of Desulfovibrio or Desulfotomaculum. There is no reason to believe that life on Mars, if it ever emerged, evolved along the same lines as life on Earth, let alone that identical species appeared on the two planets. Still, the capabilities of various organisms on Earth indicate that life on Mars – including dormant organisms that could spring to life again in another few hundred thousand years – is certainly possible.

Clark says that he doesn’t “know that there’s any organism on Earth that could really operate on Mars, but over a long period of time, as the martian environment kept changing, what you would expect is that whatever life had started out there would keep adapting to the environment as it changed.”

Detecting such organisms is another matter. Don’t look for it to happen any time soon. Spirit and Opportunity were not designed to search for signs of life, but rather to search for signs of habitability. They could be rolling over fields littered with microscopic organisms in deep sleep and they’d never know it. Even future rovers will have a tough time identifying the martian equivalent of dormant bacterial spores.

“The spores themselves are so inert,” Clark says, “it’s a question, if you find a spore, and you’re trying to detect life, how do you know it’s a spore, [and not] just a little particle of sand? And the answer is: You don’t. Unless you can find a way to make the spore do what’s called germinating, going back to the normal bacterial form.” That, however, is a challenge for another day.

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Essay on Life on Mars for Students and Children

500 words essay on life on mars.

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun in our solar system. Also, it is the second smallest planet in our solar system. The possibility of life on mars has aroused the interest of scientists for many years. A major reason for this interest is due to the similarity and proximity of the planet to Earth. Mars certainly gives some indications of the possibility of life.

Possibilities of Life on Mars

In the past, Mars used to look quite similar to Earth. Billions of years ago, there were certainly similarities between Mars and Earth. Furthermore, scientists believe that Mars once had a huge ocean. This ocean, experts believe, covered more of the planet’s surface than Earth’s own oceans do so currently.

Moreover, Mars was much warmer in the past that it is currently. Most noteworthy, warm temperature and water are two major requirements for life to exist. So, there is a high probability that previously there was life on Mars.

Life on Earth can exist in the harshest of circumstances. Furthermore, life exists in the most extreme places on Earth. Moreover, life on Earth is available in the extremely hot and dry deserts. Also, life exists in the extremely cold Antarctica continent. Most noteworthy, this resilience of life gives plenty of hope about life on Mars.

There are some ingredients for life that already exist on Mars. Bio signatures refer to current and past life markers. Furthermore, scientists are scouring the surface for them. Moreover, there has been an emergence of a few promising leads. One notable example is the presence of methane in Mars’s atmosphere. Most noteworthy, scientists have no idea where the methane is coming from. Therefore, a possibility arises that methane presence is due to microbes existing deep below the planet’s surface.

One important point to note is that no scratching of Mars’s surface has taken place. Furthermore, a couple of inches of scratching has taken place until now. Scientists have undertaken analysis of small pinches of soil. There may also have been a failure to detect signs of life due to the use of faulty techniques. Most noteworthy, there may be “refugee life” deep below the planet’s surface.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Challenges to Life on Mars

First of all, almost all plants and animals cannot survive the conditions on the surface of Mars. This is due to the extremely harsh conditions on the surface of Mars.

Another major problem is the gravity of Mars. Most noteworthy, the gravity on Mars is 38% to that of Earth. Furthermore, low gravity can cause health problems like muscle loss and bone demineralization.

The climate of Mars poses another significant problem. The temperature at Mars is much colder than Earth. Most noteworthy, the mean surface temperatures of Mars range between −87 and −5 °C. Also, the coldest temperature on Earth has been −89.2 °C in Antarctica.

Mars suffers from a great scarcity of water. Most noteworthy, water discovered on Mars is less than that on Earth’s driest desert.

Other problems include the high penetration of harmful solar radiation due to the lack of ozone layer. Furthermore, global dust storms are common throughout Mars. Also, the soil of Mars is toxic due to the high concentration of chlorine.

To sum it up, life on Mars is a topic that has generated a lot of curiosity among scientists and experts. Furthermore, establishing life on Mars involves a lot of challenges. However, the hope and ambition for this purpose are well alive and present. Most noteworthy, humanity must make serious efforts for establishing life on Mars.

FAQs on Life on Mars

Q1 State any one possibility of life on Mars?

A1 One possibility of life on Mars is the resilience of life. Most noteworthy, life exists in the most extreme places on Earth.

Q2 State anyone challenge to life on Mars?

A2 One challenge to life on Mars is a great scarcity of water.

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Engineering Life: Defining "Humanity" In A Postmodern Age

"Has existence significance at all? [This is] the question which will require a couple of centuries even to be completely heard in all its profundity" - Fredrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom

"The fact that God could create free beings vis-à-vis of Himself is the cross which philosophy could not carry, but remained hanging therefrom" - Soren Kierkegaard, Aphorisms

Signs of the Times

• An actively heterosexual Russian female athlete is informed that she cannot compete in the Olympic games as a woman, because she is genetically a man.
• A New Jersey family takes their doctor to court for allowing the "wrongful birth" of their Downs Syndrome child. Over 300 similar suits have reached the courts in recent years. Today, as in an earlier time, we hear of "life unworthy of life."
• A child is conceived in California for the purpose of serving as a bone marrow donor for an older sibling. The cells are harvested and her sister lives. It is not only possible, but legal to create human life for "spare parts."
• An embryo conceived in a Louisiana laboratory is protected by state law. But as soon as it is implanted into the mother, it can be aborted by another constitutionally protected right.
• Researchers at Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools uncover over 200 cases of genetic discrimination. Based on "pre-existing conditions," insurance companies have denied coverage to people who carry genetically transmitted diseases.

Each of these incidents illustrates the complexities genetic technology introduces. The ethical dimension is of obvious concern. How should we treat fellow human beings? Then there are legal questions about what should be prohibited or sanctioned in human genetic research. But a more basic and all too often ignored question must also be explored: What is a human person? Indeed, without an answer to this question, moral and legal reflection is almost pointless. How, for example, can we speak of protecting human rights without identifying the bearer of those rights?

Recognizing human rights has always been an explosive business. In the 19th century, the issue was to whom do the constitutionally protected "inalienable rights of men" apply? This question so divided our republic that it was resolved only by civil war. In recent historic experience, we can turn to the death camps of Auschwitz or one of the thousands of "family planning centers" in America for further evidence of the scale of this question's lethality-- and, tragically, of social ambivalence to it.

Citing a lengthy bibliography of current scholarly works on the meaning of "personhood," psychologist and social critic Kenneth Gergen observes,

One of the most interesting aspects of this work is that it exists at all, for only under particular cultural conditions would the question be considered worthy of such attention. 1

What are these "particular cultural conditions" to which Gergen refers? Both in academia and in popular culture, we are experiencing a sweeping ideological shift. It is the decline of Enlightenment assumptions that have guided Western civilization for the past 250 years, and the emergence of a "postmodern" cultural consensus. This shift in thought has been extensively documented in public opinion 2 and in more scholarly work. 3 However, little critique has been given to the practical implications of postmodernism to the pressing biomedical issues of our day. As postmodern language and concepts become an increasingly significant part of the public discussion in medical ethics, I think it is essential that Christians understand the thinking that lies beneath the rhetoric and formulate compelling responses to it.

This paper is an attempt to turn the discussion in that direction. We consider the meaning of personhood as it is conceived by postmodernists and its implications in an age of genetic technology. We conclude that a biblical view of humanity uniquely provides moral guidance through the turbulent waters of our postmodern era.

From Modern to Postmodern Anthropology

Summary: comparing anthropologies.

Modernism Postmodernism

• Autonomous Social
• Rational Subjective

Let's step back for a minute to define our terms. Outside of academia, "postmodernism" is not in common use, though we all encounter it in its various forms. 4 In a word, postmodernism is a rejection to the modern, or Enlightenment thought, that has dominated intellectual life for over two hundred years. To understand what is at stake with current issues surrounding genetics, we need to consider two crucial points of conflict between the modern and postmodern concepts of human personhood.

First, for modernists, man is rational by nature. French philosopher Rene Descartes is often considered the father of modern philosophy. Parting company with medieval thought that sought to root reason in the soil of Christian belief, 5 Descartes attempted to develop a method of discovering truth independent of external sources of authority. He began inwardly, with his rationalistic deduction "I think, therefore I am." Descartes' first certainty was that "I exist as a thinking thing." The concept of man as rational by nature became the hallmark of Enlightenment thought. Descartes, and many who followed him, believed that it was possible to discover ultimate truths through the exercise of reason alone, and to develop a comprehensive, rationalistic world view. Reason was thus the guiding light of the Enlightenment.

Second, the subtle assertion underlying Cartesian method is that the self is autonomous. By autonomous, we mean that there exists an individual self (the "I" that "thinks") who transcends, or stands above environment and biology. Descartes based his theory of an autonomous self on mind/body dualism--the idea that an immaterial mind stands over and apart from nature. Later philosophers rejected Cartesian dualism and the theism it presumed, but for more than two hundred years, most maintained the belief in an autonomous self and confidence in the rational objectivity it made possible. The autonomous, rational self became the foundation for Enlightenment humanism and its liberal political theory, free market economics and radical individualism. 6

Postmodernism is a direct assault on the entire Enlightenment enterprise. At the heart of it, postmodernists deny the possibility of rational objectivity because they reject the view of the self that modernism presupposes. Rather than seeing humanity as an ocean of autonomous rational selves, as modernists held, postmodernists think of humans as an extension of culture and deny the individual self all together. Kenneth Gergen notes,

With the spread of postmodern consciousness, we see the demise of personal definition, reason, authority. . . All intrinsic properties of the human being, along with moral worth and personal commitment, are lost from view. . . 7

The self stands under "erasure" for postmodernists, meaning they deny all transcendent categories, including essential human personhood, reason and human value. There is no Cartesian "I" that thinks any more than there is a computer "self" beneath its programming. Postmodern anthropology is based on the idea that humans are "social constructs," or socially determined beings. We cannot have objective access to reality, because there is no neutral context from which to think. We have no individual personhood, because we are the product of culture.

Despite much of its "politically correct" rhetoric, postmodernism is anti-essentialist and anti-humanist. 8 There is no universal human essence, no stable personal identity, and consequently, no inherent human value. Humans derive a sense of individual identity and value as persons from the arbitrary mores of a given culture. So one's identity, value, and civil rights are an accident of cultural origin, not some property intrinsic to human nature.

Postmodern Antihumanism and Genetic Technology

Postmodern antihumanism and the contemporary genetics industry are two powerful currents that form a potentially menacing rip tide against which proponents of human dignity must struggle. We consider key forces directing genetic research and the genetics industry, and how postmodern anthropological assumptions increasingly encroach on bioethics and biopolicy.

Scientists are for the most part extremely antagonistic to postmodernism because of its assault against reason and the postmodernists' accusations that science is a tool of Western cultural imperialism. 9 However, naturalistic materialism, the dominant view among secular scientists, shares in postmodernism's antihumanism, creating a dangerous consensus among intellectuals today. Consider the remarks of Robert Haynes, president of the 16th International Congress of Genetics,

For three thousand years at least, a majority of people have considered that human beings were special, were magic. It's the Judeo-Christian view of man. What the ability to manipulate genes should indicate to people is the very deep extent to which we are biological machines. The traditional view is built on the foundation that life is sacred. . . .Well, not anymore. It's no longer possible to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, even sacred about living organisms. 10

Whether biological machines or cultural constructs, naturalism and postmodernism strip humanity of all intrinsic value and leave postmodern culture with no meaningful frame of reference to address the pressing bioethical issues of our day.

One assumption driving the frenzy to map the human gnome is that all human behavior is of genetic origin. Things that in previous times were attributed to environment or moral choice are now being attributed to genetics. High profile scientists exploiting front page journalism have claimed to have discovered the genetic basis for a host of controversial behaviors and characteristics, including alcoholism, homosexuality, promiscuity, IQ and violence. Serious scientific doubt about these claims are commonly given little attention, leaving the public with the impression that science is on the verge of solving some of society's greatest problems.

Aside from these more explosive social issues, there are areas of research and technology where individuals may feel a more personal stake. This is where postmodern constructivism is particularly dangerous. For example, as genetic screening becomes more of an option for potential parents, we can expect to see further erosions in the value of human personhood. Dr. Harvy Lodish of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts states,

By using techniques involving in vitro fertilization, it is already possible to remove one cell from the developing embryo and characterize any desired region of DNA. Genetic screening of embryos, before implantation, may soon become routine. 11

Beyond "reproductive consumerism," economic and social pressure may well turn the possibility of genetic screening into a social obligation. After all, some will be prepared to argue, "if we can prevent another alcoholic from wasting valuable economic resources, it seems that we ought to."

Important market forces are also at work in the genetics research industry. Billions of dollars can be gained through the commercial marketing of genetic material. And scientists have been quick to seize the opportunities. Since 1971, corporations have put on a no holds barred legal battle to patent human life. In that year, General Electric researcher Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty sought a patent for a microbe synthesized in the lab for the purpose of cleaning large oil spills. After nearly a decade of legal bantering, the United States Supreme Court sided with, Chakrabarty. Life forms could be considered "human inventions," thus patentable by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). This case began a slippery slope toward the inevitable patenting of human life.

In 1987, the PTO widened patent rights to include all life-forms on earth, including animals. 12 Human beings were exempt from the ruling, citing the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution prohibiting slavery. However, the ruling had significant shortcomings. Kimbrell notes, ". . .under the PTO's 1987 ruling, embryos and fetuses, human life-forms not presently covered under Thirteenth Amendment protection, are patentable, as are genetically engineered human tissues, cells, and genes." 13 Corporate America won the right to own, use and sell all multicellular creatures, including human. 14 While a storm of pro-life protest resulted in the withdrawal of NIH requests for public funding for the use of human embryos in genetic research, it is still legal. Human life has now become a commercial commodity as billions of dollars enter into the global genetics market. The PTO is now flooded with applications for patents on hundreds of human genes and gene lines. Kimbrell warns, "[a]s patenting continues, the legal distinctions between life and machine, between life and commodity, will begin to vanish." 15

Human genetic engineering has been suggested for all kinds of medical and social applications. But as practical demand for human tissue increases, the value of human personhood in a postmodern culture experiences a corresponding decrease. As of 1990, there were over three hundred law suits against doctors by parents or children claiming a new species of injustice with strange constructivist language: "wrongful life" and "wrongful birth." 16 Translated, these euphemisms mean that life is not protected by an unalienable right, but by arbitrary decisions based upon socially acceptable characteristics. Along these lines, noted ethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt uses the expression, "injury of continued existence," 17 a disturbingly similar notion to the Nazi concept of "life unworthy of life." In today's world of genetic mapping and gene therapy, we hear terms such as the "commodification of life," and "the human body shop industry." 18

We are witnessing the depersonalization of human bioscience language:

As body parts and [genetic] materials are sold and patented, manipulated and engineered, we also are seeing an unprecedented change in many of our most basic social and legal definitions. Traditional understandings of life, birth, disease, death, mother, father, and person begin to waver and then fall. 19

In depersonalizing language, scientific and legal jargon obscures important moral distinctions. The consequence is that genetic research and technology appear more neutrally scientific than deeply ethical and human. So while questionable research goals and methods and clearly unbiblical anthropological assumptions sometimes drive the genetics industry forward, sociological data shows that most Americans don't really understand what's going on. 20 And those who do understand, but oppose public funding for gene research on human embryos, are called "uneducated" and "ignorant" by research professionals. 21 But such ad hominem responses will continue to have a hollow ring until scientists and biopolicy makers offer some meaningful distinction between what they can do and what they should do.

At a time when few people can articulate a meaningful defense of human dignity, we are left open to the increasing influence of postmodern anti-humanists. David Hirsch raises a daunting problem:

Purveyors of postmodern ideologies must consider whether it is possible to diminish human beings in theory, without, at the same time, making individual human lives worthless in the real world. 22

There are important indications that Hirsch's fears are now being realized. In recent public opinion surveys, a substantial majority favor genetic screening for a wide range of genetically transmitted disorders. 23 Abortion as a therapeutic option is, of course, in view. But it is not merely serious or fatal diseases that are being singled out. For example, in a recent survey taken in New England, eleven percent of couples polled said they would abort a child genetically predisposed to obesity. 24 We need to call these sentiments what they are: eugenic .

This popular opinion is also reflected in the medical community. Between 1973 and 1988, the percentage of geneticists who approve of prenatal diagnosis for sex selection rose from 1 percent to 20 percent. 25 In a broader study of gender-selected abortion, physicians were asked to respond to the following scenario:

A couple with four healthy daughters desires a son. They request prenatal diagnosis solely to learn the fetus' sex . . . They tell the doctor that if the fetus is female, they will abort it. Further, they say that if the doctor will not grant their request for prenatal diagnosis, they will have an abortion rather than risk having a fifth girl. 26

In this case, 62% of American doctors said they would either perform the diagnosis or refer them to a physician who would. Civil rights activists have rightly condemned abortion based on gender around the world and we should be equally outraged by the blatant misogyny this study suggests.

Back to the Future?

Postmodernists themselves recognize the potential cost of their anti-humanistic denial of objective human value. Kenneth Gergen concedes,

Postmodernism has often been viewed as morally bankrupt because it fails to profess any fundamental values or principles. More forcefully put, postmodernism fails to offer arguments against Nazism or any other forms of cultural tyranny. 27

Gergen's point is grossly understated. In point of fact, there are dangerous historical and conceptual connections between postmodern antihumanism and fascism. 28

Summary: Comparing Worldviews

Fascism Postmodernism

• Humans as social constructs
• No objectivity
• Appeal to the pragmatic

Having illustrated postmodern sentiment and language in current discussions of genetics, we now turn to a brief analysis of the commonality between postmodern anthropology and folkism -the ideological basis for German fascism.

In his sobering and timely essay, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," 29 George Stein states,

German philosophic romanticism was a xenophobic...reaction against the idea of 'man' as a species. Rather, 'men' participated in life or had their being through a unique natural and cultural identity. Folkism was established as both a philosophical ideology and as a political movement. 30

For folkism, human value and human rights were associated with cultural identity just as it is for contemporary postmodernism. There simply are no inalienable rights, because there is no universal human essence. And individualism was also a myth for folkism in much the same way it is for contemporary postmodernists. Again citing Stein,

Man is a social species. Individualism is an illusion. . .each individual is subordinate to the social body of which he is a member. 31

Individuals, therefore, possess value as they take their place in culture. This raises two questions. First, what is "culture"; and second, what does it mean to have a place in culture? Early fascists found the question of culture easy enough to define: Aryan folkism. And in the post World War I era, when Germany was searching for some way to regroup, folkism provided the rallying point. As to what it meant to have a place in folkish society, that was another matter. Stein points out,

Without human essentialism, folkish standards came to define normative humanity at the exclusion of other races, and even many within the race. [German social darwinist Ernst] Hackel and others were thus willing to argue that we must assign a totally different value to their lives. 32

Ideology alone could not accomplish the folkish ideal of the German Aryan state. But what if folkish romanticism and Aryan superiority were scientifically true? This was the claim of the German social darwinists and the basis for the Nazi eugenics program. It was a scientific application to what postmodernists today call "social constructivism." Social undesirables--those who did not fit the folkish ideal--were considered genetically inferior. As such they had a responsibility to die. As Haeckel states, "Hundreds of thousands of incurables--lunatics, lepers, people with cancer--are artificially kept alive without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body." 33

A growing number are expressing concern that the same ruthless pragmatism can easily be cultivated in today's multi billion dollar genetics revolution. Arbitrarily assigning value to human life and scientific justification for social engineering is not merely a folkish matter. As we have seen, Americans today have indicated some of the same tendencies. And as economic and social pressures merge with various prejudices, postmodern constructivism provides a compelling basis for weeding out or altering so called "undesirable traits" of the gene pool. Some have considered proposals to treat medically, people who carry the alleged "violence gene," 34 since reform is considered unlikely. The Bell Curve, written by two widely respected scientists (one a Harvard researcher), argues for a social policy that curbs efforts to educate many poor people based on their presumed limited genetic potential. 35 In a disturbing and woefully underreported trend, corporations are showing an increased willingness to do genetic screening on their employees to identify factors that might make them less productive or expensive to insure. 36

We are entering into a new age in the struggle for human rights. The secular world view, rooted in naturalism and postmodern constructivism have little room for the inherent dignity of man. It is a culture without anchor, adrift in what Gergen has called "the tyrannies of rhetoric." 37 Apart from the image of God in all people, there is little reason to resist the current momentum toward social engineering. Christians must take a stand as we did with abolition and child labor, and as many continue to do against abortion, as humanists in the rich, biblical sense of the term.

1.  Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 272.

2.  George Barna, The Barna Report: What Americans Believe (Ventura: Regal Books, 1991), 112.

3.  See Lynne Cheney's report to congress as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1992.

4.  For an introduction to postmodern thought and its affects on a wide spectrum of contemporary society, see Dennis McCallum, Ed., The Death of Truth (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1996).

5.  Medieval epistemology can be summarized in Anselm's dictum, "I believe so that I may understand."

6.  For an excellent discussion of American individualism, see Robert Bellah, et. Al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

7.  Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 228, 229.

8.  See David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge, 1988), 405-08.

9.  See Jim Leffel, "Postmodernism and the Myth of Progress," in Dennis McCallum ed, The Death of Truth (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1996), 45-57.

10.  Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993) 233,4.

11.  Harvey Lodish, "Viewpoint: The Future" in Science, 267:1609.

12.  U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Animals-Patentability (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Patent and Trademrak Office, April 7, 1987), cited in Kimbrell, 199.

13.  Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 199.

14.  Kimbrell states, "It is important ot note that, as described in the last two chapters, current U.S. patent law makes patenting human embryos perfectly legal." The Human Body Shop , 223.

15.  Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 212.

16.  Cited in Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 127.

17.  H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr, in Marvin Kohl, ed., Beneficient Euthanasia (Promethius Books, 1975).

18.  Kimbrell uses these terms to describe both the rhetoric and the emerging biopolicy surrounding genetic research and technology.

19.  Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 228.

20.  Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 290.

21.  William Ryan, "Poll Shows Strong Opposition to Embryo Research Funding," United States Catholic Conference News , July 25, 1995.

22.  David Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (Hanover: Brown University Press, 1991), 165.

23.  Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 290.

24.  Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 124.

25.  Gina Kolata, "Fetal Sex Test Used as Step to Abortion," New York Times (December 25, 1988), A1.

26.  Cited in Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 123.

27.  Gergen, The Saturated Self , 231.

28.  See Gene Edward Veith, Today's Fascism (St. Louis: Concordia Press, 1993).

29.  George Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," American Scientist , 76:50-58.

30.  Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," 53.

31.  Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," 56.

32.  Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," 55.

33.  Cited in Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazis," 54.

34.  The brochure for a conference dealing with violence, sponsored in part by the NIH, but cancelled after substantial protest, states: "Researchers have already begun to study the genetic regulation of violent and impulsive behavior and to search for genetic marekers associated with criminal conduct. Their work is motivated in part by the early success. . . on the genetics of behavioral and psychiatric conditions like alcoholism and schizophrenia. But genetic research also gains impetus from the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime--deterrence, diversion and rehabilitation--to affect the dramatic increases in crime, especially violent crime that this country has experienced over the last 30 years. Genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct. . .and of treating some predisposition's with drugs and unintrusive therapies ." (Italics added). Cited in Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop , 258.

35.  See Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: The Reshaping of American Life by Differences in Intelligence (New York: Free Press, 1994).

37.  Gergen, The Saturated Self , 229.

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Here’s some exciting news. I guess. It appears that until 3 billion years ago, Mars was partly covered by water, at which time its atmosphere was blown away by the solar wind. But a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that an enormous amount of water is still trapped in the pores of volcanic rock beneath the surface of Mars.

Water implies the possibility of life. Michael Manga, study coauthor and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says: “Water is necessary for life as we know it. I don’t see why (the underground Martian reservoir) is not a habitable environment. It’s certainly true on Earth — deep, deep mines host life, the bottom of the ocean hosts life.”

What would it mean if we found life on Mars, even if it’s only primitive organisms similar to those that we find at the bottom of the ocean on Earth?

Neel V. Patel argued recently in the New York Times that the discovery of life on Mars “would change how humanity thinks about its place in this universe.” He concedes that sending humans to extraterrestrial destinations is a worthy goal, but NASA’s top priority should be answering the question of whether we are truly alone in the universe.

Patel’s point is well taken, but, really, does it matter? It might be interesting and surprising to find life on Mars, but would it change anything having to do with who we are and our place in the universe?

In fact, concerns about life and water and other resources on the moon, Mars and elsewhere bear this inherent danger: They distract our attention away from the one place in the entire universe where we know, for sure, that more-or-less intelligent life does exist, as well as the unfortunate fact that we’ve currently put it into considerable jeopardy.

Humankind’s imagination has always been excited by the possibility that the cosmos harbors life beyond Earth. We’ve been pleased to entertain the idea that the moon, Mars and other planets are way stations on the path to our inherent destiny, to conquer space and to colonize distant moons and planets.

Accordingly, Earth’s most prominent visionary, Elon Musk, is committed to landing humans on Mars within 10 years and founding a metropolis of a million earthlings on the Red Planet within 20.

This ambitious goal is admittedly consistent with the narrative that has driven human migration since our ancestors left Africa some 80,000 years ago. Humans have regularly moved into new territory, thrived, consumed and outgrown their resources and then moved on and repeated the cycle. According to this narrative, as our planet increasingly shows the stress of our overuse, colonization of the moon and Mars is the next logical step.

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But is it? Once we leave the Earth, does this terrestrial narrative make sense, if it ever did?

In 1492 the so-called New World must have seemed unimaginably distant from Europe. But it wasn’t, and it wasn’t really New. It was still a place where humans could thrive.

But the universe is different. Our Milky Way is an average-size galaxy in a universe that contains, by some estimates, 2 trillion others. Still, the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If our galaxy were reduced to the size of the United States, on that scale, our solar system would be the size of a quarter in your change tray.

In short, the scale of travel beyond the Earth is immense enough to make nonsense of whatever logic drove the narrative that spread humankind across the globe. This makes sense: We evolved here. The Earth created us. And now we’re creating whatever the Earth is going to become. The Earth is where our lives make sense.

Of course, critics will say that this sort of thinking would have kept our ancestors cringing in caves, terrified of venturing onto the savannas. Maybe. But to imagine that we can escape an overburdened Earth by colonizing Mars is a fantasy at odds with our essential humanity.

Life on Mars? Good luck to it. We’ve got our own problems here.

John M. Crisp lives in Texas. Contact him at [email protected] .

©2024 Tribune Content Agency LLC

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Opinion: Life on Mars? How about life on Earth?

August 24, 2024 at 12:00 p.m.

by John M. Crisp / Tribune Content Agency

Here's some exciting news. I guess.

It appears that until 3 billion years ago, Mars was partly covered by water, at which time its atmosphere was blown away by the solar wind. But a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that an enormous amount of water is still trapped in the pores of volcanic rock beneath the surface of Mars.

Water implies the possibility of life. Michael Manga, study co-author and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says: "Water is necessary for life as we know it. I don't see why [the underground Martian reservoir] is not a habitable environment. It's certainly true on Earth — deep, deep mines host life, the bottom of the ocean hosts life."

What would it mean if we found life on Mars, even if it's only primitive organisms similar to those that we find at the bottom of the ocean on Earth?

Neel V. Patel argued recently in The New York Times that the discovery of life on Mars "would change how humanity thinks about its place in this universe." He concedes that sending humans to extraterrestrial destinations is a worthy goal, but NASA's top priority should be answering the question of whether we are truly alone in the universe.

Patel's point is well taken, but, really, does it matter?

In fact, concerns about life and water and other resources on the moon, Mars and elsewhere bear this inherent danger: They distract our attention away from the one place in the entire universe where we know, for sure, that more-or-less intelligent life does exist, as well as the unfortunate fact that we've currently put it into considerable jeopardy.

Humankind's imagination has always been excited by the possibility that the cosmos harbors life beyond Earth. We've been pleased to entertain the idea that the moon, Mars and other planets are waystations on the path to our inherent destiny, to conquer space and to colonize distant moons and planets.

Accordingly, Earth's most prominent visionary, Elon Musk, is committed to landing humans on Mars within 10 years and founding a metropolis of a million earthlings on the Red Planet within 20.

This ambitious goal is admittedly consistent with the narrative that has driven human migration since our ancestors left Africa some 80,000 years ago. Humans have regularly moved into new territory, thrived, consumed and outgrown their resources and then moved on and repeated the cycle. According to this narrative, as our planet increasingly shows the stress of our overuse, colonization of the moon and Mars is the next logical step.

But is it? Once we leave the Earth, does this terrestrial narrative make sense, if it ever did?

In 1492 the so-called New World must have seemed unimaginably distant from Europe. But it wasn't, and it wasn't really New. It was still a place where humans could thrive.

But the universe is different. Our Milky Way is an average-sized galaxy in a universe that contains, by some estimates, 2 trillion others. Still, the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If our galaxy were reduced to the size of the United States, on that scale, our solar system would be the size of a quarter in your change tray.

In short, the scale of travel beyond the Earth is immense enough to make nonsense of whatever logic drove the narrative that spread humankind across the globe. This makes sense: We evolved here. The Earth created us. And now we're creating whatever the Earth is going to become. The Earth is where our lives make sense.

Of course, critics will say that this sort of thinking would have kept our ancestors cringing in caves, terrified of venturing onto the savannahs. Maybe. But to imagine that we can escape an overburdened Earth by colonizing Mars is a fantasy at odds with our essential humanity.

Life on Mars? Good luck to it. We've got our own problems here.

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