Hi,
On Thursday morning, NASA and an international team of rocket scientists launched the latest mission to Mars, a rover called Perseverance. After thousands of years of humans gazing at the heavens and wondering if we are alone, if life on Earth is all there is, we now have the first robot on the way to another planet that has been specifically designed to try to answer the most fundamental question of our existence.
As a space nerd, days like this are literally what keeps me going. Honestly, my internal monologue when I start feeling depressed about the state of the world, about all our failings and mistreatment of each other on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" (as Carl Sagan called our home planet), is that we humans are capable of such deep, infinite beauty in a universe that is filled with deep, infinite beauty. There is literally no end to what we can know about ourselves or the world around us.
In some ways, though, asking the question this way: "Is there life beyond Earth", misses the point. When Perseverance arrives to Mars in February 2021, it will land in an ancient river delta, where scientists believe all the conditions for life were once present. While there, it may detect incontrovertible evidence of biological processes sometime in the planet’s distant past. It may find that life on Mars predated life on Earth. But even if that happens, it is up to us, the species that created this robot, to interpret what this data means for humanity and our place in the universe.
What rights would ancient life on Mars deserve? What rights would life on Mars deserve if it still existed today? Would it matter if the life that evolved on Mars was truly alien – of a totally different chemical composition for example – implying that life is likely very common throughout the universe? Would it matter that life on Earth actually originated on Mars, came to Earth via a single shard of stone, and that we are all Martians? How would all of this change how we treat each other, in the middle of an overlapping pandemic, racial reckoning, and climate emergency?
This week’s good news on climate
In 1861, on the eve of civil war in the United States, abolitionist John James Ingalls created the Latin motto of my home state of Kansas, "ad astra per aspera". In English, it means "to the stars through difficulties" – a motto that’s just as lofty, just as fitting for humanity today as it was for a free state entering the union on the brink of a war fought over slavery.
At the time Ingalls wrote: "The aspiration of Kansas is to reach the unattainable; its dream is the realisation of the impossible." That is not only our dream as climate people, to achieve goals that feel impossible, but it is our duty. We have no other choice. Humanity has no other choices.
The word "aspiration", of course, is from the same Latin root word for star. Our literal journey into space more than 150 years later, to send a robot to help us answer the most fundamental questions about ourselves, is aspirational. It shows us we are capable of so much more.
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