Science faces innumerable challenges today. Taxpayers increasingly must be convinced that there are great discoveries still to be made; then they must be persuaded to foot the bills for the research.
Thus, when Daniel Goldin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, introduced a team of scientists who contend they have the first hard evidence of past life on Mars, he voiced appropriate caution. It’s not conclusive evidence. There’s no scientific consensus. Let science determine the need and direction of any future work in the area.
But like a man who has found a winning lottery ticket but isn’t ready to cash it in, Goldin couldn’t hide his good fortune. He didn’t lobby President Clinton or Congress for new funding, but clearly the spadework was being done. An enthusiastic Clinton called for a space summit in November to discuss how to follow up on the findings, and Goldin wisely invited international scientists to participate.
This wasn’t political opportunism or crass promotion of the space program, however. Clinton should have been excited, and Goldin deserved to be “thrilled and humbled” by what the scientists had found.
Mankind has speculated for centuries about whether humanity is isolated in the universe or whether life could exist on other planets. Many of the musings centered on Mars because of the belief that water once freely flowed there and an atmosphere trapped heat and made conditions conducive for life.
Until now there has been no scientific evidence to back up man’s imagination. But two years ago respected scientists from NASA and universities like Stanford began studying a potato-sized, 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite that fell to Earth from Mars long ago. Using new high-resolution electron microscopes and laser-powered equipment, they found golden-colored globules within the rock that contain chemical and organic traces of tiny organisms. They also found startling images of worm-shaped objects that they believe to be fossils of micro-organisms.
No single line of the evidence provides “ultimate proof” that early life once existed on Mars, but taken together they point to that conclusion, the scientists said. Still, many other scientists remain skeptical. More work is needed to show cell walls or remains of cells within the microfossils. Then the work should be duplicated in samples taken directly from Mars.
Additional work will be done on the meteorite, but there’s ample reason to rethink scheduled missions to Mars so they can bring back rock samples. Additional scrutiny and research are justified in order to verify the provocative findings of the NASA-backed team.
