In the sort of super-science we should be doing all the time, Russian scientists are sending life itself to orbit a Martian moon. It’s educational, it’s awesome, and insanely they had to carefully navigate regulations designed to prevent them from doing anything even nearly that cool.
The problem is how Earthmen have unfortunately developed political correctness, shame, and an ability to apply eco-fear even to areas that don’t have ecologies. Instead of spreading the incredibly one-in-a-named-numbers-don’t-go-that-high jackpot of life far and wide (the way we and every species there is has done since the dawn of our creation), people have instead decided that life is a filthy stain that should be hidden from other planets.
It’s like owning the only extant copy of a Beethoven’s symphonies and refusing to allow copies, instead hiding it in a small bucket rapidly filling with record-destroying poison (the analogy, and the record, start to break down around here) and which could at any time be smashed by a randomly thrown rock. Instead of shooting specially-prepared life seeds into Europa, Titan and anywhere else they think they’ll take we’re been carefully sterilizing everything we send into space. To prevent any chance of giving life to a whole new world. We are actively working to prevent new worlds, an idea so horrific it bears repetition. We view space as a museum instead of a garden, choosing to tiptoe through everything that exists insnead of making the most of our magnificent potential.
The “Phobos-Grunt” mission (”Phobos Soil” in Russian) will examine Mar’s minuscule moon, a twenty-something-kilometer rock which happens to be called a “moon” because it orbits a planet (it’s not even spherical, and alongside its sibling Deimos is probably an asteroid that wandered too close and got captured). The idea is to scan for water or other usable resources for future Mars missions.
Along the way Grunt will carry LIFE, but don’t get excited about mankind manning up and getting on with the job of interestifying the cosmos - “LIFE” is the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, and it had to carefully prove it’ll come nowhere near to delivering organic matter anywhere to get approval. Instead, the idea is to transport several radiation resistant specimens and see how they hold up outside Earth’s magnetosphere for a few years. Cosmic radiation does all sorts of un-fantastic things to DNA and we want to see how frozen seeds, radiation-resistant bacteria and the veteran space traveller tardigrades (microscopic animals also known as “water bears”) hold up.
It’s a start. It’s interesting. But it’s still a signpost of how ashamed some scientists seem to be of our existence, and we fondly invite such people to go hide in a cave while we get on with our awesome existence.
Luke McKinney. Image Credit: Walter Myers, 2009.
LIFE experiment http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phobos-grunt-mars
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