“You read us his words, as great as Locar’s. You read to us that there is ‘nothing new under the sun.’ And you mocked his words when you read them—showing us a new thing.”
“There has never been a flower on Mars,” she said, “but we will learn to grow them.”
—Roger Zelazny, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”
The possibility of life on Mars—whether indigenous or imported, whether past or future—carries with it an obvious corollary. If Mars has life then it must have death. Indeed, death on Mars has a literature all of its own. One of the most famous of Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction stories is “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” a vignette of a dying astronaut on the Martian plains. Arthur C. Clarke chose the Sturgeon piece as his contribution to an anthology called My Favorite Science Fiction Story and has played a variation on the same theme himself in “Transit of Earth.” In a story strongly under the influence of Scott of the Antarctic, Clarke’s doomed astronaut is Captain Gates in reverse; their spacecraft crippled when the permafrost it landed on gave way, his colleagues have died in order to leave him with enough oxygen to make a long-planned, if fundamentally inconsequential, scientific observation. After this, he too will die.* In Gordon Dickson’s novel The Far Call and Ludek Pesek’s grim children’s book The Earth Is Near, the protagonists most concerned with Mars are doomed. Robinson’s Red Mars opens with the murder of the first person to reach the planet.
This is not all that surprising. Mars is a desert, and in America the literature and iconography of the desert are filled with death. Lowell’s Mars was a cosmic reconstruction of this idea, and a grim forewarning of the Earth’s inevitable end. Its color, like that of the Painted Desert beyond the forests of Flagstaff, might be “lovely beyond compare; but to the mind’s eye, its import is horrible. All deserts, from a safe distance, have something of this charm of tint . . . but this very color, unchanging in its hue, means the extinction of life . . . The drying up of the planet is certain to proceed until its surface can support no life at all.” That deserts are also places that live is a wonder precisely because of the hardship involved. Life’s presence does not alter the essential deathliness of the place; it highlights it, whether it’s a mouse burrowing in the roots of a dwarf juniper or a set of canals that girdles a planet. To Lowell the canals were a great triumph of engineering, a testament to a superior and peaceful civilization. But they were also futile. Later writers, from Ray Bradbury to Philip K. Dick to J. G. Ballard, would echo the theme; Mars was a place where entropy was on the rise.
It was, in part, a sense of the fragility of life in the desert that led NASA to ensure that the Viking landers (perhaps the least living things mankind has ever made) were assembled in sterile conditions, purged with hot helium, and baked in vast ovens for days. Though this had an immediate practical purpose—if the landers were not sterile their life-detection experiments might end up discovering common-or-garden earthly bacteria that had simply happened to come along for the ride—it was also driven by the ethical concern that a few earthly bacteria might wreak havoc in a marginal Martian ecosystem. It was, in the words of the Caltech exobiologist Norman Horowitz, one of the people working on the life detection package, “a monument to a Mars that never existed.” The deadest thing human hands have ever built became something very like a tombstone on the planet’s surface.
If deserts are deathly, so, too, is science fiction in general. Genre expectations within the literature of the fantastic divide the worlds it describes into categories loosely analogous to the two “other worlds” of everyday life. The worlds of fantasy are arbitrary, but with clear significance; they correspond to the other world of our dreams. The worlds of science fiction, on the other hand, are frequently portrayed as necessary, beyond our current boundaries in space or time but related to our world by an imagined history. They correspond to the other world we face by necessity: the world to come. A decade ago, ruminating on the fact that so much then-current science fiction made this peculiarly explicit—there was a vogue at the time for stories that started after the end of, if not the world, at least the earth—the critic John Clute wrote, “In our hearts, most of us in 1992—writers and readers alike—read sf in the secret conviction that the genre is a body of fairytales about the afterlife.”
If our natural ways of thinking about other worlds are as dreams or afterlives, then Mars is clearly the second. Mars no longer has any of the arbitrariness of the dream about it. We know it far too well. It has the same things in it that our everyday physical world has—sand, sky, sunsets. The one thing that is missing is us. Freud claimed, influentially but unconvincingly, that people cannot truly believe in their own death; Goethe said much the same. Imagining one’s death, according to this logic, meant imagining one’s survival as a witness to that death, and this meant one was not really imagining a world in which one was absent. In fact, though, one can imagine a world in which one is dead: One simply cannot grace the imagining with full subjectivity. In the way we are forced to imagine them, death and Mars are much alike.
Through naming its features after dead astronomers and writers, the IAU has made Mars yet more like a cemetery. So has the American custom of renaming their meticulously sterilized spacecraft in honor of dead colleagues after they land on Mars. And this association with death, far from making Mars more distant, more unapproachable, makes it closer and more real. The Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, visiting America in the 1940s, was sensitive to a lack of the ties that bound together past, present, and future in his childhood China, a lack he summed up by describing America as “a world without ghosts.” With our memorials we are giving dead Mars its first ghosts. And that binds us to it in new ways. I have felt close to Mars in many ways while writing this book. I have looked at meteorites that came from Mars and lost myself in the writings of people who have imagined it in greater detail than I would have thought possible. I have relaxed in Tom Meyer’s backyard a few miles out of Boulder, a happy guest in the heart of the Mars Underground as we lie on our backs and gaze up at the evening sky. I have pored over maps and felt that I could walk out into them. I’ve watched Bob Zubrin make people really—really—believe they were on their way there. I have looked out of aircraft windows and almost felt I could imagine what the bulk of Olympus Mons would look like off our wing, filling up a state’s worth of the American West and shouldering aside the sky; I have watched the planet itself from a parking lot in Flagstaff. I have listened to my godson Jack talking in his five-year-old matter-of-factness about what he or I might wish to do there. I have looked out across the beautiful curve of the Gulf of Lyons from the foothills of the Pyrenees and seen it as the shoreline of a flooded basin on a terraformed paradise (and I have got out my compasses, calculated the radius of curvature and tried to work out which basin might best fit the bill: something a bit bigger than Gusev would do nicely).
But I don’t think I have ever felt closer than in the lobby of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. On the floor is a Viking lander, a flight spare almost identical to the two that sit on Chryse and Utopia; on its side is a plaque that identifies it as the Thomas Mutch Memorial Station, named in honor of the geologist in charge of the lander science program, who died in 1980. Displayed with the plaque is the explanation that while the lander is the property of the museum, the plaque is merely on loan; one day NASA will take it away and mount in on the lander’s dusty twin, a few hundred miles from the mouth of Kasei Vallis. There is no date; there is no policy; there is no guarantee. But the things we say on gravestones have a special value, a requirement for commitment. You’re not meant to touch the plaque. I did. It meant more about Mars than a meteorite.
John Clute made his comments about science fiction as a set of fairy tales about the afterlife in a review of Stan Robinson’s Red Mars, and it specifically excepted Robinson. Though the tale may be set after many of us are dead (his characters arrive at Mars around Robinson’s seventy-fifth birthday), the book and its sequels are committed to the idea that the history it relates is, for good or ill, continuous with that which we inhabit—the same commitment that the Mutch plaque makes. The only worlds that end between now and then are the worlds that end with every death; the political and economic constraints of today are carried forward to tomorrow and outward to Mars. The new planet is not the New World that some of its would-be settlers want it to be; it is a new part of our Old World.
I sat next to Stan Robinson at the NASA Ames terraforming meeting in the autumn of 2000. At the podium, Charles Cockell was talking about his biological research at Haughton crater in Canada. The most interesting environments he had found were what he called microoases. Four feet across, or a bit more, and more than ten inches deep (the permafrost comes close to the surface), the microoases are tiny islands of rich plant life in an environment where 99.7 percent of the surface is bare rock (the figure is precise: Charles measured it himself). These oases, he told us, are the sites where large animals have died. Sometimes a musk ox will wander into Haughton and fail to wander out. Very slowly, its body will decay and enrich the soil. Wind-borne seeds will sprout in it; lemmings will find the soil there softer than its surroundings and chose it for their burrows. Once the lemmings are established, the oasis takes on a life of its own, their droppings replenishing the original bequest of nutrients. How long these oases last is not yet known. Decades, certainly; centuries, possibly. Robinson and I looked at each other; Nathalie Cabrol, a few seats away, had the same idea; so did a number of others across the auditorium—you could see them lifting their heads, or scribbling a note, or nudging their neighbors. Here, we all thought, was a way to put the poetry into ecopoiesis.
Take away the water and a human body contains some forty pounds of interesting nutrients. On the Earth, we take these for granted. On Mars, they would be worth something. A human body, carefully desiccated, might in a few decades, or a century, be sent to Mars for the equivalent of a few thousand dollars; dead people are far cheaper to send there than live ones. Entry packages could be designed that got the remains down to the surface in one piece, rather than spreading them through the atmosphere, and implanted them a little way into the regolith, so the wind would not carry them away. A little microchip would carry the deceased’s name and some version of his or her life story; a carefully tended database would record where each of the loved ones had ended up. And that would be it, until the ecopoiesis began. Then, when warmth and water returned to the surface, life would begin to spread and would start to make use of resources. The seeds of the future would find their nutrients and would make use of them.*
Would people really wish to be buried on Mars? It is far from home, by any standards. But some might make the choice. When trying to find figures on mineral extraction for the discussion of supergreenhouse gases in the previous chapter, I came across a brief biography of Frank Taber. Taber was a man of the West, born in Oregon, died in Montana. He married his college sweetheart and joined the Bureau of Mines before moving to Bitterroot Valley and running what was then the largest fluorspar mine in the world (which is why the search engine offered him up to me). He flew his own plane and relished the new insights he got into the land from on high; but he was also happy scratching a rock with his pocket knife and examining the results with a hand lens. He gazed at the moon and stars as Gene Shoemaker had; I imagine he would have enjoyed a glass of bourbon with Dave Scott. I’d have liked to have met him.
I mention this because Taber’s biography is a virtual tombstone on a site run by the Celestis Foundation. Celestis offers its clients burial in space. A sample of Taber’s remains, along with those of twenty-five others, made up the second Celestis payload, launched in 1998 and now in orbit around the Earth. The Web site will even tell you where to look to see the satellite. Gene Shoemaker went further, being buried, in part, on the moon; some of his ashes were on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft when it was crashed near the moon’s south pole (deliberately) in June 1999. The spacecraft bore a small inscription from Romeo and Juliet:
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
For Gene, the moon was the right choice. Mr. Taber, though, might have chosen Mars if the option had been available. So might many more in years to come, if given the chance. They would be little capsules of earth—of Earth’s earth—moved to Mars. Their locations would be mapped and there they would sit, awaiting the dream of a new life. To some ears this may sound macabre, but the funeral practices of other times and places often do. It might sound like a desecration, the dumping of human waste on a pristine land.* But this is much more like a sacralization than a desecration. The transformation of body to microoasis would be an ecopoietic sacrament.
Terraforming is a mighty dream, but it can be started in small ways. Chris McKay has recently been narrowing his focus down to the first vital step: putting the first living thing from Earth onto Mars. Not an astronaut. A flower. Back in the 1970s Penny Boston showed the Underground that you could grow things in pretty Martian conditions; the little glass Mars jars with thin carbon-dioxide atmospheres and even thinner radishes were one of the main attractions in the attic room in the physics building that they called their own. But there is a difference between knowing something and seeing it done. Sojourner’s makers knew their little rover could roll around a rocky sandpit—they’d seen it do so on a back lot at JPL. But it made all the difference to them and the world to see it done on Mars. The same applies to the flower. Sojourner was, in NASA jargon, a technology demonstrator. The flower, says McKay, would be a biology demonstrator. He imagines a tiny greenhouse on a lander; it might use Martian soil, chemically neutralized, or it might not; it might extract some water from the Martian atmosphere or from ground frost, or it might not. But it would use Martian air and Martian sunlight, and from those a plant would grow.
At present, NASA still has a policy of cleaning its Mars-bound spacecraft almost as thoroughly as it cleaned the Vikings in order to protect the environment. This makes a lot of sense in many ways, especially for spacecraft looking for life. But at sometime this planetary protection will have to be relaxed. After all, the rhetoric of Mars exploration, as spoken by space program administrators and politicians, is that one day people will go there—the question is always said to be one of when, not if. Keeping a human presence utterly sealed off from the environment would be completely impossible. So at some point, we have to let life loose on Mars. The plant would be the first step.
It wouldn’t be a rose. Roses are too slow to grow, too hard to tend, too woody and whatever else. But in my mind’s eye I see it as a rose, a rose that reminds me of the rose garden in Greenwich Park, of the boutonniere I wore on my wedding day, of the rose bed my father dug for my mother in the garden of the last house he ever lived in, of the roses my wife Nancy looks after on the back step of our gardenless apartment. I see its bud opening and the faint sunlight on its petals; I imagine water evaporating from its leaves, and more being drawn up from the gently irrigated soil, moistened by canals a trillionth of the size of Lowell’s planetary monstrosities. I see hundreds or thousands of similar flowers carefully tended in earthly classrooms by children following the Mars flower’s progress, their growth minutely measured as life unfolds in parallel on two different planets. I see it fading in a strange way, withering without rotting in a place where there are no bacterial worms to eat away at it, where a rose cannot be sick—but must die, nonetheless, as the seasons demand. Planetary protection be damned, I see it dropped from the greenhouse to the soil below. There the UV and peroxides will work their dark magic; the rose will be distilled into a few grams of carbon dioxide, water, and a little nitrogen.
Those molecules would spread across the planet. On Earth the atoms are used to life; life takes them in and spits them out repeatedly. Your every breath contains atoms breathed in and out by your most distant ancestors; each new tree takes bequests from the world’s crematoria into itself. The great dance cycles on as it has for billions of years; but now it can be started again. When people go to Mars, their breath will carry faint traces of your own, because your breath is spread around the world. When plants grow on Mars they will take up that breath and fix it in new soil. When people die on Mars, they will leave there atoms that once made up a tiny part of your ancestors. Even if no terraforming takes place, a transfer will still have occurred.
And if the greater changes come, then, by and by, the faint traces of that first rose and the exhalations of all humanity will pass through the tissues of a living world. The carefully charted constellation of microoases will come to life like a vegetable empire as seeds that fall on the grave sites blossom and grow. Perhaps no one will come by to read the microchip epitaphs for centuries, if at all; perhaps the life of the planet will be reserved for plants and microbes, avoiding the vast trouble of releasing the levels of oxygen needed by animals. Either way, the oases will still grow, even if the flowers are unseen, the fruit unpicked, the herbs unsmelled: saxifrage in cracked stone, sweet alpine strawberries, rosemary for remembrance.
Dead as we may be, breath by breath we will go to Mars.
*At around the same time Isamu Noguchi carved a beautiful sculpture called Planet in Transit, its black granite redolent of the grave.
*In his magisterial history Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama devotes a short chapter to the aspect of humanity that Thomas Cole and others were most willing to work into their wildernesses: the sign of the cross, frequently in the form of a headstone. It’s an aspect of their art that has not been picked up much in portrayals of Mars; though Bonestell painted a Martian burial, there is no cross in evidence, just a flag. The title of Schama’s chapter is “Vegetable Resurrections.”
*On the subject of waste, it must be admitted that in the Arctic a latrine site will do almost as well as a dead musk ox; this is why the punctilious researchers at Haughton ship all their excreta out at the end of each field season.