Is It Okay to Touch Mars?
[Music] Hey, Vauce! Michael here. No rocks from Mars have ever been brought back to Earth, and no human has ever touched anything on Mars. But that's about to change. National Geographic has asked me, and Jake, and Kevin to talk about Mars because they have a show coming out soon, all about how we are planning to turn Mars into a home, a place where humans will soon be living and working.
It's a plan set to become a reality in the 2030s. That's cool, but beyond just how, there are everyday life questions raised. We would be literally beginning society all over again on a new planet. Whose laws will Martian colonists follow? What kind of watches and calendars will they use? And what will be lost if we, as a species, gain Mars? Is it okay to touch Mars? What will its flag look like?
In 1998, Pascal Lee designed a flag for Mars that was flown at the Hutton Mars project research station, where how humans might live and work on other planets was studied. The flag is a nod to Kim Stanley Robinson's famous Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars trilogy. Should we have the technological and political ability to do so at some point in the future, we could terraform Mars from a red planet into a green one with life, and then a blue, watery, Earth-like one.
This flag has since been used by a number of Mars exploration societies and was even flown into space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery by astronaut John M. Grunsfeld in 1999. That all makes it a pretty good contender to be the first official flag of Mars. The Outer Space Treaty, of course, prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies, but it doesn't necessarily stop private individuals or companies from doing so.
But since it takes months at best to actually go between Earth and Mars, and minutes to even communicate at light speed, how would and who would enforce laws on Mars if Martian colonists did things that we here on Earth disagreed with? What could we do to pressure them otherwise or punish them for being criminals? One idea, extraterrestrial liberty, is to just give up control and release those headed to Mars from all current earth-based laws their nationalities hold them to, to allow them to become Mars citizens, able to make laws, elect, live, and die the way they want, free from any currently existing state.
That might be reasonable, but it raises another question: When is Mars? Now, what time is it there for colonists on Mars? And an Earth watch would be of very little help. A day on Mars, the time it takes the planet to turn around once—sunrise to sunrise—is about 2.7% longer than on Earth. I mean, that's pretty close, but over time it adds up gradually.
An Earth watch on Mars would drift, and the time it said would tell you very little about night and day on the red planet. To combat this, scientists on Earth who work with robotic rovers on Mars use Mars time. They actually live by it. You can download a program that tells you solar times on Mars, or do what many scientists have done: get yourself a watch that runs 2.7% slower than usual.
If every second, every minute is 2.7% slower than it should be, it'll be perfect for matching Mars's rotation. That could spell trouble for Martian colonists, though, who wish to tune in to live events on Earth, like sports or award shows. But again, given the immense travel time between the two, Earthlings and Martians may find that having similar timekeeping systems just isn't really that necessary in their everyday lives.
Okay, right now, on Earth, it is um, 20:16. As we know, one trip through all the seasons from now will have been a year, but in that same time, Mars will have only traveled part of the way through its seasons. If Martian colonists continue to use Earth years, that's okay. But it would mean that for them, years would feel a bit arbitrary. They wouldn't contain environmental cycles like ours do.
Perhaps if they feel disconnected and emancipated from Earth calendars, they'll just use their own Martian year system as well. A few such calendars have been proposed, some divided into familiar week and month lengths, but with about twice as many of each per year. The thing, however, that fascinates me most about putting humans—living things—on Mars is a more touching topic, literally.
Humans will likely touch the red planet in our lifetimes, and the first to do so will be famous. But jokes on them! I mean, we, me, you—we're all already touching Mars. Let me ask you this: Where did you get that body, that one you're in right now? It's made of atoms and molecules, but they come and go. You eat and breathe and absorb things, use them for a while, but eventually shed or exhale, or otherwise pass them through. A month from now, your skin will be completely different skin—all new cells.
The red blood cells you've got now will only be with you for about another four months. Like a water wave, you're a temporary arrangement of stuff. A really neat thing that dirt does, but not all of this dirt that you are—the dust in from dust to dust—is Earth dirt. New stuff is always falling to Earth, anywhere from 5,000 to 300,000 kilograms of space rock dust, debris, asteroid fragments a day, some of which inevitably winds up being you, part of your body for a while.
Now, that may sound like a lot of material, but compared to the mass of Earth, it's small. Some of these ET rocks are debris that's been floating around our solar system since the planets formed. Some has come from asteroid collisions, some has even come from interstellar space beyond our solar system.
What's neat is that because atoms and molecules are so small, even the tiny amount of interstellar material landing here adds up to a lot at the atomic scale. A physicist estimated that if only 0.01% of all the extraterrestrial material falling to Earth comes from beyond our solar system, and even if only 10% of that stuff is water, that would still mean that 50 billion—5 billion with a B—of the water molecules in your body right now, as you watch this video, were in interstellar space fewer than 1,000 years ago.
Some of the space material falling to Earth comes from planets like Mars. When powerful enough impacts occur on its surface, Martian material can reach escape velocity and begin an interplanetary journey. Rarely, but occasionally, this journey terminates on Earth. It's been estimated that Martian meteorites only fall to Earth about once every 50 years or so. That's a long time in human years, but in planet years, that's nothing.
Your physical body right now likely contains billions of atoms that used to be on Mars and arrived here on Earth in the last 1,000 years. If you consider stuff from Mars that's been here on Earth for less than a millennium as being Martian, well, it's tenable to say that you are 0.00000000000000 00000000000000 1% Martian.
But before you get too excited, there's a difference between Martian debris that was roasted and exploded in our atmosphere centuries ago, and actual still-on-Mars material. The difference might be small, or it might be big. When Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the Moon, they didn't splash down and then run into the arms of family members. Instead, they were locked away in quarantine for three weeks, just in case the Moon harbored any kind of previously unknown or unthinkable life form, an organism or virus that could have come back to Earth with them—one that Earth life had never encountered and thus never been naturally selected to resist the threat of a moon bug pandemic.
Wiping out life on Earth was just large enough that NASA took precautions. Though later, Buzz Aldrin admitted on Twitter that their quarantine facility wasn't perfectly sealed. Luckily, no moon germs escaped and infected all Earth life, probably because there weren't any to begin with. After Apollo 14, the moon quarantine requirement was lifted because it had become sufficiently clear that the Moon was devoid of life. But Mars? Well, we still don't know exactly.
We haven't found macroscopic life on Mars, but the possibility of tiny things hasn't yet been ruled out, and the incredible consequences contamination could have mean it remains a serious concern. There's even an advocacy group of scientists from all over the world called the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return. But it's not just back contamination that matters—the transfer of extraterrestrial organisms to Earth. There's also forward contamination: the transfer of Earth organisms to things in space.
Any life that might currently exist on Mars could be incredibly vulnerable to things we here on Earth barely notice but accidentally bring there. How sad would it be to one day find life on Mars only to realize that it's all dead? Everything it had to teach us about itself, about Mars, about the solar system, about life—wiped out just a few years ago by a virus stowed away unbeknownst to us on one of our robotic missions!
Extremophile organisms have been found that may be able to survive such a trip. Life here on Earth may have even arrived from space in that way—a concept called panspermia. So should we be scared of monsters beyond our atmosphere? I'm reminded of the glowworm in their larval stage. The glowworms stick to the tops of caves and leaves, usually above water sources. Their glow resembles the night sky, the tempting expanse of other worlds beyond our own.
Like us, bugs are attracted to this vista, believing it's a way out of the cave. Of course, it's not. The glowworms dangle sticky mucus strings from their perches—snares that capture their prey—are the real stars. No different, a clever trap that keeps alien predators fed. Probably not, but that hasn't stopped space agencies like NASA from forming divisions like their Office for Planetary Protection, a group that oversees plans for missions that might bring Earth and alien life into contact.
Currently, all missions to Mars must satisfy the Coleman-Shan equation. This sterilization restriction works to ensure that the probability of us contaminating places like Mars with foreign Earthly organisms is not zero, but at most 1 in 10,000. That was considered acceptable given the number of Mars missions we'd probably do before fully understanding its exobiology. So far, we have no evidence that anything is alive on Mars right now or has ever been.
But that brings us to ANSMET, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites—an effort that since 1976 has found more than 20,000 extraterrestrial rocks in Antarctica. The first one they found in Allen Hills in 1984 was special for one thing: it's believed to have originated on Mars. It's estimated that about 17 million years ago, this piece of rock was blasted off the surface of Mars by a meteor and reached terminal velocity—about 5 km/s—fast enough to leave Mars entirely.
After flying through space for a very long time, 13,000 years ago, it got captured by Earth's gravity and fell to our planet's surface. Twelve years after its discovery, the presence of what looked like microscopic fossils was discovered on the rock. Could they be evidence of Martian life? The claim didn't convince everyone, but to this day, the structure's exact origins haven't been explained. How exactly to tell whether they're caused by living things isn't agreed on either.
But the finding was a major event in the field of astrobiology and the public's understanding of it. The discovery was possibly so momentous that U.S. President Bill Clinton gave remarks about it, saying, "Today, Rock 841 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered."
After his statement, these are the two questions he was asked by the press: Did he believe abortion rights were under attack and where did he get his tie? The thing is, alien nanobacteria don't wear ties. They don't legislate or govern us or control our lives or look anything like us. If they exist, we'll most likely be in control of them, and probably actually not even notice them under our boots.
So does protecting or preserving them not matter? I mean, should we just not let them get in the way of our progress as a species? Well, that's a fundamental question that touches upon what we want our purpose to be in this universe. Labeling parts of Mars "don't touch" as parks would be a great way to preserve it as it was before we came, so that our grandchildren and their children can see what Mars was like for, well, most of human history.
Others have argued that we shouldn't go at all, that Mars is best left to itself. Humans ruin things, and what right do we have to alter Mars if we can help ourselves? Still, others say, why stop at natural parks? If we find viable life on Mars, it may be struggling to survive—a rare relic, perhaps from a time when Mars was more hospitable to life.
They argue that we should help change Mars so that those remaining Martian organisms can thrive and multiply and be their best selves. With our technology, intelligence, and sapience, we, perhaps alone in the solar system, have the power to help them—and we should help ourselves to Mars.
Second, these aren't just hypothetical philosophical problems, by the way. With plans for human missions to Mars just a bit under two decades away, they're questions we will actually need to answer quite soon. Should humans go to Mars? It would be a great way to spread out, to diversify our habitats, so we're still around should anything happen to Earth. Of course, it does give us more space for more people, but for what?
Ultimately, Jupiter doesn't care if there are 7 billion humans or 7 trillion. The volcanoes of Io will continue erupting whether or not we write any more poems about love. If humans were wiped out today, the fundamental forces of the universe wouldn't change, and distant galaxies would continue their journeys into the abyss beyond the observable universe, just as they already are and always will.
What good is life to the universe? Perhaps it has none, but we are possibly its greatest and only hope to find out. We may not treat life as well as we could, but whatever this darn life thing is, keeping it around might very well be up to us. We owe it at least that much. And as always, thanks for watching. For more on how we plan to make Mars home, check out National Geographic's new global event series, Mars, premiering Monday, November 14th at 9/8 Central.