On his book Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go
Cover Interview of May 06, 2018
In a nutshell
Life on Mars is about both the astronomers who have
made claims about the existence of past or present life on Mars and about those
discoveries themselves. It is about exactly how much we know about possible
life on Mars and how certain we are about what we think we know.
Life on Mars is also about two more things. First,
some important ethical and moral issues arise should we contemplate the
possible human colonization of Mars in the near future. Would our views
regarding human colonization of Mars change if we knew the red planet were already
home to a native biology? Second, how should big science, in particular space
exploration and planetary science, be done when under the intense scrutiny of
the national and international media? NASA just launched the TESS mission (to
find planets around nearby stars) and the InSight mission (to study Mars). Through
their tax dollars, Life on Mars readers together are paying billions of
dollars to fund these missions, and therefore all discoveries made via these
and similar missions are and should be public knowledge. As a result, the
tax-paying public quite justifiably wants to know what scientists discover. And
they want to know now, not in three years when scientists and the public have moved
on to the next big thing.
For more than a century, feedback between some media-savvy
scientists who depend on public money to support their projects and friendly
reporters has created a Mars mania. That mania may have led both scientists and
the lay public to expect more of Mars than Mars may have to offer. At times,
under the heat of television lights and the pressure from real-time
interviewers, the mania has led eager scientists to speculate and draw profound
conclusions from their research that might be true but which also might lie beyond
the limits of their data and their actual knowledge. In calmer circumstances,
for example on the pages of carefully written papers in refereed, scientific
journals, they often have drawn different, or more nuanced, conclusions. By
knowing more about Mars, readers will become wiser consumers of new discoveries that will be reported about Mars.
I think this book is unusual in that it does more than
discuss the science and the scientists involved in studying Mars. Teasing apart
the real Mars from an imagined Mars is difficult. I am, at heart, a teacher and
so my intent is to help readers with this, but I also ask my readers to think about the
issues and make their own judgments.
My readers should prepare to go on a journey with me to
telescopes on high mountains scattered around the surface of Earth, to
telescopes in Earth orbit and in Mars orbit, and even down to the surface of
Mars. When our journey is finished, readers will have become knowledgeable
about Mars. I hope they also will have become curious to know more about Mars. In
fact, readers should demand that NASA, ESA, and the astronomy community
continue to dedicate significant resources to learning more about Mars. The
answers we hope to obtain are simply too important to not pursue.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Life on Mars is about both the astronomers who have made claims about the existence of past or present life on Mars and about those discoveries themselves. It is about exactly how much we know about possible life on Mars and how certain we are about what we think we know.
Life on Mars is also about two more things. First, some important ethical and moral issues arise should we contemplate the possible human colonization of Mars in the near future. Would our views regarding human colonization of Mars change if we knew the red planet were already home to a native biology? Second, how should big science, in particular space exploration and planetary science, be done when under the intense scrutiny of the national and international media? NASA just launched the TESS mission (to find planets around nearby stars) and the InSight mission (to study Mars). Through their tax dollars, Life on Mars readers together are paying billions of dollars to fund these missions, and therefore all discoveries made via these and similar missions are and should be public knowledge. As a result, the tax-paying public quite justifiably wants to know what scientists discover. And they want to know now, not in three years when scientists and the public have moved on to the next big thing.
For more than a century, feedback between some media-savvy scientists who depend on public money to support their projects and friendly reporters has created a Mars mania. That mania may have led both scientists and the lay public to expect more of Mars than Mars may have to offer. At times, under the heat of television lights and the pressure from real-time interviewers, the mania has led eager scientists to speculate and draw profound conclusions from their research that might be true but which also might lie beyond the limits of their data and their actual knowledge. In calmer circumstances, for example on the pages of carefully written papers in refereed, scientific journals, they often have drawn different, or more nuanced, conclusions. By knowing more about Mars, readers will become wiser consumers of new discoveries that will be reported about Mars.
I think this book is unusual in that it does more than discuss the science and the scientists involved in studying Mars. Teasing apart the real Mars from an imagined Mars is difficult. I am, at heart, a teacher and so my intent is to help readers with this, but I also ask my readers to think about the issues and make their own judgments.
My readers should prepare to go on a journey with me to telescopes on high mountains scattered around the surface of Earth, to telescopes in Earth orbit and in Mars orbit, and even down to the surface of Mars. When our journey is finished, readers will have become knowledgeable about Mars. I hope they also will have become curious to know more about Mars. In fact, readers should demand that NASA, ESA, and the astronomy community continue to dedicate significant resources to learning more about Mars. The answers we hope to obtain are simply too important to not pursue.