On his book Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go
Cover Interview of May 07, 2018
The wide angle
Life on Mars is a history book that is about the
future. Mars is in our future, probably the very near future. What we already
know and what we likely will learn in the coming decades about life on Mars should
determine how we proceed in our attempts to launch rockets and send astronauts
to Mars. In real terms, we may invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the
next century in our attempts to colonize Mars. Therefore, understanding Mars is
important.
Like so many others, I have always been fascinated by the
idea that life could exist in the universe beyond the Earth. Does it? That’s a
big question. As a child of the space age, my young mind was stimulated by our
exploration of the Moon and then the nearest planets in the solar system. From
Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, from Ranger to Pioneer to Mariner to Viking to
Voyager, I travelled the solar system with astronauts and unmanned explorers.
My teenage mind was drawn into deep space by Arthur C. Clarke (The Star),
Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Isaac Asimov (The Foundation
Trilogy) and Frank Herbert (Dune). Then I discovered the world of
professional astronomy, in which I have immersed myself and made my own
discoveries about the processes through which planets form around other stars. Finally,
I came full circle: in teaching, my students helped me rediscover the deep
passion for knowledge about the universe that lies beneath the big questions
they ask in my classes. One of the biggest of these, repeated to me year after
year for the better part of three decades, has been ‘Does life exist on Mars?’ This
book is my attempt to make myself whole by writing my own chronicle of Mars, by
telling a story about Mars and about those who study Mars in the search for
Martian life.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
The wide angle
Life on Mars is a history book that is about the future. Mars is in our future, probably the very near future. What we already know and what we likely will learn in the coming decades about life on Mars should determine how we proceed in our attempts to launch rockets and send astronauts to Mars. In real terms, we may invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the next century in our attempts to colonize Mars. Therefore, understanding Mars is important.
Like so many others, I have always been fascinated by the idea that life could exist in the universe beyond the Earth. Does it? That’s a big question. As a child of the space age, my young mind was stimulated by our exploration of the Moon and then the nearest planets in the solar system. From Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, from Ranger to Pioneer to Mariner to Viking to Voyager, I travelled the solar system with astronauts and unmanned explorers. My teenage mind was drawn into deep space by Arthur C. Clarke (The Star), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Isaac Asimov (The Foundation Trilogy) and Frank Herbert (Dune). Then I discovered the world of professional astronomy, in which I have immersed myself and made my own discoveries about the processes through which planets form around other stars. Finally, I came full circle: in teaching, my students helped me rediscover the deep passion for knowledge about the universe that lies beneath the big questions they ask in my classes. One of the biggest of these, repeated to me year after year for the better part of three decades, has been ‘Does life exist on Mars?’ This book is my attempt to make myself whole by writing my own chronicle of Mars, by telling a story about Mars and about those who study Mars in the search for Martian life.