Pathfinder's Sojourner and Yogi, Credit: IMP Team, JPL, NASA
by Dr. Hugh Ross
"Today’s weather on Mars" headlined the news for weeks this summer, as millions of people eagerly followed the Pathfinder’s every move. Researchers are still sifting through the mountains of raw data beamed back to Earth, and our knowledge about Mars and the entire solar system is advancing.
The focal point of this interplanetary drama has been the search for Martian life. Let me repeat what I published long ago: I expect life remains to be found on Mars—Earth life remains carried to Mars by several means, including solar radiation pressure. This well known information seems lost on NASA scientists today. And I can understand why as I hear them interviewed on radio and television. To offer the world "evidence" that life sites abound in the universe has become the cherished dream of many.
I have different reasons for excitement over the Pathfinder’s mission. Most importantly, it is paving teh way for future missions that will build our knowledge not only of hte red planet, but of our entire solar system. This knowlege will, I have reason to believe, help build an even stronger case for our blue-green planet’s divine design, for Earth’s unique and "amazing" suitability for life.
Meanwhile, photo images suggest that the canyon in which it rests was cut by moving water, possibly liquid or slushy water. Combine this finding with an earlier discovery of frozen water (a tiny amount) in Martian polar caps, and you can imagine why speculation about Mars life is rife. According to widely accepted (though unsupported) assumptions, water plus "biotic" chemicals brought to Mars by comets, makes indigenous Martian life a sure bet.
Or does it?
Water certainly is abundant throughout our galaxy. Astronomers observe water in all large heavenly bodies cooler than about 4000ºK. This past month, water was discovered even on the sun.1 Permanent liquid water, however, is rare. While Mars in its infancy may have held some water, that water didn’t last long. The planet’s gravity is too weak to hang onto it. The Martian poles contain a tiny amount of frozen water only because incoming comets continually replenish the supply, a supply quickly (and mostly) lost to interplanetary space. The Martian atmosphere is so thin and frigid that a liquid drop of water landing on the planet’s surface evaporates in one second. Finding a puddle on Mars would be no easy task, even in the equatorial regions where the surface temperature occasionally (I should say rarely) rises above freezing.
So-called biotic chemicals found in comets—methanol, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and a few simple cyanide chemicals2—mixed in liquid water do not, experiments tell us, develop into living systems on their own, even in the best possible environment or in the maximum time period the universe will allow3. So it seems unrealistically optimistic to hope that Mars, with its severe conditions, has ever cradled indigenous life.
As for the latest on the widely publicized, "maybe-fossil-bearing" meteorite from Mars (the rock ALH84001), three geophysicists in Hawaii have published their findings that the carbonate globules said to have arisen from biological processes instead were crystallized from shock-melted materials,4 materials exposed to intense radiation and/or extreme heat such as a meteorite encounters in penetrating our atmosphere. I neither read nor heard any mention of this finding in the popular news media. Did it seem unimportant, or did it throw cold water on society’s brightest hope for an alternative to hope in Christ? God only knows. I have my guess.
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1997 Issue (Vol. 11, No. 3)