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A City, Plucked from Time
Jan. 5th, 2004 07:19 pmI'm kind of bemused at the speed with which humans adapt to change. I remember how fascinated I was as a child with the blurry B&W Mariner 4 photos. Those were amazing. They showed details of Mars that no-one had ever seen before. I used to stare at those, and imagine somehow riding along on the Mariner, so close to Mars, seeing the planet hanging there red and silent, filling the sky.
Now we've got this new device sending back clear, sharp close-ups of where it landed, and it's mildly interesting, but on the whole pretty much what one expects Mars to look like. The interesting part's going to be the colour micrographs of the rocks and (hopefully) fossils or living plants. It would have been hard to imagine back then that something like this could ever become routine.
I'm not entirely convinced that the Viking experiments didn't find life, even though the result was dismissed as a chemical reaction. The brief frantic burst of gas production followed by inactivity is about what one might expect from microbes adapted to live in a cold, dry environment if they're suddenly flooded with water and heated to earthlike temperatures. Maybe it really was metallic peroxides, but on the other hoof, maybe it was Martian bacteria suddenly getting more water and heat than they were equipped to handle.
Looking at the pictures from Spirit, I note that the dust-filled crater off in the distance has a dark mark in the dust. They're saying this might be a bounce mark from the landing. It's interesting then that the subsurface dust may be darker than the top dust. Again, there's ways to account for this apart from life, but it's intriguing. I'm waiting to see the little robot roll out there and see what's under that dust layer. Some part of me still manages to hope it'll uncover the golden road that leads to the city with the broken dome.
Now we've got this new device sending back clear, sharp close-ups of where it landed, and it's mildly interesting, but on the whole pretty much what one expects Mars to look like. The interesting part's going to be the colour micrographs of the rocks and (hopefully) fossils or living plants. It would have been hard to imagine back then that something like this could ever become routine.
I'm not entirely convinced that the Viking experiments didn't find life, even though the result was dismissed as a chemical reaction. The brief frantic burst of gas production followed by inactivity is about what one might expect from microbes adapted to live in a cold, dry environment if they're suddenly flooded with water and heated to earthlike temperatures. Maybe it really was metallic peroxides, but on the other hoof, maybe it was Martian bacteria suddenly getting more water and heat than they were equipped to handle.
Looking at the pictures from Spirit, I note that the dust-filled crater off in the distance has a dark mark in the dust. They're saying this might be a bounce mark from the landing. It's interesting then that the subsurface dust may be darker than the top dust. Again, there's ways to account for this apart from life, but it's intriguing. I'm waiting to see the little robot roll out there and see what's under that dust layer. Some part of me still manages to hope it'll uncover the golden road that leads to the city with the broken dome.
