The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man (31 page)

Though the sum total of Zubrin’s suggestions may sound daunting, the technological hurdles we’ve surmounted in just the last century make anything seem possible. There is an adventuresome spirit in man that could make it happen. Think of Captain Robert Scott and his expedition to the South Pole. Hopefully a trip to Mars might have a happier ending.

As we look to the future,
Mars might also be a good place to understand our past and perhaps even the riddle of first life. Two-thirds of the surface of Mars is 3.8 billion years or older. And Mars is a lot less volcanic than Earth. Since it is small, less than twice the size of our moon, the Red Planet cooled more quickly than Earth and developed a thick, immovable crust. The surface of Earth is constantly renewed as the continental plates collide, sink, and are rebuilt, a product of plate tectonics. Earth’s fossil record has yet to cough up the earliest steps that led to life, the appearance of cells, photosynthesis, and DNA. The hope is that Mars, whose crust has remained stagnant for aeons—leaving any fossils far more intact—might be a better place to understand the formation of life than here on Earth.

The draw here is that MIT and Harvard researchers think it’s possible that
all life on Earth is descended from microorganisms on Mars that were carried aboard meteorites that traveled to Earth. The climates on Mars and Earth were once much more similar, so life that was viable on one planet might also survive on the other. Also, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth, blasted loose by asteroid impacts and then hurled through interplanetary space before striking Earth’s surface. And microbes have demonstrated an ability to survive the initial shock of such an impact, as well as the fortitude to journey through space and arrive on another planet.

So what about current life on Mars? Though things look a little rough on the Martian surface, could life exist underneath? Scientists have been looking at the deep and dismal corners of our planet to find
out just how tough an environment life can withstand. I interviewed Bob Wharton, who passed away in 2012: he was a rugged researcher who studied karate under Chuck Norris and discovered life in Antarctica at the bottom of frozen lakes. At Lake Hoare in Taylor Valley, about eight hundred miles from the South Pole, his crew spent a half day melting a hole in the twenty-foot-thick crust of ice before climbing in and descending to the lake bottom. What they found were bizarre microbial mats—tissuey structures that are pigmented green, red, and purple to catch the limited light. “It’s a fairly advanced form of life,” said Wharton. “You’ve got a cell wall, and you’ve got DNA inside the cell to pass on information to its offspring. It’s not elephants, but it’s a big step in the evolution of biology.”

Despite a mean temperature of minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 33 degrees Celsius) above the ice, underneath everything’s toasty and above freezing.
The ice provides what scientists call “thermal buffering.” Wharton also looked for life on the 14,179-foot (4,322-meter) volcanic summit of Mount Shasta in the state of California. He sampled microorganisms there in acid hot springs. “The water would have burnt holes in my clothes,” said Wharton, “but microorganisms were thriving.” Could life survive in similar environments on Mars?

Even if life doesn’t exist there now, it could someday. Part of making Mars a more hospitable place to live might require some monumental efforts to change the atmosphere there by a process known as terraforming: deliberately modifying features of the planet to be more like Earth. We could take a lesson from our own global warming problems and start releasing CO
₂
into the atmosphere of Mars. Melting Martian polar caps would be a good start. That would liberate CO
₂
and possibly methane, both greenhouse gases locked up in the permafrost. The liberated CO
₂
would thicken the atmosphere and, like pulling on a blanket, would warm the place up nicely.

Zubrin has several ways to get this blanket growing. One is to establish factories on Mars to produce artificial greenhouse gases. Raising the temperature of the Martian south pole by 7 degrees Fahrenheit
(4 degrees Celsius) this way could initiate a runaway greenhouse effect, which could trap even more heat. One promising and long-lasting greenhouse gas fit for the job would be halocarbons such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the kind formerly used as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in some aerosol cans. However, we would have to choose our halocarbons carefully, picking only those without chlorine.

“Using CF gases [as opposed to CFCs] will allow the ozone to persist, while the CF gas adds to the greenhouse effect,” says Zubrin. Fluorocarbons, such as CF4 (Tetrafluoromethane), could be used instead of CFC gases to create a greenhouse effect without destroying the ozone layer.

Martian explorers might use large orbital mirrors to concentrate sunlight on the poles. A space-based mirror with a radius of 77 miles (125 kilometers) reflecting light back on the Martian south pole could do the trick. An aluminized mirror about four microns (four-thousandths of a millimeter) would weigh about 220,000 US tons (200,000 metric tons), which would be impossible to haul from Earth. But the space-based manufacture of the mirror could be accomplished on a Martian moon or an asteroid.

There is a political aspect to this as well. If America wants to pick up the race to Mars again, the nation would have to time it right. The US window of opportunity, according to Zubrin, is eight years. That’s the maximum length of an American presidential administration. In 1961, President Kennedy set a goal of reaching the moon by 1970. By 1968, administrations had changed, and even as the Apollo astronauts were landing on the moon, President Nixon was putting the brakes on future projects.

With the shuttle flights terminated, the US human space flight program appears to be in limbo, and
space travel may have to be an international effort. In 2012, a Russian-Chinese effort called Fobos-Grunt (“Phobos-Ground”) was set for an ambitious sample return mission to Mars’s largest natural satellite, Phobos. However, Fobos-Grunt failed to perform an orbit-raising maneuver two and a half
hours into its flight, and it never left Earth’s orbit. The aim of taking soil samples on planetary moons remains a respectable one, but it may be one for the future. Remember, there were multiple failures in both the US and Soviet space programs before there were successes.

Carl Sagan, a popular American astronomer, cosmologist, and prolific author, was a strong advocate for a combined American-Soviet effort. He saw it as a way of bringing together former rivals and building trust, but both sides were reluctant to share missile technology, which could be used to send warheads. The shuttle-Mir program provided a taste of the benefits of cooperation. Between 1994 and 1998, space shuttles made a total of eleven flights to Mir, the Russian space station. American and Russian scientists also conducted experiments to determine how animals, plants, and humans would endure in space. With the demise of the US shuttle program, cooperation has diminished.

Zubrin thinks that the best choice is for the US, perhaps in conjunction with Russia, the European Union, and China, to offer a prize of, say, $20 billion for the first private organization to land a crew on Mars and to return them to Earth. This path could bring down the costs of space travel substantially. Zubrin believes that space travel under bureaucratic control is a recipe for high prices, and he thinks the private sector is often vastly more efficient because it does not require consensus to try something new. You need only one innovator and one investor.

According to Zubrin, the real cost of such a mission, pared down and under private control, would be closer to $4 to $6 billion. In this scenario a $20 billion prize would be a nice incentive. Offering a range of prizes could get things going: Let’s say $500 million for a successful Mars orbiter imaging mission. Perhaps $1 billion for the first system that uses propellants of Martian origin to lift a 4.5-US-ton (4-metric-ton) payload from the surface of Mars to its orbit. And a $20 billion grand prize to someone or some organization to send at least three crew members to the Martian surface, remain there for one hundred days, take three overland trips of at least thirty-one miles (fifty kilometers), and return the crew safely to Earth.

J. Craig Venter, through his companies Synthetic Genomics and J. Craig Venter Institute, based in Maryland and California, is trying to develop
a DNA sequencing machine that could be landed on the surface of Mars, look for life in the soil, sequence it, and beam it back to Earth—the benefit being that the task could be accomplished without having to return the machine to Earth. Jonathan Rothberg, founder of Ion Torrent, in Connecticut, a DNA-sequencing company, is working on a similar effort.

Mars One, a Dutch nonprofit foundation, wants to set up a permanent space colony on Mars. The company thinks that the sale of broadcasting rights of a Mars reality show would be enough to finance an actual mission sometime in 2023. The company would start with televised episodes covering the selection of astronauts, trip preparations, and the flight to Mars. After landing, the company would then start streaming operations continuously from the surface of the Red Planet.

The Mars One plan is to launch 2.75 US tons (2.5 metric tons) of supplies in 2016, a Rover in 2018, and about six landers with living pods, supplies, and support systems in 2020. The first four astronauts wouldn’t arrive until 2023. A second human group would join them in 2025. The catch, however, is that the trip would essentially be one-way: there are no planned return flights.
You would live your life out on Mars, and your remains would be cremated. The company says that the Martian community would decide what to do with your ashes.

Still, the company says they’ve had more than 100,000 applications from would-be astronauts eager to make the trip. Mars One will offer “to everyone who dreams the way the ancient explorers dreamed” the opportunity to apply for a position in a Mars One mission.

Lots to offer here, just no welcome-home party.

The greeting was more forthcoming when I pulled up to Biosphere 2 in the high desert near Tucson, Arizona. Pristine desert grasslands speckled with mesquite trees as well as prickly pear, cholla, and saguaro cacti surround the facility at the foot of the Santa Catalina
Mountains. John Adams, the assistant director of the facility, took me inside to a real-time mini world with a tropical forest, a million-gallon ocean, a small savanna grassland, a fog desert, and mangrove wetlands. Biosphere 2 is a large futuristic structure of glass atriums covering an area equivalent to 2.5 football fields. The facility was one of the first to experiment with what life might be like on another planet, though its purposes today are a bit different.

“
Biosphere 2 offers a way to study the effects of climate change on these different ecosystems but in a controlled environment. Scientists here are essentially performing carefully monitored laboratory-type experiments, but on a much grander scale,” says Adams.

Biosphere 2 began its own evolution as a different experiment. Its original purpose was to test the ability of man to survive in a closed, self-contained system—one completely shut off from the outside world, such as the one the explorers might encounter on Mars. The “Landscape Evolution Area” of the modern facility, now used to study soil formation, was formerly the “Agricultural System.” Space Biospheres Ventures, the original developers of Biosphere 2, had hoped that food grown in it would satisfy the nutritional needs of the first eight pioneers who entered the facility in 1991.

That team was
dependent on the facility’s different biomes and infrastructure for the food they ate and the air they breathed—which turned out to be the things that gave project directors the most trouble. The experiment lasted two years. The first year was rough for the gourmets in the group. The crew lost an average of 16 percent of their pre-entry body weights. However, Roy Walford, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the medical doctor for the first Biosphere 2 experiment, was then promoting a low-calorie, nutrient-dense diet as a way to increase longevity. So even though the team claimed “continual hunger” in their first year of isolation, Walford happily reported that the group’s cholesterol and blood pressure both went down.

But the researchers here suffered from more than loose pants;
they also needed to adjust to the levels of CO
₂
, which fluctuated wildly.
Most of the pollinating insects died, though insect pests like cockroaches boomed. Morning glories overgrew the rain forest, blocking out other plants. The worst was that oxygen inside the facility, which began at 20 percent, fell gradually over sixteen months to 14.5 percent. The project began pumping oxygen into the system to make up for the failure, but the press caught them and cried foul.

Space Biospheres Ventures officially dissolved on June 1, 1994, after a second mission failed and federal marshals served a restraining order on the on-site management team regarding questions of authority. If Biosphere 2 had been on Mars, the occupants might have starved to death or succumbed to slow asphyxiation.

Biosphere 2 is an example of how long-term occupancy of a space station on a planet that is millions of miles from Earth could be extremely dangerous and fraught with perils that science may not yet know enough about.

On the positive side, if we can overcome these hazards, then a Mars station might offer a place where
Homo sapiens
can truly differentiate—becoming a new species. Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, envisions a permanent research base of closed environments on Mars as the next most logical place to live outside of Earth. Still, she claims a child who grew up on the Red Planet, with one-third the gravity of Earth, would never have the physical or skeletal structure to survive on our Blue Planet.

“It is likely that a second-generation Martian would be physically unfit to walk unaided on Earth, at least without intense weight and strength training,” says Stoker. “Just imagine if you suddenly weighed three times what you weigh now. Could you walk? Would your deconditioned heart be able to pump the blood volume needed? Whether we know it or not, we are constantly doing a lot of work against gravity.”