Pat Kane: Maybe Rover really will find life on Mars

Or, to be precise, stones from Earth that may share the same indicators of microbial life as rocks on Mars. Behind him passes the seaside resort’s famous painted Crocodile Rock. In this TV report on space exploration for life on other planets, it’s the only visible monster.

There’s another monster off screen, though. I’m watching a frankly delightful item from this week’s The Nine on BBC Scotland. It tells the story of how a Scottish geologist on the isle of Cumbrae is helping Nasa scientists prepare for their next Mars mission.

Professor John Parnell does this from his Millport kitchen. He guides scientists around Europe by video screen, showing them how to identify rocks that might show the conditions for molecular life inside them, alive or fossilised.

By doing so, Parnell is helping these scientists rehearse how they will manipulate their probes and instruments on the EU’s Mars rover, named Rosalind Franklin (after one of the discoverers of DNA). As we hacks say, there’s more than one kilt round this. A leading operator of the Franklin rover has been recruited from the University of Stirling, a Dr Christian Schroeder.

However, back to that other monster in the background. The ExoMars mission was slated to begin in September 2022 – a calendar window where Earth and Mars are optimally aligned.

But who was going to launch it into the starry, starry night? The Russian space agency Roscosmos, from a spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, using Proton rockets and Kazachok landers ...

Ping. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, chunks of this project have just been falling out of the sky. On March 17, the ESA (European Space Agency) cut off all co-operation with their Russian counterparts, who reciprocated in kind – 20 years of collaboration and mutual support brutally shut down.

The European project leaders are now scrabbling around among themselves, and appealing to Nasa and the US, to help them with rocket transportation for their Mars rover. But the Russians have specific expertise that will take time to replace. They also have to wait for the best planetary alignment (which happens every 26 months).

All of which implies a mission no earlier than 2026 or 2028. But even then, as you’d imagine, astrobiology might not be that high in the funding priorities of a Covid-chastened, war-torn, food-stressed Europe.

Oh, it was going to be so geekily beautiful. Just look at the Rosalind Franklin rover! The more capable its design – jointed wheels to negotiate unpredictable terrain; bat-like wingspreads of solar panelling; a long neck with binocular sensing equipment at the head – the more adorable it looks.

It even has plutonium deposits radiating away inside it, for back-up power. The RFR was tooled up to drill two metres below Mars’s surface, in an ancient riverbed, where a record of microbial life would be more likely to be found.

The Rover currently sits in a secure unit in Turin, being “flushed with argon to ensure it is kept in the pristine condition needed to minimise the chances of contamination from Earth-based microbes”, reports Scientific American. “Some experts wonder if those resources [hundreds of millions of euros] might be better spent elsewhere.”

AS I have argued in these pages quite a few times, I don’t know if it could be better spent than on an astrobiology mission. How well are we doing down here, treasuring our common existence on a gorgeous but choking planet? Are we up to scratch? Hardly.

What the eco-thinker Jeremy Rifkin calls a “biospheric consciousness” (or Jeremy Lent calls “ecological civilisation”) is hopefully arising, but barely on the horizon. And will maybe come to fruition too late.

COP conferences come and go, George Monbiot keeps bringing out brilliant books with a generally inert outcome, Greta and the kids have their moment, and then … some spasm of late empire, whether territorial (Ukraine is Russia!) or resource-based (open up the next oil/gas field!), puts a boulder under the apple-cart wheel. Human self-governance, faced with the various horsemen of existential crisis, is failing badly on its own terms.

We need some cosmic perspective – and as a resolute scientific materialist, I mean that physically (though I am relaxed about all my spiritually questing friends). If there is life on Mars – even if we find that there had been life on Mars – it should shock us into some kind of collective, species-level realisation. But what? And would it be in the right direction?

I very much appreciated the physicist Brian Cox this previous week, doing the rounds for his UK Horizon Worlds tour (with Robin Ince) this August and September. Cox laid out fluently what the ethical consequences of discovering a “universe of microbes” on our doorstep might be.

“It looks like we have good evidence life was present 3.8 billion years ago and the first civilisation to appear on Earth was about now, give or take”, Cox said on the BBC last Sunday morning.

“So it took the best part of four billion years to go from the origin of life on Earth to a civilisation … That’s one-third of the age of the age of the universe, and that is a long time. So that may indicate that microbes may be common, but things like us may be extremely rare.”

Cox continued: “Many of our political leaders maybe don’t really think … is it possible that this is the only, let’s say, the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns? That matters. I don’t think that’s some kind of whimsical idea. It might focus the mind.”

The Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, also speculated along these lines earlier this week. His twist is that any “intelligent life” contacting us from elsewhere “is unlikely to be a flesh-and-blood civilisation, but some exotic and possibly malfunctioning electronic entity”, Rees said in New Scientist. “The timespan of our technological civilisation is just a few thousand years, and it could be less than another thousand before [we are] usurped by electronic entities.

“That is a very thin sliver of time, not only compared with the three-and-a-half-billion years of Darwinian evolution, but also to the billions of years that lie ahead. If there were another planet in the galaxy that had evolved like ours, it would be most unlikely we would catch it in this sliver.”

Usurped by electronic entities? Given the current runaway nature of computation and artificial intelligence, I find it hard not to imagine that such conscious machines will be the next stage in this planet’s evolution of consciousness. (The fluid, gentle robots at the end of Spielberg and Kubrick’s movie AI have always made this prospect real for me).

Another challenge: if humans want to be more than “spam in the can”, as the old rocketeers say, then they might well have to biologically re-engineer themselves for the conditions of space travel and other planets. The outcome of that might even be an entire new speciation of humanity.

However, in the meantime, epauletted generals on both sides of a new Cold War are fantasising about “full spectrum victory”, by means of a proxy war in a desperate but determined country. Which, predictably, has collateral damage – including putting the inspirational potential of astrobiology on the back burner.

Let’s leave the last words to the great David: “This film is a saddening bore/Cause I wrote it 10 times or more.” A better life on Earth, please.