Seth Shostak, PI Of Many A Mars Op... Reflects On What Our Current Trip There Might Eventually Yield...

Okay. I must admit -- this is has been a childish, but life-long, fantasy of mine. . . having been more or less raised on Frazetta's various lurid renderings of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantastic tales of the planet Barsoom. And it was in fact the 18^th Century drawings Shostak mentions below, that inspired ER Burroughs to write of wild deaths and lives -- on his wholly-imagined version of the red planet. Which in turn fed Frazetta's imagination as a boy. . . and thus. . . his, fed mine.

Here's a bit of the more "science-ladened" end of it -- but to be sure, it brims with shimmering poetry, for me as well. . . even all these years later:

. . .[Our rover] will trundle around Mars’ gaunt landscapes in a search for sediments. These could contain clues to organisms that pitched and swirled in long-vanished seas. . . .

[I]f Mars ever had life, the dead will surely outnumber the living, and are therefore more likely to be found. The landing site for Perseverance, Jezero Crater, looks like a former lake basin fed by a dried-out river, a happy hunting ground for a rover on the prowl for the desiccated remains of early inhabitants. . . .

The samples cached by Perseverance will be collected and returned to Earth by a future mission, to be analyzed in terrestrial laboratories [for proof of former life]. . . .

[I]f that happens, it will be more than an interesting science story. The parade of history will be split. Just as the past is now divided into “before” and “after” the Copernicus. . . so too will discovering long-expired Martian bacteria permanently change our self-regard.

[F]inding Martian life would compel us to abandon the notion that we are privileged, that humans are the sole sentient inhabitants of the universe. Indeed, we would not only have a strong indicator of cosmic company but could infer that it is widespread. . . .

Perseverance could put us back on a road long traveled. In the 18th century, telescopes became powerful enough to discern the polar ice caps and surface markings on Mars. The Red Planet was the only world we knew where conditions might be similar to those on Earth. This likeness launched a durable belief in Martian life, and the Perseverance rover is the latest gambit by science to hunt it down, dead or alive. . . .

And of that long lost. . . mountain poetry, now:

. . .Mars, a coal of fire is rising,

Rising slowly in the frigid twilight sky
Fierce it glows beyond the pine trees,
With a redness all its own,
Rising lonely, while the night breeze
Stirs the branches, with a moan. . . .

-- Catherine Cate Coblentz,
Mars Hill, Lowell Observatory
Flagstaff, Arizona 1924

Indeed. She climbs into the colder winter night's skies. . . with a moan. . . .



And, I for one, will be waiting right here, on Jasoom -- with baited breath, to hear her sighs. . . telling us of her long ago departed. . . lives.

नमस्ते