Iron and Sand

I was catching up on my reading of Analog Magazine, which I highly recommend to anyone that is a fan of Science Fiction. I've been a reader off and on for almost 40 years. Go to www.analogsf.com today and get your subscription. You may never see it on newsstands. They have it in audiobook and electronic versions, but I've always loved the art that goes with the stories. It's all hand drawn.

The story Iron and Sand by Michael Flynn in the July/August 2008 issue was about people in a distant future finding pre-human artifacts on a planet that I imagined to be very much like Mars. Digging through the ruins of the extinct culture reminded me very much of the recent podcast on Assyrian history I wrote about before this entry. There's something evocative about the image of exploring dusty ruins. The interesting flavor of this story was just how advanced and incomprehensible this civilization had been, yet it was now gone without much of a trace, no survivors hanging around anywhere.

With this story kicking around in the back of my mind, I was listening to NASA's JPL podcast on the 5 year anniversary of the Martian explorer rovers Spirit and Opportunity. I wrote about them on July 15th and September 11th, 2007 in this blog. See: http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/07/spirit-opportunity.html and http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/09/rover-update.html

I've had a growing affection for this project and its unparallelled success. The thought of these almost indestructible little robot rover probes continuing to survive way beyond anyone's wildest speculation, all just to learn and discover and explore - how could you not love it?

The JPL podcast started by marking the 5th anniversary of the landings, Spirit on January 5th and Opportunity on January 24th. John Callus, JPL Project Manager for the rovers, was being interviewed. Through a failure of a wheel on the Spirit rover, the engineers at JPL determined that they could drive and steer the rover by dragging the wheel. The wheel cut a furrow in the soil behind the probes, and they discovered silicates, an indicator of water. Both rovers uncovered evidence of water, which brings hopes that life once existed there. Callous asked, "Why did Mars become a cold dry barren planet? Another way to express these questions is: Are we alone, and what is our future? Exploring Mars helps us to address these questions."

I had one of those resonance/revelation moments. "Are we alone?" This sounded like a response to the Iron and Sand story, people kicking around on a dry dusty planet looking for someone's traces. Then I wondered what he meant. The rovers aren't looking for people (intelligent beings), they are just looking for life. John Callus meant, are we - life - alone, or is there life in other places than besides Earth. I'm confident that there is life out there. The odds are stacked heavily in our favor. 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and as we look deep into space, countless trillions of galaxies. Then spread that out over 13 billion years, and it's just inconceivable to me that we are the only place life could self assemble.

The angle of the Iron and Sand story bent my train of thought into an unexpected place. What might we find in our future explorations that will be completely unexpected? We're looking for life, but what if that's not all there is to find? What if there are other forms of intelligence that are not life as we define it? What if there are other forms of self-assembly besides life? Something like machine intelligence? Something aware built into the structure of matter or energy? Something symbiotic to life that we have always had an inkling of understanding about, and just defined it as God or Religion? What will we find that we don't even know to look for yet? I want to find out.