Ice on Mars: Good for the Jews?

I have always been only slightly embarrassed by my avidity for reports of UFOs, ETs, new planetary systems, semantic transmissions across the galaxies and every other kind of disruptive wow.

My embarrassment stems not from a reflexive belief in reports of bright lights flying low and fast over Stephenville, Texas or Chilliwack, British Columbia; I am as skeptical of tabloid headlines, and as cautious about the madness of crowds, as any other child of Voltaire or Mad Magazine.

No, what makes me sheepish about this stuff isn't my intellectual credulousness; it's my yearning for some indisputable event that will bust up our paradigms, some unruly discovery that will force us to remake from scratch our stories about who we are, where we come from and where we're headed.

Now that the Phoenix Lander has confirmed the existence of ice on Mars, and soil you can grow asparagus in, I'm rooting for them to find amino acids. I want it to be conceivable that Mars is a mere billion years behind Earth on the path to evolution, or maybe, sadly, a couple of billion years ahead of us on the road to extinction. And if they don't find organic molecules, I'm rooting for some strange silicon-based information-rich chains in that Martian soup.

I want what's found to make us say, Whoa! I want us to experience the kind of radical amazement that will require sending conventional cosmology to the repair shop. I want data that upend our accepted accounts of origins and evolution. I want scientific cover for the most boldly creative re-imaginings of the nature of life and of our own place in the great chain of being. I want to see the concepts of meaning and purpose up for grabs. I want new discoveries about stardust to make both ancient texts and current textbooks wholly inadequate for understanding the mysterium tremendum of the physical universe.

I want the discovery of extraterrestrial life -- or "life" -- to change everything. I don't mean an eruption of "War of the Worlds"-style paranoia or of "Close Encounters"-style romanticism. I'm thinking instead of that 4-million-year-old black monolith that astronauts find deliberately buried on the moon in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, an object identical to one in the movie's opening "Dawn of Man" sequence. Forget the middle part of the movie, the voyage to Jupiter to examine a third monolith circling that planet, a trip sabotaged by the mutinous supercomputer HAL; think instead about how the movie ends.

There is an amazing light show, followed by actor Keir Dullea's accelerated aging in a weird Louis XVI-furnished room, followed abruptly by Dullea's transformation into the Star Child, a fetus in a glowing orb looking down from space on the Earth. If you're of boomerish vintage, you know that plenty of stoned debates about the meaning of the movie's strange conclusion followed its initial release (I know, I know: you didn't inhale). The interpretation that worked best for me was that, basically, we humans don't know nothing.

Is evolution the merely pointless, meaningless consequence of having world enough and time, or is our current state of consciousness just too embryonic to grasp the telos of the universe? If cosmologists are right about the Big Bang, what's the difference between the essential preposterousness of that account of ontology, and the "tsimtsum" -- the great contraction -- of kabbalah? If a starry night or a baby's finger can make you marvel at the sheer existence of anything at all, why should God be a less plausible account of materiality than quantum physics' favorite theory: superstrings vibrating in 11 ineffable dimensions of space-time? If scientists believe, as they do, that invisible dark matter and unobservable dark energy make up the vast majority of the universe, then why should mystical accounts of an unseeable cosmos be any more inconceivable?

Jews -- my particular tribe -- don't need monoliths, or Martian ice water, to set them off in these speculative directions. Jacob was renamed Israel because he wrestled with God, and his descendants still spend their days wrestling with the idea of God, no matter what the news might be from the Large Hadron Collider, the SETI Arecibo Observatory or the Phoenix Lander on Mars.

Nor do I underestimate the capacity of fundamentalist literalism -- in my tribe, orthodoxy -- to assimilate even the most alien of singularities that scientists may turn up. Should instruments examining a soil sample from the fourth planet's northern arctic plane reveal a Martian version of Horton's Whoville, there will no doubt be exegetes aplenty who will calmly conform such a disorderly discovery to the literal narrative of Genesis.

But for those who despair about the postmodern dead end that the history of consciousness has led to (and I include myself among them); for those too undisciplined to reliably integrate yoga, meditation, beginner's mind or other spiritual technologies into their daily lives (yes, my hand is up); for those who can sleepwalk past a rose, forget to say a morning thank-you for existence, or succumb to anti-mindful pathologies like boredom or killing time (guilty, guilty and guilty) -- for us garden-variety broken vessels, a thrilling we-interrupt-this-program bulletin from the scientific magisterium is arguably not too childish to ache for.

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A version of this post appears as my weekly column at www.jewishjournal.com.

Comments

[TheViewFromCydonia]

Save for succumbing to "anti-mindful pathologies like boredom or killing time" it's the first time in my life I've ever come across anything that gave voice so concisely and exactly to my (and, I'm sure, many others) sentiments.

Many thanks..

[Mykel]

I think we came from Mars, after ruining it.

[mbaty]

Oh Earth! Teeming with endless life of endless varieties, all popping up in their environment, perfectly suited for the place it exists. From the macro to the micro, from the dinosaurs to the smallest bacteria, and, above all, the mystery of it. The sun and moon and Earth perfectly synchronized in orbit so that this planet can support our life. Don't we all long to make sense of it? To know that this is not all there is, and to understand why. The word "God" has been hijacked by mental ideas made up by men who longed to understand--and who thought that they did. I prefer the Jewish "Ein Soph," the undefineable limitless force/source.

[EbonBear]

Alas, you forget the fundementalist's limitless capacity to simply ignore or explain away (which is quite different from actually explaining) anything which contradicts their preferred interpretation of their preferred holy book.

I actually share much of the feelings you describe. I don't want simply ice particles or space asparagus. I want dragons.

When I was a small child, I was taken through a cave system (I think it was in Chedder Gorge) and the final cave contained a thirty-foot long animatronic dragon that roared and blew smoke at tourists. I stood entranced by that dragon for what seemed like an age before I was interrupted. As an adult (still with a love of dragons), I now it was just animatronics, clever machinery but that's what I would like: That sense of awe and wonder and suddenly feeling very small in a universe which could contain something so amazing.

I want dragons.

[ibsteve2u]

A monolith, eh? And what if after years of work we find that the inscription reads:

"Road closed due to biological hazards. Please retrace your route and turn left at Alpha Centauri."

[Arion]

Oh, my goodness. That is really good. It reminds me of those times in Talmud where the Rabbis tell God he is wrong. ("Torah is yours, God, but Talmud is ours. You lose") It reminds me too on an evening long ago, in the Home for The Elders of Zion in the lower East Side. It seemed that someone had failed to put the foil protectors on Pincas Dov's, books, so a flying saucer had landed in the back yard. (we all could see the indentation). The problem was, the Pepsi Cola Company owned controlling share in the Saucer, and they had lodged pepsi bottles inside Schmuel. Nothing for it but to have Schmuel taken up to Bellevue for an X-ray. The radiologist on duty could only do ankle X-rays so that is what we got.

[terramartom]

Just to save a bit of time for future conversations. There is no GOD!
We live and we die. We are not so colossally important to anything other than ourselves! Do the math - Bllions of Stars and planets - one Almighty GOD?
However flying pink Elephants is something I can truely believe in any religious philosophy!
Poor Planet Earth inhabited by human ant colonies.

[kantcould]

And on that bright new day when this messianic gametoid finally shows up, who will we look to to start resetting our epistemological clocks? Why Marty Kaplan, of course. Keep posting, dear soul. We need your thumb on the scales for balance.

[Jonahson]

If we ever land on a planet where there is intelligent life, the evangelist would be on the next shuttle to that planet.

[Heidfeld]

Very interesting article... and thank you for it.

But why not take it even one step further. Why not re-badge some of our "defense" money (or "war on terror" money) into the space program? Think about it.

When we find concrete proof of life on another planet, all religious texts (quaran, bible, torah...) will go right out the window. All religion will go right out the window for that matter. And there goes 95% of the motivation for terrorism.

So yeah, throw a few billion at the space program as part of the effort for world peace. Oh, and I still say we should send every religious male a copy of Penthouse when they turn 18. Let them read it and then decide what to do as an adult. I'm willing to be it would do more to harm terror recruitment than anything Bush and his 800 billion have done in the last 7 years.

[BaileyWo]

"No, what makes me sheepish about this stuff isn't my intellectual credulousness; it's my yearning for some indisputable event that will bust up our paradigms, some unruly discovery that will force us to remake from scratch our stories about who we are, where we come from and where we're headed."
_________________

In fact, that could very easily happen if scholars weren't so afraid of publishing their work. I read that in 1984, during the Reagan Administration, archaeologists discovered a scroll in Cave-11 at Qumran (by the Dead Sea) that explained what happened to the Arc of the Covenant., lost now for some three thousand years. Turns out the Prophet Elisha was having trouble with his chariot and stopped by to get a charge from the Arc. Some guy from the motor pool came over and crossed wired the chariot from the Arc, hooking the negative cable up to the positive post on the Arc.

Needless to say, when you're dealing with that much power and you make a simple mistake like cross wiring your chariot's energy cells, it's no wonder that no one's seen Elisha or the Arc since!

Of course the poor guy from the motor pool was quickly forgotten but you should have seen that chariot going up in flames!

[indypete]

Thanks for clearing that up.

[themodernleader]

Those of the numan race who have given thought to the meaning of life and other things yearn to learn that we are not alone. We want to know that the Good Lord is with us; that our existence was preordained; that we are here for a purpose ordained by our creator; that life in our own image is everywhere or somewhere in this vast, improbable universe; that we are a chosen life-form specifically created to have purpose in the universe.
Yet, with the use of science,we are continually confronted with information that disputes our wishes, propositions and doctrines. Our origins suggest that our present status is as much the result of chance and sheer luck as to any grand design or law of nature. When we recognize that the human species became almost extinct about 70,000 years ago with only about 2200 individuals populating the entire earth: when we consider that human groups expanded and collapsed countless times in the thousands of years until civilization started to gain a foothold about 8,000 years ago, then we are wise in assuming that we are alone and our climb or descent in civilized conduct can hold only ourselves accountable; and we are wise in continuing our search for answers for controlling and orienting the forces of nature for the benefit of all mankind.

[sophie]

Has anyone ever wondered that if god supposedly created us and everything in the universe, why didn't he make ALL the planet habitable, filled with life, filled with brain-dead religious people worshipping him? Why just this planet? And if god is all that, why not forgo the dinosaurs and prehistoric man and the drawn-out long process of becoming what we are today and make mankind a knowledgeable, ever-worshipping species from day one? I don't get it.

Of course when something is found, many religious leaders and their blind followers will either dismiss it or conjure up something in order to pretend they have all the answers as to why god did this or god did that. Remember when one evangelical leader claimed that Hurricane Katrina was sent by god to punish the gays in New Orleans because they were to have a gay parade the day she hit? Hmmmm...using that tried and true theory, when gays were finally allowed to marry in California, what did god do?? He punished Iowa with floods? Odd.....why the silence from the religious crowds about how California is still on the map when men and women are allowed to get married to whomever they love? It's 2008 people....not the dark ages. Open your eyes! . And god really didn't do anything to create "this". God was only invented when a bunch of old men got together to sell religion to the masses and to scare the poorest people into submission.

[CFAmick]

I also think that you'd have to question the motivations of someone who endowed us humans with such poor knowlegde of health care for 99% or our existance.

[indypete]

".... why not forgo the dinosaurs and prehistoric man and the drawn-out long process of becoming what we are today and make mankind a knowledgeable, ever-worshipping species from day one?..."

According to the fundies, he did... or at least from day 6 anyway.

The Iowa floods for the California gays? Maybe His eyeglasses were in the shop getting fixed and He simply missed... ever think of that?

Semi-unrelated, but I'd be interested to hear what the fundies would have to say if we did track down some honest-to-goodness Little Green Men (not just pond scum, real thinking, breathing LGM's with a civilisation). The scrambling would definitely be worth the price of admission!

[Nommo]

Never discount the possibility that in some few years down the road there will be discoveries and proofs
that will blow all previous science right out of the weeds. The real problem here is that we have not really done much in the way of advancement from those who came up with the silly notions that we can't now get rid of, or that never really took hold in the first place. Particularly the 'thou shalt not kill' one.

[guajiro]

So do I Marty. I can just imagine that when we get back some of that Martian soil, some nerdy, computer geek will find a new way to make computers so fast that we will achieve super-conductivity, thereby eliminating the need to have war in the middle east over oil and the need to have dangerous nukular plants around our neighborhoods. Because of super-conductivity, space travel will become common and we'll seed Mars and other planets with life, even starting the colonization of Mars, all before the year 2012. With never-ending energy will come new electrical power plants for poor third world countrys and the end of poverty as caused by nature or a nation's resources. Of course, as always, we will continue to have to fight the planet's evil corporate doers and their agenda of impoverishing everyone but their shareholders.