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.
Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan
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Marty, from the headline I expected you'd make me laugh. Instead, you made me (and many others from the comments I've read so far) think. Way to go Marty! And, way to go Huffers!
Great post. Thanks Marty!
Shalom.
The problem is that the experiemnt of life has only one observation post, the 3.7 billion year horstory of living organisms on planet Earth. That fact is at present inescapable. There is not one piece data that indicates that there is, or has been anything "living" anywhere in all of time or space. The fact that there is evidence of liquid water on Mars, the most terrestrial of the planest, is interesting but hardly unexpected. The fact that streams of the past flowed from higher ground to lower also seems less than surprising--if water on Mars flowed uphill, not that would be news. The sad fact is that the tens of billions of dollars spent proving that water exists on Mars or that it flows downhill, and all the other interesting science, has been sadly diverted from studying the origin and evolution of life, the only place it exists, right here on Earth. More money has been expended on this last Mars shot than all the money expended by all the scientists looking at the origin and evolution of life on Earth for the last 100 years.
Donald Wolberg:
I would be interested in seeing those figures. I don't see how anyone can possibly know how much money was spent worldwide on the research of life and evolution? Do you count all the money spent on digging up dinosaur fossils? Is that any different than looking at the history of Mars?
What about all of the money spent of the Hubble and other telescopes?
How do we benefit form a picture hanging in an expensive museum?
It all boils down to whether we want to live in a utilitarian society like the former Soviet Union or Taliban Afghanistan or do we want to live in a society that values beauty and exploration?
Being silly is not an excuse for lack of knowledge. Building museums is different from research in zoology or botany or paleontology, which remains mostly university based by people who mostly teach, not do research. In point of fact most natural history museums are not doing well and actually employ very few researchers--there are only a few handfuls in North America. Budgets are easy to figure--the professional societies that have paleontologists (vertebrate and invertebrate-micro or paleobotanical) have memberships in the thousands, and perhaps 1/2 to 1/3 are graduate students who will be unemployed or underemployed. Most research is via grants, and most grants are in the few to tens of thousands, not the millions or billions that a rocket launch and technology requires. Indeed, it is likely that the total budget for research in origin of real life on Earth, or its evolution over 3.7 billion years is in the few millions at most. Likely too is the fact that this amounts to the price of one engine on the launch vehicle for the Phoenix, and the Phoenix has shown that there is water where we assumed there was water. A very poor investment in science.
I didn't know the Russians had utility bills. I thought that's why there were all communists.
By the way, I read that archaeologists working in the Sinai Desert announced this week that they discovered the original tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. Amazing find! Using carbon dating they were even able to determine that the rock upon which they were written was at least 4.5 billion years old.
"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."
The orthodox, sadly, almost always choose change or ignore the facts rather than alter their rigid mindsets. The discovery of life (real or potential) on Mars would merely be the latest in a long line of world altering scientific discoveries (Galilean astronomy, germ theory of disease, genetics, evolution, Newtonian and Einsteinian physics) that the Bible and other such texts haven't a clue about. At some point I hope the rest of us can reach the realization that the recorded mythology of ancient tribesmen is not a valid guide for living in the world, or the universe.
Orthodoxy is not restricted to religion. There are fundamentalist politics, as well. These are hte politics where facts do not intrude on beleifs or ideology.
Bravo... well said.
The constitution is barely holding up as a document by which to run our country... so why should we be so crazy about texts that are thousands of years old?
yikes
Great post! But let's face it... it would be better for us Jews if they had picked some better-liked vegetable instead of asparagus (except broccoli). :-)
Yes, and I heard that surrounding the ice on Mars they found a broken champaign glass and a footprint!
"If scientists believe 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?"
Because things you can't see can still exist and be detectable. For instance, we can't see the earth's core, either, but we know it's there for the same reason we know about cosmic dust: it's effect on gravity.
So after 51 years what has the space program shown us?
The #1 fact?
That the Earth is the nicest place anywhere in our neighborhood. Without a doubt.
No place else is even close.
And we really should be doing a better job of taking care of it.
Decades ago, when I read bushel baskets full of Sci Fi novels each year, I read once that humans would eventually become physically emaciated but would develop larger heads because we were physically lazy by nature, but had ever-expanding mental interests.
Much later, when I started reading and hearing about the descriptions of the occupants of UFO's I developed a theory... first, why should another life form happen to have two eyes, two legs, two arms and walk upright when most of the other reasonably intelligent life on our planet doesn't match the rough physical description of humans?
Here is the theory... suppose these "aliens", if they actually exist, are from the Earth's future? What if they are US?
What if they are coming back to see if they can fix where humans SCREWED UP?
If the time paradox theories are correct, they certainly would be careful to avoid much contact with this generation's humans because one mistake might preclude their own existence!
Just something to consider... I have often considered writing a Sci Fi novel based on that premise, but have never taken the time to do so... yet.
provoice...
I suspect you've already encountered it, but if not I recommend Isaac Asimov's "The End of Eternity" A foundation of historical and temporal engineers are tinkering with the timeline trying to "fix where humans SCREWED UP". Another, unknown group in the far future has blocked off that time period, and... well, I won't give away more in case someone here decides to pick up a great book.
I agree with the large head mythos, that's a given, but if they were truly our descendants, I would also expect enormous genetically enhanced breasts and penises.
So maybe if there is ice on Mars then Israel can be moved there and the Palestinians can get their country back.
Ah, another 6 degrees of Israel player.
Let's see Mars-Jews-Israel-Palestinians. OK, only 4 steps. You win.
Several things (although I am in sympathy with displaced persons everywhere ... historically there was not a Palestinian nation there was Transjordan which was not Palestine ...
And, I frankly would have preferred that the powers that be would have given us Jews Germany after the war --- alas ...
Since there were always Jews in the middle east including in Transjordan --- and since Israel has now been a reality for 60 years ---- we can work together to create a sustainable peace ... or the ice on Mars won't matter a damn since we may take the rest of the planet down with us ...
There are ways to work together ridding ourselves of extremists on both sides ... and then recognizing who hegemonically has served to oppress both groups (Jews and Palestinians) --- and directing our angst and anger in that direction
Their country? Hmmmm. A better case can be made for the Ottoman Turks getting the entire Middle East back. Only problem is they lost WW I and their empire. Then too, there is an embarassing fact that Jew seem to have been in the majority in Jerusulaeum, sinc 1870 or so and there was no Tel Aviv. Most of the country was empty and land was purchased from absentee Arab landlords living elsewhere. Of course the fact is that Arabs left when order to leave by the Egyptians, Syrians and others so it would be easier to kill the Jews and then give the land to them. Unfortunately, the Jews did not cooperate in 1948, 1956, or 1967. In point of fact also, there would not be a West Bank or divided city or Golan issue, if for example, Jordan had stayed out of the 1967 war, as asked by Israel. The then King was more afraid of being assassinated by his Arab allies if he did stay out and he lost. History is a terrible thing--all those nasty facts.
Thank you for the fun article. However, your basic premise: "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?" is wrong.
Mystics are absolutists who absolutely believe in a thing. A mystique's paradigm can't be faulted.
Scientist are not absolutists. Their paradigms are designed to be faulted in order to increase their knowledge. They only believe in possibilities within paradigms.
That is, scientist try to fault the current paradigm until it creates more questions than it can answer. It's a given, If a paradigm can't be faulted, then it can't tell us anything about the universe.
Further, so-called "dark matter/dark energy" were tacked onto existing relativistic formulas in order to make some sense out of not only an expanding universe, but also one that is gaining speed. That is, in the end we don't know all that much about our universe....
Still, maybe old Socrates was right. Even the dumbest of us ( Menlo ) are born knowing the sum total of the knowledge of the universe. Maybe mystics have somehow made the connection... which is filtered through their particular cultural bias and ends up twisting certain philosophers/philosophies into gods/religion... Say, Buddhism, or Judaism, or
Christianity?
Either way, maybe we know next to nothing about the universe, but it sure is fun to think about it.
The issue is not whether dark matter or the big bang is more "believable" than the Trinity or Vishnu. The crux of the difference is the process of science and and the process of religion. Religion puts belief first and then observations are made to fit. Because one has faith in a loving God the bible he gave us must be true. Science puts observation, evidence and logic first and tries to develop theories that fit observation. It is open to revision when new observations are not consistent with the dominant theory. At the frontier of science there will always be hypotheses that are not fully supported by observational evidence. But for the hypothesis to be science there must be, in principle, a way to test these hypothesis with observations.
Science is a process for learning about our universe. The sets of theories we currently have are merely provisional. This does not make them weak. The big bang and evolution are supported by vast amounts of evidence coming from many directions.
The scientific view of the universe pays off in predictions that can have a very high probability of success. We have confidence that airplanes successfully fly to their destinations, not because we have faith in any particular theory of aerodynamics and structural dynamics, but because centuries of observation have given us a very high confidence in the scientific processes that developed those theories.
Does anyone have an aspirin?
This was my first reading of the day -- a great start to the week! Just when I didn't think I could have become a bigger fan.... Thanks again, Marty.
Really refreshing! Thank you.
Believing in God is akin to believing in string theory. Both require faith because neither is comprehendible; both inspire awe; both are the subject of endless debate. And both beliefs are compatible. String theory however makes my head hurt. So score one for God I guess?
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