Garden Earth Staff Contributor and co-author of Dead Mars, Dying Earth, Dr. John E. Brandenburg was quoted widely in today's Florida Today story on the NASA announced Mars water finding. Details

What's Mars
Got to Do With It?

In order to understand Earth, it helps to understand its unique place in our Solar System. We are the last abode of life: the survivors. Our nearest neighbor Mars was once a living planet, perhaps as alive and blue as our own. Vast oceans covered its northern plain. The surface water that remains on Mars is but a remnant of what once flowed in rivers, cutting vast channels. Its skies were blue (and what little atmosphere remains is still blue) and life, at least bacterial, perhaps more evolved, lived under its skies as it now does on Earth.

Consider that:
Mars once had an ocean larger than the Pacific.
Mars once had an atmosphere.
Mars once had life.

They are all gone.

But Not Forgotten

Mars, our closest sibling in the solar system, is the one who died in childhood. In my family, we have such a relative. My mother had a sister who died of diphtheria (whooping cough) in 1930 when she was two years old. I almost had an aunt. As such my mom grew up as a dearly loved only child, held all the more dear by the knowledge of the tragic loss that made her an only child.

Earth, too, is now an only child--the only one still holding a thriving biosphere. Our planet is the only place we know where the rush of life has transformed the usual carbon dioxide base of atmospheres to an oxygen-rich mixture suitable for genetic experiments such as ourselves. Imagine, beings who consume the waste products of plants; who die if the do not inhale this waste. What exotic beasts! What an exotic biota! What a fascinating symbiosis! Earth is both rare and fragile.

Svante August Arrhenius, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903 for his explanation of electrolysis. His "living cosmos" hypothesis was called "Panspermia." Arrhenius thought the cosmos was crawling with life that was spread by spores from planet to planet (and even in-between stars), and was carried on the pressure of radiation. As unlikely as his theory seemed for many decades, the evidence is beginning to mount that Arrhenius’ genius was greater than we possibly imagined. While the delivery mode is probably meteorites, in fact, life probably does travel from planet to planet and maybe even from star system to star system.

Have Life Will Travel

It is a paradox. The potential for life (as protein) is everywhere we have looked in our Universe. Traveling the great Panspermia trade routes, ensconced on meteorites, it is predictable that everywhere it lands and there is an opening for it to establish a foothold, it will.

Life has now been found not only two miles down in the frozen Antarctic ice, but clinging to the volcanic vents on the floor of the ocean and perhaps most impressively, in the hearts of nuclear reactors. In fact recent, studies released at the January 2000 American Astronomical Association meetings put forth two candidates, bacillus subtilis and Deinococcus radiodurans, which appear to be able to withstand the huge temperature differentials--the force of being blown from one planet--and the fiery plummet into the atmosphere of another. So, a group of scientists suggest that life have started on Mars, crossed through space to Earth and triggered the Cambrian explosion of life here on Earth.

What's He Up to This Time?

Remarkably, Arrhenius was the author of another powerful and sobering idea: that carbon dioxide could trap heat on a planet’s surface leading to a greenhouse effect. His seminal paper on the greenhouse effect first advanced the concept that by burning fossil fuels, and thus injecting large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, humanity was changing the thermal balance of the Earth and producing greenhouse warming.

This brings us back to a sobering reality. Earth is in trouble. We have had the warning about global warming, but will we listen? Mars teaches us that we must.

By Stephen Corrick & Monica Rix Paxson
Contributing editor & author, Dead Mars, Dying Earth

Evidence is mounting that Mars (top) once had a warm, wet, living history similar to Earth's. What are the implications for our own planet?

photos NASA

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