How the Red Planet Can Be Reborn
There has been no recent shortage of people pointing out that Mars is a hostile and unforgiving world. That is not news. The planet is freezing cold, full of toxic soil and bathed in constant, deadly solar radiation. Any life that still survives there faces a desperate daily fight against the odds.
Things have not always been this bad. Turn the clock back billions of years, to the earliest days of the Solar System, and a different planet appears. Back then Mars was much more hospitable, perhaps even more so than Earth was at the time.
Martian investigators have uncovered troves of evidence to support the idea of a once temperate Mars. They’ve managed to paint a picture of how the planet died, slowly turning from a water-rich world to a frozen desert. But one mystery has always remained — where did all the water go?
The Long Fight for Gravity
Long after Man discovered gravity, he used his mastery to reach another world. Those who went found a dusty, barren landscape, scarred with craters and scattered with boulders. The Moon was not, as the Church once taught, a perfect sphere, smooth and uncorrupted by forces of nature. Instead, much like the Earth, it was shaped by universal laws of physics and chemistry.
Four hundred years ago such an idea would have been heretical. The Church believed in a perfect universe. Celestial bodies moved in a divine realm and obeyed their own mysterious laws. At the centre of it all lay the Earth, placing the Church, the ultimate authority in the medieval world, at the heart of the universe.
At the time our vision of the night sky was limited to that which eyes alone could see. The Sun and Moon were clear enough, and formed symbols of the day and night. Planets, like stars, appeared as nothing more than distant points of light. The regular cycle of movements, of the rising and setting Sun, and the waxing and waning Moon, could be explained by picturing the Earth at the centre of the Universe.
Best of the Rest…
How do we spot an incoming asteroid before it is too late? One option is to develop a kind of planetary radar, rather like they systems ships and planes use to scan for nearby objects. Astronomers have worked out how to use radio telescopes to do this, with some success. Roughly 40% of the large nearby asteroids have been found. But much of this work was done with the Arecibo Observatory and, since its unfortunate collapse last year, the Earth’s radar has been badly damaged. Sarah Scoles looks into what can be done to fix it in Scientific American.
Life seems to be present almost everywhere on Earth, from high in the atmosphere to deep underground. The more we look, the more bizarre and unexpected forms it takes. Samples of ancient water, isolated from the rest of the planet for billions of years, have revealed life based not on light from the Sun, as almost everything is, but on energy from the Earth’s radioactivity. Writing in Quanta, Jordana Cepelewicz has the details.
SpaceX is close to dominating the rocket industry, as much as that industry can be dominated. Roughly a hundred launches take place every year, a number that is more or less static. Of those, most are locked to certain providers, for reasons of security or national pride. Only a few are really up for grabs. SpaceX, by far the cheapest option, takes most of them. That might be enough to sustain a business, but it is hardly bringing in the big bucks. The Economist takes a look at the business case for SpaceX, and concludes that the real money lies in Starlink, not in the rockets.
So much reporting around health, science and space exploration is unrealistic, hyperbolic and misleading. These are complicated topics, and there are often no easy or straight forward answers. Instead what is needed is analysis, discussion and an exploration of the possible ways forward.
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