My Thoughts for March 8, 2015

Two science events took place this past week that all of us should note. First, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft has detected geological evidence a rather large ocean did exist on Mars at one time.  Whether the ocean contained life is still an unknown but I like to think that Martian fishermen may have at one time cruised on boats and hauled in large Martian fish.  Of course, this was some four to five billion years ago and it will be sometime before we send a team of space explorers to Mars to develop further information.  Wish I could be on that team.  Imagine finding a Martian fossil, what a thrill.

The second science event reported was about a tiny dwarf planet, named Ceres.   In 2004 it was reported a picture of Ceres taken by the Hubble Telescope show two amazing weird bright spots on the surface of the plant.  Today NASA has a space probe named Dawn about to go into orbit around that dwarf sphere.  In a video of the planet I saw, you can actually see two white spots.  What are they?  I’d like to think that its sunlight being reflected off the window of some long ago space probe, a probe maybe from some other world or even some other universe.  When the Dawn spacecraft goes into orbit around the little planet it will be an amazing achievement in itself.  You see the plant almost 400 million miles from earth and it has taken since 2007 to reach the little world.  Just think what a newsmaker it would be if the name on the shiny piece of whatever said “Boeing” or “Air Force.”  What would it tells us about ourselves or life in our universe four billion years ago?   

And, what are the lessons to be harvested from these two news reports?  What if Mars did have a large ocean for billions of years?  Maybe at one time there really were little green men running around all over on that now dead planet.  What happened?  Could their leaders not agree on things like global warming?  Could they not get control of weapons of mass destruction?

World leaders have a terrible time agreeing on anything. Look at World War I.  None of the European leader could agree on what to do about Germany.  It led to World War II. Today we can’t get agreement on what to do about Iran, the Middle East, or global warming.  In our country we can’t get our congress to work together to make America a better place to live.  We can’t even get our congress to respect our Office of the President. Why, because democrats and republicans can’t work together?  Or, is it something more sinister, like our President is a person of color? All our politicians need to wake-up.

Here’s what these two science events can teach us.  First, its beginning to be understood that if we damage our atmosphere, whether by nuclear war or through pollution, all our water will evaporate and our plant will die, which means life as we know it will die. What happened on Mars is not fully understood but it’s beginning to look like it at one time had an atmosphere that for whatever reason was destroyed.  It is atmosphere that makes it possible for water to remain on a planet.  Our entire world needs to recognize we need to work together to prevent global warming or nuclear war. 

 The second event that of Ceres, while we don’t yet know what the two white spots are, it does point out two very important facts.  One important fact is the power of science and when scientist are allowed to work together without politics getting in the way some pretty amazing things happen. Another important fact, although admittedly a stretch of the imagination, is if those spots are found to be a wreck of some ancient spacecraft, then, out in the cosmos is advanced life.  We people of planet earth better learn how to work together because I suspect life follows one basic rule: survival of the fittest.