Curiosity - life on Mars?

We all wish luck to the Mars Science Lab (MSL) nicknamed Curiosity on its way to the Red Planet. Because a central goal of this scientific space mission is the search for signs of microbial life it is also of exceptional theological interest.

Nov. 26, 2011: NASA began a historic voyage to Mars with the Nov. 26 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, which carries a car-sized rover named Curiosity. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket occurred at 10:02 a.m. EST (7:02 a.m. PST).

"We are very excited about sending the world's most advanced scientific laboratory to Mars," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "MSL will tell us critical things we need to know about Mars, and while it advances science, we'll be working on the capabilities for a human mission to the Red Planet and to other destinations where we've never been."
Quoted from NASA science page

The estimated landing of the rover on Mars is 6 August 2012 - after eight and half months of 10 km/second flight in our Solar system.

For an overview of the mission I recommend a well-written news article by BBC Science Journalist Jonathan Amos.

Gale Crater
The 2.500.000.000 dollar mission uses the latest technologies and scientific instruments in a car-sized one tonne vehicle. The research concentrates on a geological paradise, the Grand Canyon of Mars, called the 154 km in diameter Gale crater named after the Australian banker Walter Frederick Gale (1865-1945). He is the man who looked at the Red Planet and suggested that there are canals on the surface of Mars and thus intelligent life, Martians.

Picture from NASA

Gale crater is a deep scar on the surface of Mars assumed to be over two billion years old. The crater allows the examination of very deep layers of clay minerals and sulphite salts observed at the bottom. Scientists have assumed that these deposits were possibly formed as sediments in an ancient body of water. Nobody is sure - until Curiosity brings us some hard facts from the hot spot!


Interior of Mars

Earliest evidence of life on Earth has been found in pre-Cambrian granite that formed some two-three billion years when the surface of our planet was cooling and God created the lithosphere. 

Apparently Mars has no granite or basalt sphere at all. In the picture is one recent model (2003) taken from a nice description of recent theories of the inner structure of Mars by Courtney Seligman.


Astrobiologist's wet dream
The fundamental assumption of Astrobiology is that where there is water there is possibly also life as we know it. So examining 2-3 billion year old sediments formed in another planet of our Solar system... an astrobiologist's wet dream come true.

Out of the way, Cassini-Huygens and those dead frozen surfaces of Titan!

Jesus Christ - Extraterrestial?

Jennifer Wilson talked recently (26.6.2011) about this subject in Veritas forum

Prolegomena for Extraterrestial life - ET

Encounter of the Third Kind

Astrobiology studies life in our solar system and in outer space and is becoming an increasingly significant field of research about the origins of life on our planet. The Titan expedition was trying to find out conditions that could resemble earth some three billion years ago when the crust of our planet began to be cool enough.

This blog is not about Astrobiology but Astrotheology, Space Theology, yet I do propose some indications about what biological extraterrestial life might be. You are welcome to join in the discussion and propose additional prolegomena to my list!


1. All life originates ultimately from a single source
Creator of the entire Universe, God of Israel, is the only one who gives life. His universe is full of life.

Life cannot be generated artificially; only life begets life. Therefore modern biologists consider that the various life forms upon Earth have single point of origins.

Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave prominence to the Panspermia theory according to which particles of life are flying in the interstellar space in asteroids and meteroids. Such rock has hit our planet over 2 billion years ago starting life for the first time here when the environmental conditions were ripe. Additional "impregnations" may have happened since the beginning causing perhaps multiple beginnings of life or, for example, bacterial epidemics, macro evolutionary changes or have in other ways affected life on our Tellus.

Panspermia theory does not explain the origins of life - it only moves the riddle further to the deep space. Logically reversing the Big Bang of Life we can propose that all living beings in the entire Universe do originate from a single source of life.

We humans have about as good chances to explain more closely the Origin of Life as we have in explaining the state of the Universe just before the Big Bang.



2. Extraterrestial soul and intelligence is recognizable to us
According to the self-revelation of the Creator of the world in the Hebrew Bible, man and woman are together an image of the hidden and invisible God. Since all extraterrestial life having sufficient level of consciousness to communicate with the Creator is also image of God, the extraterrestial soul and intelligence is recognizable to us. So is the presence of male and female ETs!

Science-fiction tends to fill the space with human devouring alien monsters. Well - these products of human imagination are rather in the image of the adversor of God upon planet Earth, who loves to make us to murder each other in different ways.

The Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence (SETI) of the University of Berkeley is not a bad idea. It is just a very difficult attempt of finding intelligence in outer space because of the level of noise in space and the immense distances between stars and galaxies.

The Kepler space telescope has reportedly already collected data about 1200 stars that seem to have planetary system similar to our Sun. It is probable that many millions of stars even in our own Milky Way, not to speak of Andromeda, have intelligent life. And these life forms are recognizable to us and can communicate with us - maybe with Spielberg type music of close encounters - because the same God has created them who created us.


3. Biodiversity in the cosmos is beyond our imagination
Our rapidly evolved brains separates us from the rest of life upon Earth. We humbly call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens exactly for this reason - without being there we can even calculate in our brains what probably happened during the first milliseconds of Creation in the Big Bang (if there was one...). We are able to understand the strange mathematics of atomic particles and the electronic orbits and antimatter. Maybe someday we will figure out what is dark matter and energy.

Yet our imagination is limited to painting images on what we have, images that our brain is capable of producing from the input of memes and memories and observation and imagination.

God has demonstrated such immense richness of imagination when creating the biodiversity upon this planet (which we are quickly destroying in our greed for rapid and constant economic growth) that there must be myriads of life forms in the Universe that are totally beyond our imagination. Once we see one of them, we can imagine others like it.

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Update June 3 2012. Highly focused technique for search of intelligent life BBC article