Lonely Planets

by David Grinspoon

  equal time with detection in a paper Lederberg published in Science in

  1960 called “Exobiology: Approaches to Life beyond the Earth.” If

  there is a founder of exobiology, it is he.

  Winning a Nobel Prize is often said to mark the end of one’s produc-

  tive scientific career. Perhaps this is most often said by scientists who

  have not won Nobel Prizes. Certainly Nobel laureates have less to

  prove and are more free to indulge what may seem, to their more inse-

  cure colleagues, like crazy whims. In a sense, exobiology owes its birth

  to such Nobelian self-indulgence. Lederberg, commenting on the effects

  of his Nobel Prize, said that it had enabled him “to stay in a nonrep-

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  utable game. Not disreputable, mind you, but nonreputable. It might

  have been very, very difficult otherwise and it would have been very

  hard for a capable young scientist who’s had a lot of risks to take in his

  career to hitch it to something as uncertain as exobiology.”

  Since the early 1960s a handful of scientists have dared call them-

  selves exobiologists. In the spring of 1960, recognizing that biology

  would be an important component of space exploration, NASA estab-

  lished an Office of Life Sciences. In 1962 an Exobiology Division was

  established at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Ames

  has remained an important center of exobiological research ever since

  then, and in 1998 it became the headquarters of NASA’s new

  Astrobiology Institute.

  C O S M I S M

  I’ve been describing all this from an American perspective, but on the

  other side of the Iron Curtain, plans were also being drawn for robotic

  visits to the planets. In fact, the Soviet scientific establishment was

  more open than American scientists to the study of extraterrestrial life.

  The ground was prepared by the philosophical tradition of Russian

  Cosmism.

  Cosmism, or cosmic philosophy, was a space-related philosophy that

  thrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It combined

  ideas from Eastern and Western spiritual traditions (including a dash of

  Russian Orthodox Christianity) with a scientifically constrained under-

  standing of the origin, history, and future of the universe. The cosmic

  role of humans and other sentient beings was emphasized. Many

  Cosmists believed that the entire universe, from tiny individual particles

  to stars and galaxies, was alive and conscious. Humans, it was believed,

  and other more highly evolved intelligent creatures, had the highest

  concentration of this consciousness. With this realization came a great

  moral responsibility to encourage the further peaceful development of

  advanced consciousness in the universe, uniting the spiritual and tech-

  nological aspirations of humankind.

  Several Russians who are better known to us for their scientific

  accomplishments were also deeply involved in the formulation of the

  spiritual, historical, and ethical ideas of Cosmism. One important con-

  tributor was Vladimir Vernadsky, who invented the concept of the bio-

  sphere (and conceived of most of the essentials of the Gaia hypothesis)

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  in 1917. Vernadsky then went on, in loose concert with Teilhard de

  Chardin (who, though not Russian, was kind of a Catholic Cosmist), to

  elaborate the concept of the noosphere—a sphere of intellectual activity

  rooted in the Earth, and expanding into the wider cosmos.

  The first person who explicitly connected cosmic philosophy with

  space travel, alien life, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

  was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a near-deaf, self-educated,

  rural-village schoolteacher of limited means and unlimited imagination.

  Though isolated from the professional scientific community, Tsiol-

  kovsky created designs for rockets and orbiting stations that greatly

  influenced modern space technology. He worked out the basics of mul-

  tistage, liquid-fueled interplanetary rocket flight years before the

  Wright brothers took their first short, winged hop across a North

  Carolina field. Nearly a century later, many of his technical ideas still

  seem futuristic and feasible, such as his plans for domed habitats on the

  surfaces of asteroids.

  Tsiolkovsky’s numerous volumes of brilliant designs, drawings, and

  calculations were all in the service of a utopian vision of the human

  future. Space travel was a necessary step in our evolution toward cos-

  mic perfection and infinite happiness. Ethical principles were built into

  the physical laws of the universe—a universe full of advanced extra-

  terrestrials who had perfected interstellar travel. They left us alone, he felt,

  out of a sense of moral obligation. For Tsiolkovsky, the concept of God

  was indistinguishable from that of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence of

  the kind toward which humankind and its space-faring descendants would

  inevitably evolve. In his quasi-Buddhist notion of time, death, and rebirth,

  the essential nature of life was immortality, and death was an illusion.

  He believed that human beings would move into giant, self-contained

  orbiting space colonies and later colonize the asteroid belt. Finally, he

  declared, we will evolve into “Homo Cosmicus,” beings able to utilize

  solar energy directly, live forever, and freely roam the universe. The

  emergence of human intelligence on Earth, he believed, is an example

  of a wider cosmic movement in which the universe evolves toward sen-

  tience. Tsiolkovsky advocated an end to nationalistic thinking and

  urged people to think of themselves as citizens of the cosmos. He saw

  this change in perspective as necessary preparation for humanity’s join-

  ing a cosmic community of intelligent beings.

  American space-heads like me grew up reading about the technical

  achievements of Tsiolkovsky without learning of his extensive spiritual

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  electronic edition

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  and philosophical writings. This was largely because these aspects of his

  work, and of Cosmism in general, were suppressed by the Soviet Union

  out of distaste for all things even quasi-religious. I knew of Tsiolkovsky’s

  pioneering work on rocketry and his ideas about space colonization

  (probably first from reading and listening to Sagan), but I only recently

  discovered that he also wrote books on The Natural Foundations of

  Religion and The Unknown Intellectual Forces of the Universe.

  When I first learned of Tsiolkovsky’s philosophical ideas, as an adult,

  they seemed strangely familiar. This may well be because many of the

  space age thinkers I admired as a teenager* were influenced by his

  ideas. His mixture of Cosmic Evolution, belief in extraterrestrial intelli-

  gence, and the essence of Eastern and Western spirituality stripped of

  stale doctrine seems so obviously right on to me that my response on

  reading his ideas is to smile and say, “Yes, of course.” Cosmism is the

  closest thi
ng to a scientific religion I’ve yet seen.†

  *Asimov, Sagan, and Clarke, for starters.

  †Next time I am asked for my religion on a census form, I’ll write in Cosmism.

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  The eminent Soviet astrophysicist and SETI pioneer Iosif Shklovskii

  (1916–85) was also working in the tradition of Cosmism, with its spiri-

  tual side deemphasized to a degree acceptable to Soviet authorities,

  when he wrote the classic work Universe, Life, Mind, in 1962. This far-

  reaching treatise extrapolated from modern astrophysics and biology to

  explore the role of life and intelligence in Cosmic Evolution. Stripped of

  its politically incorrect religious overtones, Cosmism blended smoothly

  with Communist doctrine.* Soviet ideologues didn’t much care for the

  spiritual part, but they liked the idea that mankind was perfectible. In

  their hands, Cosmism mutated into a socialist technocratic utopianism

  in which, throughout the universe, historical progress must lead to life,

  intelligence, and ultimately the withering of the state and the creation

  of ideal workers’ utopias ringing every stable star.

  Shklovskii’s book was updated and expanded by Carl Sagan, who

  became a coauthor of the English edition, published in 1966 as

  Intelligent Life in the Universe. † This book became a bible of exobiol-

  ogy. In a sense, it was a 1960s version of Fontenelle, meant to persuade

  “philosophers” (now called scientists) to adopt a pluralist vision, but

  written mostly in language that anyone literate could enjoy.

  In Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan’s comments are set off from

  Shklovskii’s by triangles ∇ like this ∆. Occasional tensions are revealed

  between these two visionary thinkers, who saw eye to eye about cosmic

  history, but inhabited opposing Cold War societies. Shklovskii would

  begin a statement with “In accordance with the philosophy of dialecti-

  cal materialism . . . ,” and Sagan would come back with ∇ However,

  Kant’s positivistic philosophy teaches . . . ∆. Sagan always got the last

  word, as in this passage:

  ∇ At this point in the Russian edition of the present work,

  Shklovskii expresses his belief that civilizations are not inevitably

  doomed to self-destruction, despite his description of contempo-

  rary Western literature as filled with details of atomic holocaust.

  He expresses his belief that as long as capitalism exists on Earth, a

  violent end to intelligent life on the planet is probable. There is

  reason to assume, he asserts, that future peaceful societies will be

  *At the end of his life, Tsiolkovsky considered himself a Communist.

  †Shklovskii revealed in his autobiography that he only found out about this arrangement when he saw a published copy of the book with the names of two authors on the cover.

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  constructed on the basis of Communism. I am able to imagine

  alternative scenarios for the future . . . ∆

  The influence of both Tsiolkovsky and Shklovskii can clearly be seen

  in Sagan’s writings. Many of the hip, cosmicomic, superballistic flights

  of scientifically constrained fantasy in The Cosmic Connection, Carl’s

  first widely successful book, were distilled and spiced-up riffs on

  themes seen in Intelligent Life in the Universe. Sagan’s early work was a major conduit through which the Western world was given a dose of

  Russian Cosmism.

  Given this national philosophical tradition, exobiology (or astrobot-

  any, as it was then called in Russia) did not have a huge credibility

  problem. In the 1950s, Russian astrobotanists used spectral studies of

  Mars and Venus to make detailed inferences about the nature of the

  vegetation that they believed existed on both worlds. After Sputnik and

  before the first Moon probes, concerns about biology, both detection

  and protection, entered into Soviet exploration plans.

  The responsibility of planetary protection was taken seriously in

  both Moscow and Washington, even when it meant scaling back explo-

  ration ambitions. These inherently global concerns may have helped

  remind the Cold War adversaries that, as far as the health and safety of

  our planet is concerned, we all live in the same country.

  W O L F T R A P S A N D S E T B A C K S

  In 1961, NASA awarded its first financial grant in the area of exobiol-

  ogy: $4,485 to the Yale microbiologist Wolf Vishniac to develop a pro-

  totype device for detecting microorganisms on Mars. The practical task

  of designing and building instruments to find extraterrestrial life forced

  scientists to sharpen their ideas. Vishniac assumed that life “always will

  be based on carbon,” although he acknowledged, “It may turn out that

  we are deluding ourselves—that we are simply limited in our imagina-

  tion because of our limited experience.”

  Vishniac’s experiment, nicknamed the Wolf Trap, was designed to

  search for the presence of alien bacteria by looking for the changes in

  acidity and turbidity (light absorption) that, on Earth at least, always

  accompany bacterial growth. A later version of the Wolf Trap won one

  of four slots for microbiology experiments to be flown to Mars on the

  Viking lander. This was an exobiologist’s dream. Wolf was going to

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  Mars. But, when the Viking project budget started to soar, cuts had to

  be made to save the program. To the dismay of Vishniac and the rest of

  the team, the Wolf Trap was removed from the spacecraft design.

  Vishniac froze to death in Antarctica in 1973, while trying to use the

  Wolf Trap to prove that life could exist in the extreme near-Martian

  conditions found in the Antarctic dry valleys. Now we know that he

  was right. This harsh environment does indeed support microbial life,

  including clever things* that bask in the faint sunlight penetrating just

  below the surface of rocks. But it is not a place where complex animal

  life can easily survive, as Wolf Vishniac—the first martyr to exobiol-

  ogy—tragically found out.

  Another scientist who took an early leap into exobiology was Gil

  Levin. His background was in public health, and he had already built

  instruments for automatic life detection that he used to test for micro-

  bial contamination in drinking water. In 1961 he received a NASA con-

  tract to develop an instrument called Gulliver, which consisted of a

  sample chamber in which Martian soil would be fed a broth of (hope-

  fully) tempting organic compounds labeled with radioactive carbon.

  Any organisms that took the bait would exhale labeled carbon dioxide,

  which could be detected with a Geiger counter. If the Geiger counter

  started clicking, it meant something in the soil was eating the broth and

  breathing out the carbon as CO2. Gulliver evolved into the Labeled

  Release instrument, which was part of the Viking biology package

  landed on Mars in 1976. Of all the original Viking biology investiga-

  tors, Levin alone remains convinced to this day that Viking did find

  microbial life on Mars.

  Other early ideas for detecting life on Mars in
volved using simple

  cameras and microscopes. It was recognized early on that one of the

  most promising ways to find life without making too many assump-

  tions about its nature was just to use our eyes.

  From 1960 to 1964, optimism and excitement reigned within the

  small community of scientists involved in exobiology. The field may

  then have been, as Lederberg said, “nonreputable,” yet there was small

  but seemingly steady support from NASA.

  Then came Mariner 4. Most press coverage of the mission had played

  up the drama of the search for life, which only served to heighten antic-

  ipation of spectacular imagery with revolutionary implications. The

  *Or at least well-evolved things.

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  lunarlike cratered surface, and the absence of green fields, forests,

  streams, or any recognizable Earth-like surface features, was a letdown

  for both scientists and the public.

  Mariner 4 caused the first major backlash (since 1920 anyway) in

  what has been a cyclical pattern of raised hopes followed by disillusion-

  ment. NASA’s critics sensed blood in the water and went in for the kill.

  Congress held hearings and several scientists, most notably the microbi-

  ologist Barry Commoner and Philip Abelson, the editor of Science,

  ridiculed NASA’s goal of searching for life on Mars as a wasteful, irre-

  sponsible, pseudoscientific pipe dream. In an editorial published in

  Science in 1965, Abelson warned, “In looking for life on Mars we

  could establish for ourselves the reputation of being the greatest Simple

  Simons of all time.”

  In the 1960s planetology was itself struggling to achieve respectabil-

  ity as a new scientific discipline. There has always been an insecurity

  about the future of our field since we are dependent on an expensive

  ongoing program of exploration. Nobody wanted to see planetology

  suffer further ridicule on the floor of Congress, and after Mariner 4,

  exobiology became further marginalized within the planetary science

  community. Percival Lowell’s excesses had discredited planetary studies

  for much of the century, and the fragile support for planetary explo-

  ration could not afford to be held hostage to new Martian fairy tales.

  Exobiology climbed back up a notch in credibility in 1971 when