Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

  James Lovelock, a distinguished British biologist, is the formulator of the Gaia Hypothesis, which maintains that the biosphere of the planet Earth acts as a single organism to maintain the stability of the planet’s atmosphere, oceanic environment, and temperature. His book (with Michael Allaby), entitled The Greening of Mars, outlines one strategy by which Mars might be so transformed. The reader interested in the ideas of the Ecotheist movement in the poem might also wish to read Lovelock’s book Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth. Though the terraformers whose deeds the poet records have borrowed one of his ideas—the use of chlorofluorocarbons or freons to produce a greenhouse effect—they discovered an even more ambitious, but perhaps quicker, solution to the problem.

  Some elements of this solution already exist. First is the revolution in our understanding of the Earth’s early evolution which has recently occurred, whose conclusions may be found in Earth’s Earliest Biosphere: Its Origin and Evolution, edited by J. William Schopf. The original atmosphere of the Earth would be highly lethal to contemporary living organisms, being composed largely of hydrogen sulfide, methane, and ammonia, with almost no free oxygen. The first living organisms were anaerobes, that is, lifeforms which do not need free oxygen and would indeed be poisoned by exposure to it. However, free oxygen was excreted by many early organisms as a waste product, rather as we and our technology excrete carbon dioxide. When the available “oxygen sinks”—metallic ores, for instance, that could soak up oxygen in the formation of oxides, or hydrogen, which combined with oxygen to create much of the water of the earth’s oceans—were exhausted, the new oxygen atmosphere poisoned the old anaerobic organisms that had brought it into being, leaving only those forms of life, such as the blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, which could either endure the presence of oxygen or, better still, use it as an enhanced energy source for photosynthesis, the creation of sugars, and the metabolic extravagances of the more advanced animals. With this change came the age of the eukaryotes, those organisms whose nucleated structure was such as to promote multicellular organization and sexual reproduction.

  If this transformation could occur on Earth by biological means, might it not also be made to happen on Mars? Of course the process took hundreds of millions years on Earth; but Earth had to make do with the very primitive and haphazard organisms supplied by its early rudimentary evolution, whereas today there exists an enormous riches of life-chemistries and metabolisms to draw on. And one could hurry the process along by dropping ice-moons on the planet…

  But no contemporary Earth organism could survive long on Mars, whose carbon dioxide atmosphere is at a pressure less than one hundredth of the Earth’s—not enough to allow liquid water to exist—whose surface temperature, averaging -40 degrees Fahrenheit, can support frozen carbon dioxide, and which because of its thin atmosphere and weak magnetic field is bombarded by cosmic radiation. (A good account of the Martian atmosphere can be found in Robert Haberle’s “The Climate of Mars,” in Scientific American, May 1986.) Nonetheless certain Earthly organisms—bacteria for the most part—can handle conditions nearly as severe as these when taken one by one, though none can withstand them taken all together. The twenty-first century technology the Genesis poet describes seems to derive partly from the enormous advances that are now taking place in bioengineering, whereby traits deemed desirable can be grafted from one organism to another. Could not hardened strains, chimeras, be generated, that might be adapted to the Martian environment?

  The terrain of Mars clearly shows that at certain points of its geological history water has flowed on its surface. It could again. By means of freons, dyes, artificial dust-clouds or organic agencies, acting in combination with induced meteor strikes, the albedo of the Martian surface could be reduced, so that less radiation was leaving its atmosphere than was striking it. The temperature of the planet might thus be raised sufficiently to release gases locked up as ice and increase the pressure to the point that free water could exist. So to turn Mars green it would first be necessary to make it black.

  The Saturnian ice-moon S26 is about a hundred kilometers in diameter, giving a volume of about half a million cubic kilometers, and a mass of about 500 thousand trillion tons. If half this mass were used as the reaction mass to drive the other half, it might be shifted from its orbit and made to fall upon the planet Mars. Even if only a fraction of the gases released by the impact were to remain in the Martian atmosphere, such a collision could raise the pressure and temperature of the Martian surface considerably: enough to make it geologically and climatologically live. Each meter of the Earth’s surface supports about twenty tons of air and an average of about two thousand tons of water. S26—Kali, as the Genesis poet has named her—would provide a comparable amount of gases and liquids for each square meter of Mars.

  Even now the project seems hopeless to a twentieth century technological imagination. Nature has had billions of years to try out different lifeforms for their survival possibilities; jerrybuilt germs are notoriously fragile outside the laboratory and incapable of survival in the field. But suppose evolution itself could be speeded up, in controlled conditions that would gradually approximate those of Mars, so that the Martian strains could, so to speak, generate themselves? The limits of metabolism forbid this; but they do not forbid software simulacra from doing so. In the poem Ganesh Wills, the computer hacker, has found a way to express the genetic and somatic structure of simple organisms as computer programs, and has been able to place them together in a large artificial programmed environment where they can compete and evolve for selective fitness; and he has speeded up the process electronically by many orders of magnitude.

  Now in fact many of the components of such a project are already in existence. Followers of the computer games section of the Scientific American will be familiar with some of them: Conway’s Game of Life, the Core Wars battle programs that fight it out for possession of a memory space, certain expert systems that can learn from experience and adapt themselves accordingly, and the new iterative or chaotic algorithms that can generate complex internal electronic environments. Meanwhile computer modeling is now being used extensively in molecular biology, cytology, and ecology; and the National Science Foundation is currently debating the creation of a complete record of the human genome, that is, our full complement of DNA base-pairs in their correct order, divided into chromosomes: all the information needed to construct a human being. Several viruses and bacteria have already been thus recorded by gas chromatography in whole or in part. The techniques of genetic/cybernetic manipulation could also be used to tailor plants to grow into shapes useful to human beings—the Arkship, for instance, and Martian dwellings and furniture. Although the poem does not go into this, it might also be possible to create living logic and memory circuits by the same means, and even new species of animal life.

  By these methods, then, organisms adapted to life on Mars might be synthesized. But would it not take an enormous amount of time to propagate them over the Martian surface? Here the astonishing mathematics of reproduction would be heavily in favor of the planetary gardeners. Normal bacteria can reproduce themselves by fission in as little as twenty minutes; conservatively, let us estimate ten doublings per day for tailored bacteria. Thus in one day a ton of bacteria, finely scattered over a surface rich in nutrients, and without biological competition, could yield a thousand tons—about a thousand cubic meters—of biomass; in five days, this mass, if unimpeded by lack of raw materials, would approach one hundred trillion tons. The surface of Mars is about 146 million square kilometers in extent—roughly a hundred trillion square meters. Thus in this ideal case it would take five days to cover the whole surface of Mars with bacteria to a depth of a meter, starting with one ton of seed. One might rest both on the sixth and seventh days. Of course the vicissitudes of access to food chemicals and energy sources, as well as unfavorable local variations in temperature, pressure, et cetera—some of them brought about by the bacterial growth itself—would put a stop to this
growth very swiftly. But the illustration shows the potency of the biological instrument the colonists could wield.

  One generation of bacterial species would certainly not be enough; the first generation would have to be used as the compost for the second, the second for a third, and so on. Each generation would at first be smothered by its own waste-products, but the net effect would be to extract from the Martian regolith (rock soil) the gases of a new atmosphere. After a while hardy funguses and plants could be introduced, and finally animals.

  The Poetic Method of Genesis

  The scientific and technological material of the poem constitute not only a large part of its content but also a gigantic metaphor of its very structure and form. In other words, the unwritten poem is the barren planet, and the composition of the poem is its cultivation by living organisms. But the word “metaphor” fails to capture the dimensions of the trope which is the poem. For the gardening of Mars by the code (or “codex”) of life is act, theme, myth, argument and form at once. The forking tree of evolutionary descent is the forking tree of grammatical and logical construction, the forking tree of plot and story, the forking tree of esthetic form, the forking tree of family descent, and the forking tree of human moral decision; and those trees are in turn connected as branches to the stem of the great tree of the universe itself.

  Such self-similar forms are now known as fractal geometries: the plot of Genesis is itself fractal, with many small branchlets of event connecting heterarchically with larger actions which are in turn tributary to the one epic action of the whole poem, the founding of a new world. The parable of the swan’s wing in V. ii. is itself a branch or wing of this structure, as well as being a miniature version of it.

  The tragic element of the poem is also related to this deep trope. For if a path is chosen, then others must be rejected—or better, “set aside;” the German word aufheben might say it, with its implication of the cancellation of a debt. The future is a sort of wave-function, a probability curve expressing the relative likelihood of many possible events. The decisions that constitute the present and the very continuance of time must collapse that wave function and prune off the branches not chosen. This is a violent act, as all creation is violent. Mars and Earth constitute two historical choice-pathways in the poem. Both have much to recommend them, but the poet must choose to prefer one, and the conflict between them is tragic. This procrustean choice is symbolized and expressed by the very rigid technical parameters of the poem, the strict iambic pentameter line relieved only by a proportion of feminine endings (many of them “paid for” by succeeding headless lines, in a kind of rubato), and the exactly equal number of lines in each scene (400) and scenes in each act (5). The poem is exactly 10,000 lines long. These rigidities compel the action again and again to come to a point, a focus, to collapse the wave function of possibility, to choose one path of plot.

  In a larger sense still the narrator is an alternate branch of the future of the redactor of the poem, that is, myself, and the world of the poem an alternate branch to “this” one. Possibly the future the poem describes will not come about precisely because the poem has been passed to me and I have chosen to publish it. The relationship between the actual branch and its ghostly alternates constitutes the richness and meaning of time, just as the relationship between the metrical structure of the poetic line and the actual rhythm of its spoken presence constitutes its musical richness. In the broadest sense we may thus say that the content of existence is essence, that being is the sacrifice of alternatives, that freedom is the rejection of choices. The Anthropic Principle of cosmology postulates that full consciousness of the origins of the universe may ontologically privilege those origins over any others, and that thus the choice of moral being, conscious knowledge, and above all of beautiful unified complexity is the logos that creates the world. In this sense the world is a kind of drama, brought into being by its own choices; and this is perhaps one reason why the poet named the divisions of his poem by the theatrical terms he did.

  As I have suggested, the poem may be designed as a warning to past ages of the consequences of their fear of the future; on the other hand the action of the poem may be a kind of performative invocation designed to bring about the new choices it describes. The work of terraforming is the work of making air, an atmosphere, the Atman or spirit, the breath in which the poem may be spoken, the first breath of the newborn. The poem is the Lima Codex, the book of information for the construction of a new world, and the struggle of its composition, both by its original future narrator and by its present-day scribe, against its enemies, historical and technical, is the fundamental drama of the work. This struggle has been worth it for me, as I think it was—or will be—for him; for it brought me to the feet of the Sibyl, where I might listen to the sweetest voice I know.

  Dramatis Personae

  Major Characters

  The Narrator, an underground poet living in New York about a hundred and twenty years after the events of the poem under the gentle totalitarianism of the Earth’s theocratic government.

  Chancellor (“Chance”) Van Riebeck, the entrepreneur who has built an international industrial empire based on bio-engineering, and who has been put in charge of the Ares Project—the exploration and scientific survey of the planet Mars—by the United Nations. However, he has gone entirely beyond his mandate and has begun to colonize Mars with earthly bacteria genetically tailored to withstand the severe conditions of the Martian surface. Chance is married to Gaea and has three children, Freya, Beatrice, and Garrison. His family home is the ranch of San Luis Rey near Taos, New Mexico.

  Freya Van Riebeck-Lorenz, the first daughter and eldest child of Chance and Gaea: one of Chance’s most trusted and effective lieutenants, and a leading executive in Van Riebeck Enterprises. She is the wife of Charlie Lorenz and mother of Wolf and Irene.

  Orval Root, Chance’s old friend and principal science officer of the Ares Project, who because of Chance’s disobedience to UN instructions and because he fears what he believes to be Chance’s pride and destructive hubris, has broken with his erstwhile chief and comrade.

  Gaea Van Riebeck, née Redgrave, Chance’s estranged English wife; originally named Rosalind (“Rose”), but upon her conversion to the new religion of Ecotheism she has changed her name to “Gaea.” Gaea is one of the leaders of the Ecotheist movement, which believes that humankind is essentially exploitative and evil, and that Nature is both our victim and the divine being we should worship. Her children are Freya, Beatrice, and Garrison. She and Garrison live at Devereux, the old manor house Chance bought for Gaea in Oxfordshire, in England.

  Garrison Van Riebeck, the only son and youngest child of Chance and Gaea, who has taken his mother’s side against his father.

  Ganesh Wills, a half-Indian computer hacker and genius, the researcher for Van Riebeck Enterprises who devised the software modeling programs whereby simulated earthly organisms can be subjected to accelerated evolution. In this way strains of bacteria are created that can survive on Mars and begin the transformation of its atmosphere into one breathable by human beings.

  Karl Friedrich (“Charlie”) Lorenz, Freya’s husband, father of Wolf and Irene, an ecologist, and Ganesh’s collaborator in planetary bio-engineering.

  Beatrice Van Riebeck, daughter of Chance and Gaea, a paleobiologist working for her father, whose special study has been the transformation of the Earth’s atmosphere by its earliest lifeforms into one rich in oxygen. In collaboration with Charlie and Ganesh she has created the plan for the transformation of Mars which Chance and Freya are carrying out. When the poem opens she is living with her niece and nephew Irene and Wolf, her brother-in-law Charlie, and the nurse Sumikami at the ranch of San Luis Rey.

  Irene Lorenz, daughter of Charlie and Freya, twin sister of Wolf.

  Wolf Lorenz, son of Charlie and Freya, Irene’s twin brother.

  Chui Su, “Sumikami,” daughter of a Chinese Saigon prostitute and a black American G.I., one-time geisha,
nurse to Wolf and Irene and mother of Tripitaka.

  Tripitaka, son of Sumikami by an Australian priest, a martial artist, called “Don John” or “Don” by his fellow-soldiers.

  Ruhollah, drug merchant on trial at the World Court at Olympia; mystagogue of the extreme religious society known as “the Chiffre,” which maintains that all of nature is evil, not just humankind. Garrison and Tripitaka come under his influence.

  Gianbattista (“Giamba”) Vico, attorney for Van Riebeck Enterprises.

  Ximene de Vivar, pilot of the giant treeship Kalevala, a mining vessel used in the asteroids and the rings of Jupiter and Saturn, mother of Marisol.

  Marisol de Vivar, daughter of Ximene and lieutenant on Kalevala.

  Hillel (“Hilly”) Sharon, general of the Martian forces during the revolution; the lover of both Ximene and Marisol.

  Chance Van Riebeck the Younger, the son of Charlie and Beatrice, a poet and political philosopher; one of the most profound interpreters of the Sybil, and one of the framers of the constitution of the Martian republic.

  Bella Van Riebeck, nee Morison, the wife Gaea chooses for Garrison and mother of their son Flavius.

  Flavius Van Riebeck, the son of Garrison and Bella, designated to be the assassin of the Sibyl.

  Vasco de Perez, the doctor of Beatrice and Irene.

  Bengt Andersson, the Commissioner and chief prelate of the Ecotheist Church.

  Hermione Mars, THE SYBIL: the divine woman who brings the special revelation of Mars; expected years before as a prophet.

  Rosie Molloy, the wife of Chance the younger and mother of their many children.

  Minor Characters

  Blackett, a bioengineering techie in the Ares Project.

  Billy “Tosher” Wills, an Anglo-Indian, father of Ganesh and wife of Evalina, living in San Francisco.