Mars Bound, Now Who Are the Aliens?

By Gordon Freedman

Every so often those of us working hard on the future of education, training and employment need to step back and think about the broadest perspectives possible and how they might relate to the future of education, to motivating learning and changing how we approach problems on Earth. Two historic events that occurred within a day of each other on Mars last week likely will be the beginning of a new chapter in history that starts small but grows over time into a two planet reality.

Next Planet?

When the Web was young,?I half-jokingly said that once 75% of all humans are connected to the Internet, or later via apps, that aliens would simply come to Earth and take over, or do so remotely.?And maybe they already have.?However, what I did not contemplate then was that once we made it to the 75% mark, when most commerce, warfare, gossip, communications, education, photo-sharing and cat videos were on the Internet or in apps, that “we” would become the aliens ourselves and head off to other planets. It appears the time has come. The human population of this planet, or some wealthy portions of it, are earnestly evaluating settlements on the Moon as the jumping off point to starting another civilization on Mars.

A Flight of Fancy

What seemed innocuous to many and unknown to many more started with a small event on the surface of our planetary neighbor, which was 1,931,504 miles away on April 19, 2021, or sixteen minutes traveling at the speed of light.?What was happening on the red planet that day had been observed on Earth for the last decade in Brookstone airport stores and?novelty and toy shops around the world.?A miniature remotely controlled helicopter with two counter-cyclical blades had climbed a few feet off the Martian soil, clawing its way into the wispy thin atmosphere, only to very quickly return to the ground.?NASA Footage

Why all the fuss? After all, the U.S. has been landing on Mars and deploying rovers for nearly twenty-five years.?And, in the same launch window in 2020 when the Perseverance mission carried its similarly named rover and the tiny drone-copter called Ingenuity, China and the United Arab Emirates?had craft bound for Mars. Until then, Russia was the only other country to have made a soft landing on Martian soil.?

However, what was different about April 2021 for NASA and the world was the tiny four?pound helicopter, or 1.51 equivalent pounds of Martian gravitational pull, hovering above the planet for seconds, making it the first craft to have landed and then started to explore that planet by air.

As newscasters on Earth pointed out, this was the Martian equivalent of the Kitty Hawk flight of the Wright Brothers in 1903, which heralded a new era of global aviation and then space flight on and from Earth.

Media Upon Media

We are now on the verge of tuning in via the Internet or apps for what will soon become near real-time (16 minute delay) gazing at Mars, much the same way we can look through webcams on Earth at the world’s cities, surf conditions, bird nests or busy intersections.?For a growing number of people on Earth, Mars is entering our continual digital consciousness, not so differently than remote parts of Earth like Antarctica, the Sahara, Alaska or the rainforests of Brazil or Indonesia.?

In this case, NASA's Perseverance safely parachuted, then was lowered by sky crane to the surface and made?a soft landing, and later deploying its small drone, Ingenuity.?Like a proud parent, Perseverance shot video of its tiny mechanical payload taking its first flight, while Ingenuity took pictures of its own twirling bladed shadow. All of this was being controlled by humans a planet away, operating a rover which was operating a drone, observable by millions of people on Earth. There is a lot to this mission of historic note, but most of all there is subtlety and familiarity; media begets media.

Producing Oxygen

If it was not enough to have this media-fest which underscores what seems like an inevitable future on the planet, a next step was taken the following day that brought that future even closer. On April 20, a unit aboard Perseverance aptly named Moxie (does NASA get awards for anthropomorphizing its experiments?) produced enough oxygen in 30?minutes to provide five minutes of breathable oxygen for a single astronaut, or a tiny portion of the oxygen needed for eventually powering rockets.?Article

This, too, is ironic, historical and foundational. Mars once had a flourishing atmosphere, perhaps not much different than the early atmosphere of Earth. It is now one hundred times thinner and composed of 90% carbon dioxide, or what humans and animals exhale, and plants inhale, here on Earth.

From Novelty to Reality

Thus, sometime in the Spring of 2021 in the grips of a global pandemic on Earth, Mars ceased being a novelty or the subject of scientific feats of accomplishment or political PR stunts.?This certainly was bolstered by the fact that not only had governments trained their sights?on our smaller sibling, but two of the world’s richest men harbored the clear intent and the necessary funds and machinery to get to Mars and start settlements.?Aerospace corporations, military planners and research scientists, materials experts and dreamers now look at Mars not as other but as part of the inevitable expansion from Earth to somewhere else. The timing of these far away events are, perhaps, a needed diversion to life on Earth.

As the drumbeat to get to Mars became louder this spring something far smaller than Ingenuity or Moxie, and something that is deadly, pervaded our planet.?Earth’s most successful and unusual creature, humans, was and is under assault, again, by a vicious mutating virus that has and continues to cause millions of deaths around the world.

Closed Loop: Microbes, Origins and Pathogens

Viral and bacterial pathogens have been the primary enemies of humans for as long as civilization has been in existence. Bacteria and viruses, capable of killing millions — and, in modern times, racing vaccination countermeasures with Darwinian skill —?drove home the financial, political and medical reasons another planet, even one with so very few resources, might look attractive. Couple this with social, cultural, political, economic and racial strife among humans, then looking skyward is perhaps a comfortable diversion, an encounter with a blank slate for those who have the luxury to think about it.

The irony in the human gaze and the race toward Mars is that we may well be the offspring of early microbes that found their way from Martian life forms across space to a newly forming and rapidly transforming Earth, from a Mars that once had oceans, a richer atmosphere and possibly life forms larger than microbes.

Part of the missions of every nation and individual focused on Martian soil is to find out if there is currently air and water sufficient to support human life and,?if there was some form of life on the planet before, whether that form of life played a role in the development of life on Earth, including the precursors to the very microbes that eventually led to the Covid-19 virus.

First Steps, First Breaths

Next up for Perseverance, and a large part of its mission, is to start prospecting for evidence of water beneath the surface of the 30 miles diameter?Jezero crater where it landed that is thought to have been the site of a giant lake. It is theorized that water once on Mars was absorbed into certain minerals in its soil which can now be broken free to again form water the same way Moxie diced a tiny piece of the current atmosphere into oxygen and carbon monoxide. And, right after that Perseverance?will begin looking for evidence of past microbial life forms.

Ingenuity’s gyrating blades and Perseverance’s soil, air and past-life probes and experiments look a lot like one planet starting the process of staking a claim on another, or simply trying to determine if we are returning home.

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Gordon Freedman is the president of the National Laboratory for Education Transformation, NLET, a research and development nonprofit focused on the future of learning, education and their connection to the labor markets. Freedman has a life-long interest in space and the universe and was the executive producer of the award-winning documentary "A Brief History of Time," based on the book and life of Professor Stephen Hawking.