My good buddy Gordon is well oriented in space. He's not only aware of his location horizontally, like most of us, but also vertically. Every once in a while, I get an excited e-mail from him telling me to look into a certain part of the sky at a certain time of night to see a satellite going by. Speaking as someone who needa a GPS to get out of his own driveway, I'm amazed at Gordon's optimism about me. In fact, I've never seen one of those satellites or spaceships or whatever it is that my friend wants to share. But since he keeps trying, so do I.
I'm sure you've recently seen news articles about another Rover being sent to Mars. This latest vehicle is carrying in its toolkit 3 drill bits that were improperly sterilized. There've been a lot of especially unintelligible press statements from NASA about “miscommunication” as the reason for this oversight. I don't know how one communicates with drill bits, but it’s most interesting to learn of the great lengths our space agency has gone to prevent terrestrial germs from taking root somewhere else in our solar system. For that to happen, Mars would need to be a lot more hospitable to life than it seems to be, but I think NASA’s intention is laudable, because it makes our stance towards our solar system more respectful, and our optimism that something could live on Mars more realistic. I'm not sure why, but I really hope that there is some type of indigenous Martian life.
Miscommunication with drill bits aside, what I'd like to mention here is this story’s implied connection between public policy and scientific practice. Over and over and over again press releases assure us that some new scientific advancement is safe. Sometimes, odds are given that makes a person warning about consequences appear foolish. And when critics of irresponsible science are covered in the press, their attitude is invariably described as “fearful,” not “careful.”
Please notice that I said critics of irresponsible science, which is not the same as critics of science. I've worked hard in my life criticizing the promiscuous use of various agricultural chemicals, and the seemingly thoughtless spewing of genetically engineered substances and organisms throughout our planet. This doesn't make me a Luddite, or anti-science. It makes me someone who thinks about the health and safety of our various ecosystems when substances are introduced before the full import of their interaction is adequately understood.
It's cold comfort that some of the key “genetic advances” turned disasters I warned about in the 1990s have come to pass. What I hope for is a more extensive use of precaution: if you're not sure what you're doing, don't do it–especially when the consequences can’t be recalled.
How does this connect with the Mars Rover? Think about how many nuts and bolts and wires and chips went into constructing this new vehicle and the ship carrying it. There must be many thousands of tiny pieces. These pieces were manufactured all over the USA, then brought together to be assembled, tested many times, and violently propelled off our planet. It seems miraculous that in that almost unimaginably complex process of manufacture, sterilization, and assembly, only 3 small parts were left out of the zone of absolute safety. One is tempted to say, good for NASA. All it took was that one mistake to abrogate the sterility of the entire project.
We can no longer be sure terrestrial organisms haven't been brought to Mars. On the exciting day my friend calls me to say that life has been found on Mars, we won’t know if it isn't instead an escaped Earth organism.
So does the very slight but obviously real risk of missing 3 bits mean that we shouldn't try to explore a neighboring world? This is a poignant question, but what I want to ask is the one inside that question: who gets to decide? The Rover contamination is far away, but other much more immediate risk-benefit calculations are made on behalf of all of us every day, using processes that are obscure and usually impenetrable–and almost always driven by a combination of money and professional opportunism. That is, government and corporate sponsors of scientific research, coupled with careerist scientists, are the ones who decide if they will market Thalidomide or DES to pregnant women, put BPA in baby bottles, or spray organophosphates on our food and all over our countryside. Debate is healthy, and people may sometimes decide to take risks because the benefits are worth it to them. The problem is, risks are often pushed downward on the power gradient, while benefits tend to move upwards. Thus, there are famous examples like New York City’s buses being stored only in poor neighborhoods, with their consequently much higher rates of asthma and other diesel-related illnesses among children.
When I’ve spoken about food-related chemicals, people have almost always challenged whether there really is a health risk for those of us who eat the (usually slightly) contaminated food. Only once or twice in decades of back and forth on this topic has anyone in an audience asked about safety issues for farmers and farm workers, who are in daily contact with much higher concentrations of toxic chemicals. Do I have the right to condemn farmer worker children to high rates of birth defects, learning disabilities and cancer – so I can have my fruit blemish-free, out of season? Well, who has more power in our society – me, or Mexican-American kids in the San Joaquin Valley?
One thing is for sure: science moves much faster than society's ability to create mechanisms to manage it. Furthermore, promoters of science foster what they're doing with the promise of abundant food and cured illness. When my wife was dying from ALS, if someone had told me of a dangerous drug that had been tested on cute puppies and cost an obscene amount of money, would I have signed up for it? You bet. We can't make decisions as a society based on the needs and emotions of individuals, because if we do that, societies will never go near the brake pedal out of understandable but highly perilous kindheartedness.
Let's hope when the new vehicle we’re sending to Mars starts exploring Gale Crater sometime next year, it isn't inadvertently giving our sister planet a staph infection. We can't do much about drill bits on space ships, but as a citizenry there's a great deal we can do to make sure that science and technology don’t leave the realm of decision-making that includes common sense, prudence, and the greater good.
