Lou writes:

> First, many, many thanks to Wirt for his absolutely EXCELLENT explanation of
>  the impetus and  motivation behind much of what is called science today. I
>  especially liked the story of his response to the person on Sci.Astro:
>
>  > KrisM28 wrote:
>  > >
>  > > So what's the main reason we sent the pathfinder? I'm up for it but I'm
>  > > just thinking, why? Is it one of those stupid evolution theories?
>
>  > In a word, Yes.
>
>  What refreshing clarity!

While I very appreciate the compliment (regardless of whatever level of
sincerity accompanies it :-), I'm certainly not the only one to express these
thoughts. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Robert Park, a physics professor
at the University of Maryland, wrote virtually the same thing in a requiem
for the MPL that I had written earlier. I've appended his piece below.

Wirt Atmar


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December 7, 1999


Mars, Still Ours to Conquer

By ROBERT L. PARK

Somewhere in the cold desolation near the south pole of Mars, apparently
oblivious to the frantic efforts of earthlings to contact it, there is a lost
spacecraft. Barring some stroke of remarkable luck in establishing contact,
we may never know what went wrong on the Mars Polar Lander. This was the
mission that we hoped would tell us something about one of the great
unanswered questions of science: Could there be, has there been, is there,
life on our neighboring planet?

Already those who love to criticize NASA are leaping on this apparent
failure. The plaint is familiar: The agency is mismanaged. The agency is
incompetent. The agency should be killed.

But we must place this latest setback in perspective. No lives have been
lost. There have been far more costly failures than this one. And although
the $165 million price tag sounds like a lot of money to those of us who do
not play in the National Basketball Association, the Mars Polar Lander is a
fraction of the cost of a single mission of the space shuttle, which goes no
farther from Earth than the distance between New York and Baltimore.

Mars, after all, is a hundred million miles away. We don't know much about
its terrain. There may not have been anything wrong with the spacecraft; it
may have just picked a bad place to land.

Even before all hopes have been abandoned, critics, who include some members
of Congress, were quick to mutter that NASA's decision to develop "better,
cheaper, faster" science missions is to blame. Nonsense. If anything, the
apparent failure of the Polar Lander demonstrates the wisdom of having a
series of less-expensive space probes, rather than betting the whole budget
on one project. That's what happened in 1992, when NASA bet its budget on the
$1 billion Mars Observer, which failed just before reaching the planet.

"Faster, cheaper, better," however, does not mean that budgets can be cut
every year without increasing the risk of failure. Unfortunately, the White
House and Congress have slashed NASA's budget every year. At the same time,
at the behest of Congress, NASA is building the international space station,
which, with cost overruns, is expected to cost $100 billion. Thus, budget
cuts have fallen disproportionately on the modest science program. This, even
though the unmanned space probes could yield much greater benefits than the
space station.

We may never know about life on the planets that swarm around distant stars,
but the technology exists right now to explore Mars robotically. If living
organisms are found on Mars, it will be our first contact with life that does
not share our genealogy. Extraterrestrial life, however simple, would give us
insights into how life formed on Earth. How common is life in the universe?
Given favorable conditions, is the appearance of life inevitable? How many
ways could nature's experiment with life turn out?

The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to
rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it. The Copernican
solar system, Darwinian evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the universe, the
genetic code and, most recently, the discovery that planets around other
stars are commonplace may seem to diminish the specialness of Earth and its
inhabitants.

But as we comprehend the scale of the universe, we must also be filled with
wonder that fragile, self-replicating specks of matter, trapped on a tiny
planet for a few dozen orbits around an ordinary star among countless other
stars in one of billions of galaxies, could have managed to figure this all
out.

We can't stop our exploration now.


Robert L. Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, is the
author of the forthcoming "Voodoo Science."

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