Category Dreams of Other Worlds

The story of life in the universe is a story of stars. As the first clouds of gas formed stars in the infant universe, more than 13 billion years ago, the universe contained only hydrogen, helium, and a few other trace light elements. The nuclei of these light elements were forged in the intense heat a few minutes after the big bang, when the entire universe was as hot as the core of the Sun is now. As the universe rapidly expanded, radiation eased its grip and a scant half million years after the big bang, it had cooled enough for electrons to mate with nuclei and for hydrogen and helium atoms to form. Chemistry was now possible, but a universe made of the two simplest elements is singularly dull—hydrogen atoms can only join to form a hydrogen molecule, while helium is inert.

As the first stars congealed out of the expanding gas, there were no planets because there was nothing to make them out of. There was no life because there was no carbon and no nitrogen and no oxygen.1 Our existence on a rocky planet depends on generation after generation of stars fusing heavy elements in their cores and ejecting them into space to become the raw material for solar sys – tems.2 The fireworks couldn’t start until gravity had used its long reach to gather matter into concentrations dense enough to coun­ter the omnipresent cosmic expansion. This took several hundred million years. But then the pockets of spherical collapse ignited le­gions of stars that could slam atomic nuclei together hard enough for them to fuse and populate the periodic table for the first time.

Every carbon atom in our bodies was once in a star in a remote region of space more than 4.5 billion years ago. Some atoms have cycled through multiple generations of stars; their myriad stories played out over eons until they were co-opted and incorporated into our fleeting human story. We are made of stardust.

Understanding the way in which the products of stellar fusion enriched the nebula that formed the Sun and planets requires finding primordial material in the Solar System. The most pris­tine samples available are certain types of meteorites and comets. There may be as many as a trillion comets and they spend most of their time far from the Sun and Earth in the deep freeze of space. Material from the outer Solar System has been radioactively dated back to 4.567 billion years, which is taken to be the formation epoch. The spherical comet cloud extends to 100,000 Earth-Sun distances and it’s a tenuous relic of the time when the Sun switched on for the first time. In the outer part of their orbits, comets are dark and dead, but they become lively and visible when they ap­proach the Sun. This diaphanous shroud of frozen worlds holds important clues to our origins.

The Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis occur when electromag­netic particles from the solar wind collide with or excite atoms in the Earth’s magnetosphere (figure 7.4). We now understand the

explicit connection between auroras and magnetic storms, and recently have confirmed the “three-century old theory that auro­ras in the northern and southern hemispheres are nearly mirror images—conjugates—of each other.”38 Very few people in human history have inhabited the high (or low) latitudes where these bril­liant light displays are usually visible. For thousands of years the ethereal, vertical curtains of light, draped from 60 to 200 miles above the Earth’s polar regions, have inspired wonder, as well as poetic and musical responses. The Vikings first recorded the Au­rora Borealis in AD 1250. About seven hundred years later, in 1897, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen wrote of the north­ern lights: “It was an endless phantasmagoria of sparkling color, surpassing anything that one can dream. Sometimes the spectacle reached such a climax that one’s breath was taken away; one felt that now something extraordinary must happen—at the very least the sky must fall.”39

The twentieth-century composer Edgard Varese worked with “found sound,” incorporating sounds with a non-musical origin

into his music, and with electronic instruments such as the Ther­emin. He once composed a piece based on having seen the Aurora Borealis. His wife Louise recalled in her memoir of the composer, “Nature in its most magnificent and terribly impersonal aspects moved him passionately.” Titles for many of his compositions were drawn from astronomy or science. Of the aurora, Louise writes that Varese claimed he “not only saw but heard” the majestic lu­minescent curtains dancing across the night sky and later notated “the sounds that had accompanied the movements of the light.”40 Electromagnetic waves or natural radio waves can only be detected with a radio receiver.41 If we take Varese at his word, perhaps he experienced some form of synesthesia, so that in fact he had heard the northern lights. In her memoir, Louise Varese speculated that the score of the aurora her husband mentioned was either Les Cy­cles du Nord or Mehr Licht, two of several compositions that were later lost or destroyed.

More recently, Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet’s chamber music composition Sun Rings, inspired by the Sun’s dynamic mag­netic field, was written to be performed against a backdrop of IMAX-sized images from SOHO and the TRACE (Transition Re­gion and Coronal Explorer) satellite. Riley’s score is accompanied by magnificent sunspots tracking across the face of the Sun as well as finely detailed footage of magnetic field lines breaking through, looping above, and re-submerging into the Sun’s surface. Such con­temporary compositions speak to our deep, primal entanglement with the Sun, which is no less important to our lives now than it was in the ancient past.

From prehistory to the modern era, humans intuitively under­stood the Sun as integral to their very existence. Paleolithic and Neolithic communities scattered across the globe knew that the Sun powerfully shaped their lives. Evidence of their sense of the Sun’s significance is found at the Mnajdra temple on Malta, at Newgrange in Ireland, at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, and at many other megalithic structures. Such monuments speak of an ancient past in which peoples from disparate times and places were attentive and accurate observers of our star.

On the island of Malta, just off the coast of Sicily, are the re­mains of a complex of stone temples known as Mnajdra, dating to 5500 BC. One of these limestone edifices marks precise alignments with the Sun during fall and winter equinoxes.42 Physicist Guilio Magli describes Mnajdra as a “stone calendar” marking spring and autumn equinox: “In the course of the seasons, one can follow the movement of the Sun, which rises on the horizon, observing day by day at which point the light strikes the altar inside the tem­ple.”43 In walking through Mnajdra, sited as it is overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, it’s easy to recognize that the location and the megalithic temple were sacred to its ancient architects. Built with cleverness but no metal tools, the effort involved in creating the edifice was prodigious, and a reminder of the investment ancient peoples made in giving homage to the Sun.

Stonehenge, the remarkable structure ancient Britons built on Salisbury Plain sometime between 3015 and 2400 BC, is so well aligned that “the general orientation of the axis of the monument [looks] . . . towards sunrise at the summer solstice in one direction, and towards sunset at the winter solstice in the other.”44 Caroline Alexander observes that, in coming upon Stonehenge, “the great­shouldered silhouette is so unmistakably prehistoric that the effect is momentarily of a time warp cracking onto a lost world.” Alex­ander contends that the architraves atop the monoliths, “bound to their uprights by mortise-and-tenon joints taken straight from carpentry, [are] an eloquent indication of just how radically new this hybrid monument must have been. It is this newness, this as­sured awareness that nothing like it had existed before, this revela­tory quality that is still palpable in its ruined stones.” Though the stone temples at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey are far older and date to approximately 9600 BC, no prehistoric structure like Stonehenge exists anywhere else in the world. Alexander surmises that the Britons who constructed the monument “had discovered some­thing hitherto unknown, hit upon some truth, turned a corner— there is no doubt that the purposefully placed stones are fraught with meaning.”45 Emphasizing the point that the architects delib­erately aligned Stonehenge to mark the winter and summer sol­stices, Magli writes, “This is therefore the only information that the builders left us in writing. Granted it is written in stone, and with stone, and in the language of the sun and of the stones. But it is nevertheless written.”46

Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian from the first century BC, supposedly commented on “a lost account set down three cen­turies earlier, which described ‘a magnificent precinct sacred to Apollo and a notable spherical temple’ on a large island in the far north, opposite what is now France.”47 Stonehenge, Diodorus sug­gested, was constructed to pay homage to the Sun. As with the rel­ics of any prehistoric culture, multiple interpretations are possible. Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the Stonehenge Riverside Project has recently reinterpreted Stonehenge as a burial monu­ment. He contends that the people who raised the monoliths on the chalk downs apparently gathered each winter solstice to mark the setting Sun as the beginning of a new year and to remember their ancestors.

Astronomer Edward Krupp has investigated the sophisticated and sizeable burial chamber in Ireland known as Newgrange or Bru na Boinne: “Newgrange is a megalithic surprise,” writes Krupp, who characterizes the structure as emerging from the land­scape “like a highway tourist attraction.”48 During winter solstice at this stone monument, the first rays of the Sun illuminate a room deep in the structure to mark the beginning of the new year. Dat­ing from about 3700 to 3200 BC, Newgrange was designed so that “two weeks either side of the winter solstice, the Sun, on rising, shown down the length of the entrance passage and illuminated the central chamber—as it still does.”49 The beam of sunlight, as it travels deep into the monument, is thinned and sculpted by the megaliths’ calculated placement. To offer a vivid picture of the massive effort required to construct the edifice, Magli emphasizes that “5000 years ago, someone built a monument involving thou­sands of tons of earth and rock, covered it with quartz like a giant jewelry box, [and] carefully measured the direction of the sunrise at winter solstice to line up a corridor built with stones as heavy as many elephants together.”50 Not surprisingly, the legend associated with Newgrange recounts tales of the earliest known Irish gods, “The Lords of Light.”51

The Chankillo complex in Peru predates the Inca by two thou­sand years, offering insight into the precursors to Sun worship among the Inca and their official Sun cult. In 2007, Ivan Ghe – zzi, Peru’s national director of archaeology, and astronomer Clive

Ruggles reported discerning the layout of what is considered the oldest solar temple in the Americas. Ghezzi was first to surmise the purpose of thirteen towers on a ridge near Chankillo, a fourth century BC ceremonial complex in the northern coastal, desert region of Peru. Traditionally considered a fortress, Chankillo is now understood to be a very precise solar observatory built by the people who predated the Inca. Ghezzi realized that the prominent line of stone towers were markers that indicated the Sun’s position throughout the months of the calendar year. He contacted Ruggles and together these researchers, using hand-held GPS devices, de­termined that the location of the towers as projected against the horizon “corresponds very closely to the range of movement of the rising and setting positions of the Sun over the year.” In particular, winter and summer solstice alignments are clearly marked by the towers. Ghezzi and Ruggles have shown that the towers and the gaps between them offered “a means to track the progress of the Sun up and down the horizon to within an accuracy of two or three days.”52

One import of the findings at Chankillo, write Ghezzi and Rug­gles, is that “sunrise ceremonies, at a sanctuary on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, surrounding a crag regarded as the origin place of the Sun, almost certainly had pre-Incaic roots.”53 Either the Inca, or the peoples who predated them, named an island in Lake Titicaca as Isla del Sol, or Island of the Sun, in honor of the god who created the Sun, Moon, stars, and humankind. It is well known that at the high Andean city of Machu Picchu, constructed in the late 1400s, the Inca kept accurate records marking the win­ter solstice, the first day of the Inca year. But the Inca may have ad­opted their attentiveness to the Sun from peoples who far predated their great civilization.

Long before the Neolithic Britons were raising those remark­able trilithons on Salisbury Plain, the Egyptians had already de­veloped writing and record keeping and were constructing the Great Sphinx at Giza, apparently in recognition of the god Horus or Horemakhet, believed to be a personification of the Sun on the horizon.54 An even earlier instantiation of the Sun god Horus was Ra, the patron god of the ancient Egyptian city Heliopolis, located in the Nile delta. In approximately 2400 BC, Ra was combined with the god of Thebes to become Amun-Ra, the highest deity in the Egyptian pantheon. These are a few of the varied civilizations that recognized the importance of the Sun to their survival. In the Information Age, we’re just as dependent on our star as ancient peoples—maybe even more so.

Even to the naked eye, Mars clearly varies in brightness over months and years. Mars is roughly 50 percent farther away from the Sun than the Earth, and its distance from us depends on which side of the Sun each planet is on and the details of their elliptical orbits. At its closest,9 Mars is only 55 million kilometers away and, at its farthest, it’s 400 million kilometers away. This variation cor­responds to a factor of 50 in apparent brightness and a factor of 7 in angular size. Only the brightness variation is visible to the naked eye; a telescope is needed to resolve Mars into a pale red disk. Even when it looms closest in the sky, Mars is just 25 arc seconds across, or seventy times smaller than the full Moon.

Following the invention of the telescope, the view of Mars evolved relatively slowly. Galileo began observing Mars in Septem­ber 1610.10 He noticed that it changed in angular size and he specu­lated that the planet had phases. The Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens was first to draw a sketch with surface features, in partic­ular the dark area or “mare” called Syrtis Major. Huygens thought Mars might be inhabited, perhaps by intelligent creatures. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Giovanni Cassini and Huygens first spotted the pale polar caps of Mars,11 and in the early eigh­teenth century Cassini’s nephew Giacomo Maraldi saw variations in the polar caps that he speculated were due to water freezing and melting during the Martian seasons, although he could not rule out varying clouds.12 William Herschel used his state-of-the-art tele­scopes for a period of more than eight years beginning in 1777 to bolster the interpretation that the poles were made of frozen water. He had measured the tilt of Mars’s spin axis relative to the plane of its orbit so knew it had similar seasons to the Earth. He had also read Huygens’s posthumous book Cosmotheoros in which the Dutchman speculated about life in the Solar System. In an address to the Royal Society in London, Herschel asserted boldly: “These alterations we can hardly ascribe to any other cause than the vari­able disposition of clouds and vapors floating in the atmosphere of the planet. . . . Mars has a considerable but modest atmosphere, so that its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to our own.”13 With respected scientists setting up the ex­pectation of life on Mars so long ago, it’s not surprising that the idea had taken deep root by the modern age.

Telescope design continued to improve through the nineteenth century, allowing telescopes to make sharper images and resolve smaller features on Mars. In 1863, the Jesuit astronomer Angelo Secchi saw the maria appear to change in color; he fancifully drew them as green, yellow, blue, and brown at different times. He also saw two dark, linear features that he referred to as canali, which is Italian for grooves or channels.14 It was a fateful choice of words, because the literal English translation as canals suggests construc­tion by a technological civilization.

Behind every successful robot rover there’s a driver. Actually, four­teen drivers in the case of Spirit and Opportunity. For those peo­ple used to the gray, male gristle of the typical scene at Mission Control in Houston, the rover drivers are surprisingly young, and many are women. Drivers don’t control the rovers in real time with a joystick; the reasons are that real-time control would be far too hazardous, and there’s no immediate feedback. Depending on where the Earth and Mars are in their orbits, the distance can vary from 35 to 200 million miles, and the time delay for a signal can be as high as twenty minutes.

The drivers are part of a much larger team of engineers and scientists, numbering over two hundred, who are all involved at some level in what the rovers do. On a typical day, the results of the previous day—which are part of a larger strategy involving weeks or months of roving—are evaluated as quickly as possible, usually within an hour. Then the drivers work with the science team to map out the day’s activities, which might involve measure­ments of an interesting rock or navigating around obstacles. This is turned into a set of commands that the rovers can execute. Com­mands are turned into a realistic animation and reviewed with the science team. Then they are picked apart for anything that could go wrong. All possible contingencies are considered. The final list of commands is reviewed twice and sent to the rovers to execute. Then the process starts again, as it has for over 2,500 days. The only break comes during each Martian winter when the rovers hibernate and conserve power.

There’s a catch. A Martian day is 40 minutes longer than a Ter – ran day. So each day drivers begin their days 40 minutes later than the day before. As driver Scott Maxwell has said, “Pretty soon, you’re starting your day at midnight, at 2 a. m., at 4 a. m. (figure 3.4). It’s been called ‘Martian jet lag’—it’s tough on bodies, on brains, on relationships.”31 It leads to fatigue, which leads to mis­takes. So many drivers watch their caffeine intake and keep to Mars time even on their days off, which puts further strain on relationships and adds to the “otherworldliness” of the job. As for what it feels like to control a robotic vehicle on another planet, listen to Ashley Stroupe, one of the most experienced drivers: “It’s really just awe inspiring. Probably the closest I’ll ever get to being an astronaut. Going to new places and being the first human eyes to see them is profound and hard to describe. It’s the best job I could imagine.”32

The different personalities of the rovers project into the driving experience, as Stroupe explains: “The rovers do behave differently!

Spirit and Opportunity are first in very different terrains, and so you have to drive them differently. Also, they have aged differently and have driven us to use very different strategies. We have to drive Spirit mostly backward to drag the broken right front wheel, and we have to drive Opportunity with the robotic arm out in front since one of the joints broke and we can’t stow it anymore.” There are also light moments, as Maxwell describes in his online blog: “Early in the mission, we nearly lost Spirit due to a problem with its flash file system. When we’d diagnosed and fixed the problem, cleaned up the flash drive, and knew that the danger was past, someone wrote this on one of our white boards: Spirit was willing, but the flash was weak.” His greatest driving challenge was trying to get Spirit to a safe haven for the winter by driving across a dune with a balky wheel. As he said, “Imagine trying to cross a desert pushing a shopping cart with one stuck wheel.”

All human cultures communicate by signaling greetings, which serve as an opening that usually indicates a lack of hostility. Whether a presidential address, evening news program, a letter, telephone message, or a friend or stranger’s passing acknowledg­ment on the street, we anticipate salutations.48 Greetings also are an opening to what the ancient Greeks called xenia, hospitality to the unknown other. Biocultural theorist Brian Boyd contends that among ancient Greek cultures, the extension of hospitality, or xenia, initiated collaboration among strangers in a hostile time and region. Particularly in the Iliad and Odyssey texts, hospitality, asserts Boyd, is a core value:

The word xenos, stranger-guest-host-friend, tells a whole exemplary tale in a single word. When a stranger arrives at my doorstep, I am obligated to welcome and feed him. . . even before asking him who he is. . . . The stranger becomes my guest, and to signify that he has therefore also become my friend, I should bestow on him a valuable gift at his departure, and help him on his onward journey. He is then obliged, should I arrive on his threshold, to become my host. . . . But more than that: the bond of xenia created by the initial act of welcome and cemented by the gift should endure between us for life and be­tween our descendants.49

As an example of this, Boyd mentions a scene from the Iliad in which a Greek and a Trojan warrior refuse to fight as their rela­tives were xenoi.

From its inception, Voyager’s Record was understood to be as much a message to ourselves as it was to those who may encoun­ter it. Included are greetings from President Jimmy Carter, who wrote: “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.”50 Even as Voyager ex­tends hospitality to possible galactic civilizations, Carl Sagan often reiterated that we must extend to neighboring nations, those we know quite well, an equal largess if we wish to survive millions of years hence. That was the point of Sagan’s talk given in 1988 on the 125 th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg:

Today there is an urgent, practical necessity to work together on arms control, on the world economy, on the global environment. It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. . . . The real triumph of Gettysburg was not, I think, in 1863, but in 1913, when the surviving veterans, the remnants of the adversary forces, the Blue and the Gray, met in celebration and solemn memorial. It had been the war that set brother against brother, and when the time came to remember, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, the survivors fell, sobbing, into one another’s arms. They could not help themselves.51

Though seemingly ill-equipped for their mission, Voyager carries from a tiny blue dot of a planet into the unfathomable abyss a gift, a small repository of human artifacts, music, and greetings offering not just xenia but charity that neither expects nor re­quires reciprocity. That was the attribute that ensured our survival as a species and likewise has informed our dream of becoming members of an advanced galactic community. “In their explor­atory intent,” wrote Sagan, “in the lofty ambition of their objec­tives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.”52

Aerogel was created in 1931 as the result of a bet. Steven Kistler wagered a colleague that he could replace the liquid inside a jam jar without producing any shrinkage. In other words, he thought he could fill the volume with something that had the same struc­tural properties but was completely dry. The material that won the bet was 99.8 percent air and has the lowest density of any known solid. Aerogel is made by extracting the liquid from a gel by super­critical drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly drawn off with­out the solid matrix of the gel collapsing under its capillary action, as would occur during evaporation. The first aerogels were made of silica; more recent ingredients include alumina and carbon.11

If you touch an aerogel, it feels like Styrofoam or the green foam that flowers are often pressed into. Pressing on it softly doesn’t leave a mark and pressing on it firmly leaves a slight depression. But pressing down sharply enough will cause a catastrophic break­down of the dendritic structure, making it shatter like glass. It’s light and strong, supporting four thousand times its own weight. Aerogel is a thousand times less dense than glass, and the myriad tiny cells of air trapped inside the material make it one of the best insulators known. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab learned how to make extremely pure aerogel and it was used as an insula­tor on the Mars Pathfinder mission. Peter Tsou is the wizard at JPL who fabricates aerogels; because of the importance of his skills, he was named deputy principal investigator on Stardust.

With Stardust, the challenge was to capture small particles mov­ing at six times the speed of a rifle bullet without vaporizing them or altering them chemically. Aerogel is perfect for this job; the rigid foam that’s not much denser than air slows the particles down and brings them to a relatively gentle halt, each one leaving a carrot­shaped wake two hundred times its size. Imagine firing bullets into a swimming pool filled with Jello. Stardust’s aerogel was fitted into a module the size and shape of a tennis racket that swung out when the spacecraft approached the comet. One side was turned to face Wild 2, and the other side was turned to face interstellar dust encountered on the journey. Before and after use, the module was stored in its protective Sample Return Capsule (plate 9).12

Stardust flew within 150 miles of the comet on January 2, 2004 and headed back to Earth with its precious cargo trapped like tiny flies in a silica spider web. On January 15, 2006, Stardust returned home after seven years and nearly 3 billion miles of traveling. First, the mission controllers did a short rocket burn to divert the space­craft from hitting the Earth, leaving it with just 20 kg of fuel. Then they fired two cable-cutters and three retention bolts to release the 46-kg return capsule and watched as springs on the spacecraft pushed the capsule away. The capsule streaked into the pre-dawn California sky at 29,000 mph, faster than any man-made object had ever been returned to Earth. The heat shield and parachutes worked flawlessly and the capsule landed in the Utah desert at 5:10 a. m. The few people up and outside that morning saw a fire­ball and heard a sonic boom.

Within two days, the package containing the aerogel was opened in a clean room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Stardust was subject to the maximum contamination restrictions, since it returned material from an extraterrestrial object with the potential to host life. In practice, the risk of “infecting” the Earth with alien life was low, since any known organism would almost certainly be destroyed by the high impact speeds in the aerogel, but NASA took no chances. The mission was carried out under a Category 5 plane­tary protection policy, which is even more stringent than Biosafety Level 4, the protocol used to deal with hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.13 That means sterilization by heat, chemicals, and radiation before the spacecraft is launched, and a requirement that the returned samples are handled in a secure facility and never come into direct contact with humans.

Members of the team opened the sample return package in a clean room just down the hall from where hundreds of kilos of Moon rocks are kept, brought back by the Apollo astronauts.14 The room was a hundred times cleaner than a hospital operating theater. They were delighted to see the aerogel segments littered with particle tracks, looking like burrows left behind by micro­scopic creatures. The mission had clearly been a success.

Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia is an online fictional hyper­text project that interleaves conventional writing with program­ming code for Html and Javascript to explore the ways human culture has been shaped by emerging digital communication tech­nologies. Memmott writes: “The Earth’s own active crust we are, building, building—up and out—antennae, towers to tele*.”55 Memmott evokes an interesting concept. Humans have produced an electronic crust, or an information and technology layer, over Earth’s surface and extending into orbit. This layer of electron­ics is comprised of technologies ranging from radio and televi­sion relay stations perched on mountain tops to fiber-optic lines in homes and businesses, from cell towers dotting the high ground to transoceanic cables in the ocean depths. This data-rich envelope extends from backyard satellite dishes to powerful astronomical radio telescopes lined across the desert in Socorro, New Mexico, to billions of dollars in satellite hardware in low Earth orbit.

This infrastructure transmits information to cell phones, radios, televisions, computers, global positioning devices, emergency ser­vice centers, hospitals, and weather reporting stations, etc. Mem – mott writes, “I spread out—pan—s end out signals, smoke and otherwise, waiting for Echo.”56 The point is that since the ancient past, humans have extended their communication capabilities over larger and larger distances, through technologies that today trans­mit information around the globe at the speed of light. But this diaphanous “skin” is sensitive to the conditions of the space envi­ronment just as our skin is sensitive to the Sun. Never before have we been so dependent upon an understanding of the inner work­ings of the Sun and its impact on the electronics that sustain our information-based culture. As we continue to expand and rely on

this electronic, information layer encasing the Earth, we’re increas­ingly impacted by the Sun’s powerful magnetic reach.

Evolutionarily, we’ve adapted to living with our star. As John Freeman points out, humans, like other mammals, insects, and plants, have evolved “sense organs that can make use of the Sun’s outward flood of electromagnetic radiation. It’s not an accident that our eyes are sensitive to the same portion of the electromag­netic spectrum where solar radiation is most intense.”57 Similarly, our skin is well adapted to sunlight in a number of ways, one being that in about fifteen minutes of exposure our skin absorbs the daily recommended amount of vitamin D. Our lives are intimately bound up with the Sun, and not just because of our need for its light and warmth. The iron in our blood was forged inside massive stars over 4.5 billion years ago and then surfed the blast waves of supernovae into interstellar space. Stars like the Sun spewed heavier elements into space that eventually coalesced into our Sun and Solar System. Harlow Shapley popularized this concept in the early 1900s by claiming that we are made of “star stuff.” The human body, as all life on Earth, is comprised of carbon, calcium, oxygen, and other heavy elements forged in the cores of stars that exploded long before our Sun was born. Given how much more there is to it than meets the eye, it’s fitting that one of NASA’s ini­tial Braille books for the blind focused on the Sun.58

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in early 2010, is carrying on SOHO’s work with even greater accuracy in exam­ining the Sun’s interior and interpreting the sound waves travel­ing inside and across its surface. Part of NASA’s “Living with a Star” program, SDO is tracking magnetic fields within the Sun in hopes of discovering the mechanism that drives the Sun’s eleven – year cycle. SDO is sending data to Earth at a rate a thousand times faster than SOHO, equivalent to downloading 300,000 songs a day. The satellite is 50 percent heavier than SOHO and views the Sun in high definition, or nearly IMAX quality, taking a picture in eight different colors every ten seconds.59 It’s serving as a first alert against magnetic storms sweeping over our fragile home in space.

We’ve learned from SOHO and other missions that the rock­steady light from the Sun, varying by less than a percent from year to year or decade to decade, is not the whole story. In invisible forms of radiation, the Sun is epic and Byzantine in its behavior, and scientists have not fully understood this apparently simple, middle-aged and middle-weight star. Scattered through the Milky Way galaxy, there are an estimated hundred million habitable Earth-l ike worlds orbiting Sun-l ike stars, and each will have its own complex relationship with its parent star.60 Our Sun and the space weather it produces will determine the future of our species as well as that of all life on Earth, even the planet itself. Having sustained our world for billions of years, the Sun is still a devoted protector and guardian. It reaches out across a hundred million miles to cradle, caress, stroke, and occasionally, scold us.

Our vision of distant worlds has improved immensely since Gali­leo first pointed his slender spyglass at the night sky. Observational astronomy has moved from naked-eye observing to the use of large-format CCDs. These devices register an image by converting incoming light first into electrons and then into an electrical cur­rent, and astronomers typically gather light for several minutes up to an hour before reading out the device and inspecting the image. The CCDs that astronomers use are just larger format versions of the ubiquitous detectors found in digital cameras and cell phones. However, before photography matured, the only detector in as­tronomy was the unaided eye, and the only way to record an image was to sketch it on paper. Professional and amateur astronomers are familiar with “seeing,” the rapid fluctuation of images caused by convective motions in the atmosphere; it’s the phenomenon that causes stars to “twinkle.” Viewed through a telescope, star images flicker and dance. But there are moments of stillness when the im­ages become crisp.15 Observers ever since the time of Galileo have learned to swiftly record the view when the seeing is at its best. In those moments when the light is not quite as scrambled by the atmosphere, features become apparent that are otherwise invisible and images seem to snap into focus.

In 1877, Mars was at its closest approach to the Earth, and Giovanni Schiaparelli was prepared to make the best observations of Mars yet. Already a talented observer, he used his skills as a draughtsman to make rapid sketches of the planet during the mo­ments of sharp viewing, and he built up the stamina needed to concentrate intensely in short bursts through a long winter’s night. He made detailed maps, naming features as “seas,” not because he thought they actually contained water, but by tradition, as had been done with lunar features since the time of Galileo. He saw linear features stretching for hundreds of miles across the surface that were evocative of artificial constructions, although he resisted drawing this conclusion (figure 2.1).16 Meanwhile, a separate de­bate raged over whether the atmosphere of Mars contained a sig­nificant amount of water vapor. Some observers claimed that it did, but it’s very difficult to separate the signature of water around a remote planet from the very much stronger signature of water imprinted on the light by the Earth’s atmosphere, and these obser­vations turned out to be flawed.17 As an Italian, Schiaparelli used the term canali, which was once again given an erroneous and literal translation in English-speaking media.

Mars fever began to take hold. The Suez Canal had opened in 1869, so the public was primed to appreciate the engineering achievement implied by canals on Mars. Not every observer could confirm the linear markings, but many of them deferred to Schia­parelli’s skill and assumed that their own shortcomings were the obstacle. Amateur astronomer and author William Sheehan has noted the power of this type of thinking, where expectation and projection can shape the sensory experience: “Schiaparelli had taught observers how to see the planet, and eventually it was im­possible to see it any other way. Expectation created illusion.”18

The scene then shifted to northern Arizona. It was 1894, and Percival Lowell was driving his workers hard. He was racing to build a telescope before a particularly close approach of Mars. The patrician Bostonian had left his gilded life to fuel a personal obsession in the thin air of the northern Arizona desert. The previ­ous Christmas, Lowell had been given a copy of The Planet Mars by Camille Flammarion as a present—Flammarion was a noted French astronomer and popularizer of science, considered by many the early predecessor of Carl Sagan. Flammarion accepted the in­terpretation that Martian canals represented intelligent life and in his book wrote: “The actual conditions on Mars are such that it would be wrong to deny that it could be inhabited by human spe­cies whose intelligence and methods of action could be far superior to our own. Neither can we deny that they could have straightened the original rivers and built up a system of canals with the idea of producing a planet-wide circulation system.”19 Lowell had a prior

interest in astronomy and he correctly judged that the best place to see sharp images was in the high and dry desert air, far from any city lights. The Lowell family motto was “seize your opportu­nity” and Percival took it to heart, dropping his plans of leisurely travel in Asia to venture into the rugged terrain south of the Grand Canyon.

For fifteen years, Lowell studied Mars diligently and produced a series of drawings of intricate surface markings as he perceived them. To Lowell, the canals were real and they were manifestly artificial. Around his observations he wove a story of a dying race, more intelligent than humans, who had built a network of canals to carry water from the poles to the arid equatorial regions.20 Pro­fessional astronomers were skeptical of the observations and their interpretation, and were generally dismissive of the back story, but Lowell bypassed them with popular books and extensive lectur­ing. Lowell published his first book on the subject in 1896, titled simply Mars. Two years later, H. G. Wells incorporated major ele­ments of Lowell’s view of Mars into The War of the Worlds, which was very popular and struck a nerve with the public. The War of the Worlds was first published in magazine serial form, in the tradition of the novels of Charles Dickens. As a book, it has never been out of print and has so far spawned five movies, a TV series, and numerous imitators. At this point, cultural and scientific views of Mars were closely twined.

Lowell’s 1906 book Mars and Its Canals met with a strong re­buttal from Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, who argued that Mars was far too cold to host liquid water. He considered that the polar caps were made of fro­zen carbon dioxide, not water ice, and he concluded that Mars was uninhabited and uninhabitable. Wallace’s critique made no differ­ence in the cultural arena. Ten years later, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, set on a version of the red planet alive with exotic animals, fierce warriors, and princesses in near­human form. He wrote another ten Mars stories over the follow­ing thirty years, inspiring Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and launching a grand tradition of Mars science fiction.21

Mars fever was resistant to the medicine of improved astronom­ical observations.22 Lowell stubbornly defended his position until the end of his life, saying in 1916: “Since the theory of intelligent life on the planet was first enunciated twenty-one years ago, every new fact discovered has been found to be accordant with it. Not a single thing has been detected which it does not explain. This is re­ally a remarkable record for a theory. It has, of course, met the fate of any new idea, which has both the fortune and the misfortune to be ahead of the times and has risen above it. New facts have but buttressed the old, while every year adds to the number of those who have seen the evidence for themselves.”23 By 1938, telescopic remote sensing had demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Mars was a dry, barren, lifeless desert, but that didn’t dim the twinkle in Orson Welles’s eye as he reeled the public in with his artful hoax.

The fever cooled dramatically in 1965 with Mariner 4. Spurred into existence by a series of firsts for the Soviets in space, NASA was a young government agency with ambitious plans. By the mid – 1960s the hardware development for the Apollo program was in full swing, but NASA also wanted to gain the initiative in inter­planetary probes.24 The Mariner series of space probes was de­signed to investigate the inner Solar System. Space exploration was definitely not for the faint of heart; in the 1960s roughly half of NASA’s probes failed. Mariners 1 and 2 were intended for Venus. Mariner 1 veered off-course and had to be destroyed just after launch, while Mariner 2 made it to Venus and transmitted useful data as it flew by. Venus was known to have thick, opaque clouds so there was no camera on board. Mariners 3 and 4 were intended for Mars. Mariner 3 mysteriously lost power eight hours after launch, so all eyes turned to Mariner 4.25 After seven months and 220 million kilometers of travel and one mid-course correction, it swooped within 10,000 kilometers of the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft sent back twenty-one black and white images, the first pictures ever taken of a world beyond the Moon by a space probe. The images were small and grainy, with eight times worse resolution and sixty times fewer pixels than a typical cell phone camera. They showed a barren and cratered surface. Other instruments indicated a sparse atmosphere, daytime high tempera­tures of -100°C, and no magnetic field that would be needed to protect the planet from harmful cosmic rays.26 Mars, so deeply rooted in the popular consciousness as a living world, seemed to be Moon-like and lifeless.

Many of the rover drivers are younger than thirty-five years old. In general, planetary science is an older man’s game; it takes more than a decade to plan and execute a space mission, and the pro­portion of women in the profession has been growing, but from a low base. However, NASA understands that the vitality of the space program depends on inspiring young people and broad­ening the participation of women. The Mars Exploration Rov­ers have set a strong example of engaging the next generation. It started with a third grader naming the rovers, as we saw in the opening vignette.

The trail was blazed by nine kids aged from ten to sixteen from around the world who won an even earlier essay contest. Their prize was to have guided a robotic rover on the Mars Surveyor mission, but that mission was cancelled. In March 2001, they came to the United States to work with the Mars Global Surveyor or – biter, where they became the first members of the public to ever command a NASA mission. The next set of eight students was selected from thousands of applicants who had to write a journal saying how they would use a rover to explore a hypothetical site on Mars. Aged eleven to seventeen, they came to JPL in Pasadena in 2002 to simulate two days of exploring Mars with a prototype of an advanced rover called Fido. They experienced the same train­ing given to mission team scientists.

All this led to the selection of sixteen “Student Astronauts” from another international essay contest, sponsored by the Planetary Society. The eight boys and eight girls, ages thirteen to seventeen, came to JPL in early 2004 and were the first group of kids ever to participate in the daily operations of an ongoing Mars mis­sion. They were in the thick of things as Spirit and Opportunity made some of their most interesting discoveries. Snippets from the children’s online diaries give a sense of their experience. Courtney Dressing from the United States said, “Today was definitely the best day of my life! Spirit landed on Mars!” Saatvik Agarwal from India said, “It’s really amazing how scientists just stop with what­ever they are doing and explain it to us without feeling irritated!” Kristyn Rodzinyak from Canada commented, “Today has been a very exciting sol! I can’t wait to start working on new images for these sols and on the other rover!” Camillia Zedan from Great Britain: “The overall message from all meetings is one of enthu­siasm; just keep on truckin’. I must admit that I still can’t believe that I’m actually here.”33

A follow-up of these young people five years after the rovers landed showed that almost all of them are pursuing science degrees and heading for careers in science or the aerospace industry. Their passion for space is undiminished. Their dreams of other worlds were nurtured profoundly. They of course were lucky enough to have a singular experience, but the Mars rovers have also reached into the lives of a much larger number of people.

Voyager’s interstellar mission summons up the voice-over at the beginning of what began as a seemingly minor television series, initially aired between 1966 and 1969, titled Star Trek: “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Those words, immortalized by William Shatner in his role as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise, have powerfully shaped popular discourse regarding space exploration. By the late 1960s, Americans were tuning their televisions to watch the space drama created by Gene Roddenberry and developed along with Herb Solow, Gene Coon, Matt Jeffries, and Bob Justman. The impact of Star Trek has been unprecedented and unparalleled. In decades of syndication, the se­ries would inspire and captivate a global audience. Film historian Constance Penley points out that in the cultural discourse Star Trek became inextricably linked with NASA. Describing the con­flation of NASA and the television series in its various iterations as a “powerful cultural icon,” Penley contends that “NASA/TREK shapes our popular and institutional imaginings about space ex­ploration.” By 1976, NASA and Star Trek were so intertwined in the popular thinking that, at the request of Star Trek fans, Presi­dent Gerald Ford was persuaded to change the name of the newly unveiled prototype space shuttle from Constitution to Enterprise. Penley writes, “Many of the show’s cast members were there as the Enterprise. . . was rolled out onto the tarmac at the Edwards Air Force Base to the stirring sounds of Alexander Courage’s theme from Star Trek.”53 Then JPL Director Bruce Murray recalls that a year later, in 1977 when the Voyager spacecraft were launched, funding for the planned Jupiter Orbiter with Probe (JOP) project had been cancelled. That summer, Gene Roddenberry happened to be speaking at a Star Trek convention in Philadelphia and encour­aged the five thousand attendees to contact their congressional representatives to save the mission.54 Whatever the reason was for the reversal, the Jupiter mission eventually was supported as the Galileo Orbiter.

That Star Trek touched a powerful chord in the public sphere is unquestioned. William Shatner has observed that the original Star Trek series went on to become the most successful television series ever produced, and has evolved into a huge industry comprising spun-off TV series, motion pictures including J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), as well as novels, cartoons, action figures, Trek conventions, and many marketing products.55 By aligning the space agency with the Star Trek fran­chise, NASA has realized even greater public interest. In 2011, the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) attracted visitors with “Summer of Sci Fi: Where Science Fiction Meets Science Fact.” The event was designed to combine “the technology, innovation and exploration of NASA with the adventures of Star Trek.” Its website featured a retro image of Spock, modeled on the 1960s series, with his hand raised in the Vulcan greeting of “Live long and prosper.”56 Activi­ties included a live theater production that posed the audience as new recruits for Starfleet Command, a shuttlecraft simulator, “Star Trek: The Exhibition,” and an opportunity to win a suborbital flight with XCOR Aerospace, whose Lynx aircraft is to be piloted by former astronaut Rick Searfoss.

The Voyager mission was even featured as a plot device in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) when Kirk reunites with his for­mer crew to save the Earth from a sentient spacecraft that eradicates everything in its path as it searches for its creator. Unfortunately for Kirk and his crew, the entity views them as a carbon-based infestation of starships. It gains sentience after unknown aliens re­pair the old Earth spacecraft that forms its core, the name of which is V’Ger, a corruption of the word Voyager and likely derived from the acronyms given the Voyager spacecraft. A test model of Voy­ager was labeled VGR77-1, while the spacecraft actually launched were titled VGR77-2 and VGR77-3.57 On a recent NPR Science Friday program, Ira Flatow asked Ed Stone about his reaction to the film, to which Stone replied: “I thought it was a really won­derful idea to take this spacecraft and somehow make it part of a sentient being. Of course, that’s science fiction, but it really does illustrate the impact Voyager’s had on [the] public imagination.”58

The popular conflation of NASA and Star Trek produced a deep cultural narrative about the possibilities of exploring the universe through international and peaceful collaboration. Roddenberry’s altruistic vision of human civilization four hundred years in the future is evidenced in the name chosen for his fictional starship. In deliberate counterpoint to the first nuclear-powered aircraft car­rier, the U. S.S. Enterprise, Roddenberry christened his vessel the United Starship Enterprise and assigned its crew a mission for the peaceful exploration of space.59 Currently, Richard Branson’s Vir­gin Spaceship Enterprise, or VSS Enterprise, is poised to be among the first to offer commercial space tourism flights and is so named in recognition of Star Trek.

There’s a lesson to be gleaned from the history of a low-budget television series, which was cancelled after its third season, that nevertheless has produced such an enduring vision for hu­mankind’s peaceful future. Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen assert, “Myths are a people’s deep stories—the narratives that structure their worldview.” They point out that Star Trek and its spin-off series frequently drew upon ancient myths to rework them into a modern mythos about equality, regardless of ethnicity or species, and of a future time when humankind organized into a “Federa­tion of Planets has eliminated intolerance, exploitation, greed, war, and materialism.”60 Penley likewise claims that “an astonishingly complex popular discourse about civic, social, moral, and political issues is filtered through the idiom and ideas of Star Trek” and this, in part, explains why the series has been such “a hugely popular story of things to come.”61

In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote: “The visions we offer our chil­dren shape the future. It matters what those visions are.” Cultural narratives, even those spun from fiction, can powerfully shape a generation and a culture’s vision for survival in ages long hence. Among the deeply resonant narratives of space exploration in­forming our generation is Voyager’s epic journey, and Sagan’s apt commentary on the spacecraft’s view of Earth from the edge of our Solar System. “Look again at that dot,” he admonished. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. . . . There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . . To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”62