AND NOW, BACK TO EARTH
McCarthy, Abigail
AND NOW, BACK TO EARTH Abigail McCarthy Last summer doctors noted that there was a wave of anxiety-related illnesses in the wake of the first reports from Viking I. At the very first sight Mars...
...He pushed his way in, regardless of the surprise he was creating, and walked to the bar...
...It was a prolonged drumming noise close above his head...
...It reminded him of something-something he seemed to have heard in a previous existence...
...He awoke in almost complete darkness in the midst of a loud continuous noise, which he could not at first identify...
...It's ram.' He was on Earth...
...This might give us a better understanding of planetary processes...
...with every desire of his heart he embraced the smell of the field about him-a patch of his native planet where grass grew, where cows moved, where presently he would come to hedges and a gate...
...My favorite view of earth is in C.S...
...Asimov, before Viking was launched, foresaw what we might learn if there was no sign of life on Mars...
...Dr...
...When human beings first began to dream of other worlds, they took it tor granted that there would be life on those other worlds, even intelligent life...
...In 1877 when Mars and the earth were at a point in orbit which brought them to their minimum distance from each other-3 million miles-Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, was able to draw a map of Mars which showed dark areas, which seemed to be bodies of water, and which were connected with dark lines, which he called canali (channels...
...AND NOW, BACK TO EARTH Abigail McCarthy Last summer doctors noted that there was a wave of anxiety-related illnesses in the wake of the first reports from Viking I. At the very first sight Mars certainly looked like a planet without life...
...Saturday Review, May 1, 1975), "In the 1600s, however, after the telescope was invented, astronomers found that the moon lacked air and water, so the concept of a dead world forced itself on mankind...
...it has ice caps...
...The stars she dreamed of may in the end unroll only silence, but it does not really matter, because we have long since received the Word, God-with-us, Emmanuel...
...A lighted door was open...
...which was even more precious than the smell and feel of our world...
...How could our differences possibly matter...
...Is it already too late to turn from space and recover the vision of wholeness, bring to fullness that which we have...
...A pint of bitter, please,' said Ransom...
...But we learn something else, too...
...Since 1877 a whole new sub-field of literature has grown up called science fiction...
...They do not vigorously exclude the presence of life on Mars...
...The canal-building Martians, some therefore began to think, were indomitable engineers, fighting to keep their small planet viable against the slow but steady loss of water that was leaving it largely desert...
...The creative imagination of mankind has explored and peopled space-at first fantastically, then more and more seriously-so much so that some science fiction writers have anticipated the discoveries of professional space scientists by making the necessary leaps from theory to the concrete first...
...With every thrust into space we grow more certain...
...It didn't seem unreasonable...
...It is eight times as massive as the moon...
...What of its effect on the earth...
...With every pore of his body he drank it in...
...There was a familiar smell...
...Suddenly his heart gave a great leap...
...Why should worlds have been created if they were to be merely desert wastes?," wrote science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov...
...Klaus Biemann of MIT is sure that his instrument, perfected for just that search, probed the Martian surface and found nothing organic...
...Ransom, his space traveler, has been returned to earth just in time before the demolition of the space ship on which he had been shanghaied...
...it has seasons similar to those of earth...
...The two worlds, not very different, would have developed along two branches, one without life and one with life...
...There were voices from within and they were speaking English...
...Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet...
...Chemical reactions would explain anything so far which suggests life or the pre-conditions of life, he thinks...
...Oh God,' he sobbed, 'Oh God...
...The possibility of life in space served as a backdrop against which to illumine the conditions of life on earth, from outside, from afar, as it were...
...The advantage of this perspective is clear when one thinks of the inferences we could not help but draw from that view of earth from the mooncraft...
...The scientists are still weighing and sifting the evidence from Viking I and from Viking II, which landed in September...
...Recent reports show scientists clinging to the hope that some sort of microbic life existed or still exists...
...Harold P. Klein, biologist, was quoted in the Times as saying of the tests on Martian soil samples: "They do not vigorously prove the presence of life on Mars...
...We suddenly saw ourselves as minute specks of life moving on the face of a small planet, our lives precariously dependent on a comparatively small star, the sun...
...From the difference in the developments, we might learn, more precisely than we can possibly know now what the effect of life (basic non-intelligent life) has been on the earth...
...Not surprisingly, people accepted the idea of dead worlds with disappointment, and continued to hope for life beyond the earth, somewhere...
...They would have preferred monsters to no life at all...
...Canali translated into English as canals, positing, of course, says Asimov, "man-made waterways...
...it has a definite atmosphere...
...Carl Sagan, an astronomer and a strong proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life, has sought to explain seemingly negative data in such a way as to leave open the possibility of life...
...He contrived to get into a lane, then into a road, then into a village street...
...Why do we want to believe that there are other created beings elsewhere...
...Mars would then have an interesting difference from earth...
...Mars is smaller and colder than earth, but not very much smaller and colder...
...We are now in the season which reminds us of the earth visitor who paradoxically came of us, lived with us, and invited us to learn of him-something we have never yet done...
...It is hard for humankind to accept the thought that we are lonely in the universe...
...That is what we have-our own small earth, where grass grows, and men and women gather and light lamps against the dark...
...The returned Ransom struggles against terrestrial gravity toward that (Continued on page 826) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...Alice Meynell, a poet speculator about the universe, put it beautifully"But in the eternities doubtless we shall compare together, hear a million gospels, in what guise he trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear No planet knows that this our wayside planet carrying land and wave, love and life multiplied and pain and bliss bears as chief treasure one forsaken grave O be prepared, my soul To read the inconceivable, to scan the million forms of God those stars unroll when in our turn, we show to them a Man...
...But Dr...
...People, it seemed, had subconsciously relied on the scientific spacecraft to confirm the belief that, of all the planets in our galaxy, Mars surely sustained living beings-or once bad done so...
...Yet the hope dies hard...
...That even that may not last...
...That sight of earth, a lonely ball in the black blueness of space, which we saw on our television screens from the first moon-flight chilled the mind and constricted the heart...
...At least, in our part of the universe...
...But what of intelligent life...
...the companionship of fellow human beings...
...He had seen dim lights, the lights of men, ahead...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 26
