http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/martian_skies.html



Several dust devils cross a plain in this animation of a series of images acquired by NASA's Mars Rover Spirit in May, 2005. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/USGS)

Isn't that awesome!
What an imagination might do with that image?

DUST DEVILS ON MARS.
by Antifascist

The Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit” traveled almost 6 months and 189 million miles to arrive on January 4, 2004 at its destination--Gusev crater, Mars (14.7 South, 184.5 West).

Mars is 141,700,000 miles from the sun. The Red Planet is about 1.5 times more remote from the Sun than Earth so that it receives less than 1/2 the Sun's radiation. On a summer’s day the temperature can reach 80 degrees F in some areas, but it would be a toxic summer’s day with the air composed of carbon dioxide (95.3%) plus nitrogen (2.7%), argon (1.6%) and traces of oxygen (0.15%) and water (0.03%).

When the rover Spirit pointed its camera southwest of its landing location across the Gusev crater floor and toward a mountain range called the “East Hill Complex” located about 2 miles away, the rover camera caught an image of a Dust Devil sweeping across the high desert plain.

Something is both familiar and alien to that image. It is familiar because the desert landscape looks like a good day in Texas. However, this uniformly monotonous rock strewn flatland hints at an alien world of different physical planetary properties, compositions, and magnitudes. A world composed of only the insensate inorganic.

As a child, I remember riding across the Nevada desert with my parents on a summer vacation and seeing a dust devil skip across the desert. A child is inherently an animist and easily anthropomorphize Nature into imaginary living beings so that a whirlwind is as much a part of the desert as Mr. fox, or Ms. lizard. Over time, whirlwinds are understood maturely as a force of nature characteristic of desert lands, or of one’s home.

But to see Dust Devils dancing on Mars is unsettling. They point to a spatial contingency that is omnipresent of the cosmos. This is not just alien it is alienating. Our surreal universe is much larger than we could imagine and the everyday props of our world are not just in this world. Mars is not my world, but it looks eerily similar except there is no regard of my inner relationship to it as a physical place. This miniature dust storm on this particular day appeared out of eons of time and although it has a causal dependency on factors such as Mars’ surface temperature and wind velocity, it was accidental and did not necessarily have to accumulate into an atmospheric disturbance on this Mars day. They represent a rootless existence in which there is no certainty of being or necessary place to belong. Maybe that is why we call them “devils”; restless, empty, meaningless, and cynical symbols of a nihilistic cosmos in which there is no security or certainty of finite being. Are we also like these rootless demons? Do we lack a necessary place and a necessary presence in this clockwork of suspended burning matter?

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L

Dr. Frank Drake, former President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University attempted in 1961 to calculate the probability of the existence of other intelligent and communicating civilizations that might exist in our galaxy. The Drake Equation, attempts to estimate the number of planets in the galaxy, the number of civilizations in The Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable, the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life, stars with planetary systems, the percentage that may have life, the percentage of planets that might have advanced culture and the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space. Dr. Drake concluded that the number of intelligent alien species in our galaxy to be in the billions. Carl Sagan popularized this formula in his series “Cosmos.” Sagan and Drake modified the formula and revised their estimate to millions of intelligent species in our galaxy.

But even before the Drake Equation estimate was made the physicist Enrico Fermi posed the question known as the Fermi Paradox: “If there so much intelligent life in our galaxy, why don’t we have evidence of such alien civilizations?” Recently, the scientists Donald Brownlee, Professor of Astronomy of the University of Washington in Seattle, and Peter D. Ward, Ph.D., a paleontologist and professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, have argued the “Rare Earth” hypothesis. In their book, “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe,” (New York: Copernicus Books, 20000) they claim intelligent life, not microbial life, is rare and even unique in the cosmos. They argue that intelligent life is improbable because of the statistically rare pre-conditions of our form of intelligent life.


This argument can easily be hijacked and reformulated as the classic “teleological” argument for the existence of God, also called the argument of “Intelligent Design.” It says the universe is so “orderly” and “complex” that chance alone cannot account for the intelligent nature of the universe and human existence. “Telos” is Greek for “end,” or “goal” making the argument tricky because what is the goal? Is the goal of the cosmos to support human life, or is it rabbit hunting? Have you noticed that rabbits are “designed” for hunting by being so small and thus easy to carry, and they have a nice white round tail perfect for targeting in the gun’s sights? The “order” that we see in the world is largely the order we impose on sense data making what we call “experience.” The goals of Nature are often our goals projected on an apathetic background of physical processes unconcerned with Human happiness. “Order” appears to function in this argument more as an “normative” notion than as a descriptive term of Nature. Human “life” is elevated above all other phenomena of existence as unique and valuable, not surprising for living beings, so all the preconditions and causal links that lead to sustaining life themselves take this same elevated significance. If intelligent life is not elevated, if survival is not a goal, then what special significance does a unique and rare ecology possess? Dust Devils on Mars have no such bias for intelligent life. Moreover, in what sense is oxygen combining with iron “intelligent?" There is no mental inference involved in this chemical binding so what do we mean by “intelligent?” In addition, even given the premise that the cosmos is intelligent, how does that support theism and not pantheism? Maybe matter is not just “dead” matter, but has an organizing principle different from what we call a theistic God.

Accepting the rare earth thesis, rare in the mathematical sense, would mean that our earth is truly unique in that it is only one in a subset of actual worlds. In human terms, meaning we embrace with abandon the bias for human life, the planet earth compared to other worlds that we have seen is the very paradise that human civilization in history has sought. Earth is an mia-topia (one-place) because it exists in no other place, “topos,” but in our galaxy—a stellar island of intelligent life. Yet, earth is far from the utopian paradise one would expect especially as we attempt to recreate a Spartan warrior society culturally and economically. If intelligent life is so rare in the cosmos, why would we be so callous in the way we treat the ecosystem? Industrial waste poured into the oceans, even dumping radioactive waste in the oceans, pumping tons of carbon monoxide into the air 24 hours a day. We may make intelligent life more rare than it already is. Would destroying life on earth be destroying all conscious life in the universe?

How is it that conscious life, self-consciousness, is able to emerge from inorganic matter? Is human consciousness just a disturbance in material nature--a dust storm of reflective self-awareness that is just as restless, empty, meaningless, and rootless as those aimless sand spouts on Mars? The Vedas say that the cosmos is Mind and that our individual consciousness is just a fragment of Mind just as our bodies are fragments of matter. Our individual consciousness is only a borrowed consciousness and through us the universe knows itself and achieves self awareness. The Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich wrote,

Monistic Indian Vedic philosophy, also called Advaita Vedanta, has the religious concepts of "prana" which is primal life energy or vital force; "Samskara" which means tendency, or character of the mind; and "Atman" which is The Self, or Soul and denotes both the Supreme Soul and the individual soul which are thought to be identical.

I consider myself fortunate to be old enough to have grown up when the best sci-fi was in a book. The only picture provided was on the cover of the book. When the author presented the story and I avidly absorbed every word, the pictures I had were all in my mind, created with the authors suggestion, all on my own.

I think I was about 12 when I read Martian Chronicles, by HG Wells. When ever I think anything about Mars, see an image beamed back from a rover on mars, or just look up at night and see that distinctly red twinkling star, I think of those images I created in my mind.

So, when I see the moving image of a dust devil on Mars, I don't just see a Dust devil.
I see a boys heroic adventure.