Q&A with David Weintraub – Human’s Exploration of Mars
Troy Jiang 2018 Sept. 25th
Landing on Mars has always been a popular topic on social media and news. As everyone is thrilled to witness this historical moment, Vanderbilt’s Professor of Astronomy and the director of undergraduate studies, David A. Weintraub, calls attention to facts many people have never thought of before. In his recently published book, Life on Mars, Weintraub talks about the history and motivation of human’s exploration of Mars. He also indicates the potential risks of human’s landing on Mars, which intrigues us to think about “what to know before we go.”
What motivated you to write this book?
The book Life on Mars was a project that I started because I was curious. I wanted to know why my astronomy colleagues are so fascinated by Mars and why we’re spending so much time and so much money trying to explore Mars to search for life on Mars.
How did you conduct your research for this publication?
This research is more of the style of what a historian would do… I am not a scientist who has active experiments studying Mars. I’m not part of any planetary exploration. I’ve never done any telescope projects, but I’ve always been interested in planets. That’s my thing as an astronomer. The research was library research, internet research – trying to look back historically and understand from the very beginning of the era of telescopes.
What are some of the major findings of your research?
What I learned is that for 450 years we’ve been searching for evidence of life on Mars and quite often claiming to have discovered life on Mars. And all of those claims were later refuted, mostly refused …
What we have is a few little bits of information that are controversial at best but cannot be completely dismissed that suggest the possibility that mars either once had life or might still have life. And the fact that the evidence can’t be completely dismissed is what is so intriguing…
[I also learned that] probably the best way to find out whether Mars does or did have life is by studying the methane. And I didn’t understand that when I started the project… Methane could be produced by life or it could be produced by a number of other processes that could produce methane without light and we don’t know which processes are active [yet].
What are some of the risks of human’s landing on Mars?
We need to weigh our efforts to explore, and in the future, colonize Mars against the ethical considerations associated with Mars. [If] Mars does not have life, then our sending robots to explore Mars I think is a minor detail in terms of contaminating [it].
But if Mars does have life and let’s say we discovered it, our ambitious goals of sending astronauts [there] will contaminate it… When Europeans [arrived] in North and South America, there was a tremendous amount of life, human life and other life that was wiped out… When the first settlers arrived on certain islands in the Pacific Ocean, all sorts of wildlife [were] wiped out by disease in part because we brought certain animals or plants [that] local biology couldn’t compete [against]. So, I think we have to think about what will happen to native Martian biology, if there is any… Will we wipe out Martian biology or Martian biology will wipe out us?
What should we know about and look forward to?
A lot of people actually think we have already discovered life on Mars because of those headlines in newspapers for 50 years, but we haven’t… [yet] the closest place in the entire universe where life might exist beyond Earth is Mars… If life exists there, it will tell us so much about the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe. This is the place to look. We ought to be studying Mars in depth.