The question Dana Rohrabacher should have asked NASA

During a recent hearing before the House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, (R-Calif.), posed a question to NASA scientist Ken Farley that has had social media popping ever since. “You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago. Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?” 

Farley, appropriately deadpan, replied, “I will say that is extremely unlikely.”

{mosads}Social media jumped on the question with both feet. While many scientists believe life may have existed on Mars billions of years ago, they are pretty sure that the Red Planet was, as it is now, an arid, desolate place with little or no life to speak of thousands of years ago. That is because Mars lacks a magnetic field to shield it from the solar wind, which stripped the planet of its atmosphere, causing whatever surface water it may have had to dry up.  The idea that Mars may have had life, not to speak of intelligent life, thousands of years ago, is ludicrous. The mockery that Rohrabacher received was merciless.

Thanks to robotic probes such as the Mars Curiosity, scientists know that Mars was a warm, wet world with flowing streams, lakes, and even seas almost four billion years ago, Scientists are uncertain as to whether the period in which Mars was habitable was sufficiently long for life to have evolved. Despite decades of study from both Mars orbit and the Martian surface, no one has found fossil evidence of Martian life, not to speak of any artifacts of an ancient Martian civilization. 

A charitable interpretation of Rohrabacher’s question would conclude that he misspoke, saying “thousands” when he should have said “billions.” The congressman is not unintelligent. He has been a champion of space commercialization for many years and has sat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee for much of his career in Congress.  

He could be faulted for being one of the only Republicans to support former President Barack Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation space exploration program, the theory being that NASA’s best efforts should be directed toward supporting commercial space efforts. This position has placed him at odds with most of his fellow members of Congress and many in the aerospace community who believe that NASA’s primary mission should be space exploration. No human has ventured beyond low Earth orbit since the voyage of Apollo 17 in December of 1972. The growing consensus is that it is high time that changed.

Rohrabacher might have asked a more interesting question that looked to the future of Mars rather than its past. Some planetary scientists are skeptical of the idea of building Mars settlements, the notion being that human communities would “contaminate” the Red Planet, thus making the search for life or at least the remnants of life complicated. Who could tell if a microbe found buried in the Martian soil evolved on the Red Planet or was brought from Earth and then adapted? 

Rohrabacher might have asked Dr. Farley if there is any way that the desire of people like SpaceX’s Elon Musk to build a Mars settlement could be reconciled with the equally fervent wish of scientists to find life forms that evolved on another world. If the answer is no, Rohrabacher might follow up with asking that, if Mars is to be kept as a science preserve, with only a few human explorers allowed on it, how long will it take for scientists to conclude that Mars does not currently contain life of any kind, therefore opening up the Red Planet for human settlement? The answers to both questions may be illuminating and would impact the development of space policy going forward. 

The ultimate question about space exploration would be, should our efforts be directed toward scientific discovery or toward spreading Earth’s economy and civilization across the solar system? And we should ask, do we really have to choose between the two?

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has just published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.  He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.

The views expressed by this author are their own and are not the views of The Hill.