For What Shall We Search?

Abstract

Publisher Summary The central theme of the discussion in the chapter is the detection of exotic life, a topic that has received attention repeatedly in both popular and scientific literature. It poses certain basic questions—how should searches be conducted? how should experiments be designed? what questions should be asked? What approaches should be tried? What sort of grand strategy should be developed? These are questions that arise wherever research is planned and they are especially critical in terms of exobiology chiefly because of scientific challenges, difficulties and costs, and the potential rewards for a better understanding of life as is known on the Earth. The chapter says that instead of asking whether life is there, it should be asked as to what stage of organic evolution has been attained on the Martian surface. If there is no life on Mars, the chemical evidence of organic evolution from the raw constituents of the “primitive reducing atmosphere” through the abiotic synthesis of more complex organic compounds to the abundance and diversity presumably required for the appearance of life—all this evidence which on our planet was long ago destroyed by terrestrial life processes—would still be retained on a highly evolved but sterile Mars.