The Rock From Mars (11 page)

That soupçon of Martian water seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, but Gibson was about to wade into a veritable Martian tsunami.

Now, as Gibson and Romanek stared at his cleaned-up images of Martian carbonates, Romanek had in mind a 1992 geologists’ meeting he had attended in Cincinnati. Robert Folk, a sediment specialist from the University of Texas, had caused quite a stir by claiming discovery of a new kind of dwarf bacteria—“nanobacteria”—and proposing that such organisms were the principal agents in the formation of Earth’s carbonates and other liquid-water deposits. In fact, Folk argued, these critters were everywhere, influencing a variety of processes, but had previously gone unnoticed because of insufficient microscope power.

It was from Folk’s talk that Romanek had drawn his idea of acid-etching the Martian carbonates. When Folk had etched away the superficial layers from hot springs deposits, he’d uncovered minuscule ball- and rod-shaped structures that he characterized as fossilized remains. (The term
nanobacteria
came from a unit of measurement—the nanometer, a billionth of a meter. The period at the end of this sentence is at least a hundred thousand nanometers.) While the smallest known Earth bacteria measured 200 nanometers across, Folk’s entities commonly ranged between 50 and 100 nanometers (with some as small as 20). This meant his nanobacteria were only about one-thousandth the
volume
of an ordinary bacterium, a size most scientists insisted was too small to contain even the most basic machinery of life.

Folk’s claim, controversial in its own right, would become intertwined with a much more abrasive contentiousness soon to engulf the rock from Mars.

When Romanek stared into the fractured landscape of the Mars rock, acid-etched the same way Folk had described (now with the lab bacteria filtered out), the shapes he saw put him irresistibly in mind of Folk’s putative nanofossils. They
looked
similar. This was the first inkling of this kind of structure in the rock, whatever the structure represented. Romanek felt certain that something strange and interesting was going on here.

This was a turning point in the saga of the rock. It was young Romanek’s vision of something that might have undulated or wriggled through some ancient Martian aquifer that turned the rock definitively on its route toward a special dimension of fame and controversy. His instinct gave birth to the secret collaboration that, less than three years later, would turn this charred and fractured lump into a catalyst of human ambition, bureaucratic maneuvering, professional rivalries, personal jealousies, and audacious hopes for something historic and transcendent. Some people would come to believe that, finally, through this interplanetary message in a bottle, we might learn our place in the grand scheme. This rock might help us learn who we were.

When things got ugly later on, and some people accused NASA of dreaming up this shaggy rock story just to increase the agency budget, Romanek would bite his tongue, suppressing the urge to jump up and down and shout, “Wait, no, there was no political agenda here—it was my idea!” (Romanek had been hired under a grant from the National Research Council to use NASA office space and instruments for work of mutual interest, and he considered himself independent of NASA. By the time the rock made its public splash, he would no longer be working at NASA.)

Romanek and Gibson had a mutual-admiration club going. Romanek would grind away for weeks analyzing something, then spend five minutes briefing Gibson. The older man would amaze Romanek by turning around and delivering, with complete accuracy, the same level of detail in a presentation to some third party. Romanek thought Gibson must have a photographic memory. He was grateful for Gibson’s complete faith in his data. And Gibson was so experienced that he could plug in the information and see the context and the implications both clearly and quickly.

Gibson, for his part, thought Romanek was a real “find,” an intellectually advanced young guy with an unusually broad background, and in many ways ahead of other people at the same stage of their careers. Gibson badly wanted to hire him as a full-fledged NASA civil servant, but because of hiring freezes and red tape about job “slots” and such, he was unable to work it out.

“If any one person gets credit for conceiving the idea” of a possible biological fingerprint in the rock, Gibson would say later, “it’s Chris.”

But was Romanek’s thinking, the very hint of the idea that he might be seeing evidence of once-living Martians, some kind of crazy leap of imagination? Was he taking a stroll with the lunatic fringe? Shouldn’t his more seasoned mentor have laughed him out of the lab?

In other years, the answers to those questions might well have been yes.

There were times when, if word of a notion such as Romanek’s had gotten out, it could have earned NASA a rebuke from Congress, at the very least. The marquee aliens—the proverbial intelligent civilizations out among the stars—were faring especially poorly. Congress banished them politically at about the time Romanek was delving into the Allan Hills rock. Led by a single irate congressman, the people’s representatives booted out of the federal budget the program known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), less than a year after it had begun scanning the skies for radio signals from remote civilizations. A deadly giggle factor had set in. For the deficit-ridden taxpayer, it was just too silly. Outside of Hollywood films and other sci-fi outlets, E.T. seemed worse than defunct; he was politically incorrect.

Legitimate research into the prospects for even primitive extraterrestrial life had faced ridicule over the decades as a “pseudoscience” whose subject did not exist. And although the faithful few remained undeterred, the two Viking spacecraft had reinforced the scoffers’ views by failing to detect any persuasive signs of even the faintest trace of organic molecules in the Martian topsoil. The evidence, instead, proclaimed that the modern-day surface of Mars was thoroughly barren of life as anyone defined it. Lacking a layer of protective ozone in the atmosphere, the surface was exposed to high levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which tore down the chemicals essential for life.

But Chris Romanek sensed the ground shifting. Mostly below the pop-culture radar, a quiet revolution had transformed human understanding of life’s fundamental nature. Those who were paying attention knew that, in a sense, E.T. had already been encountered right here on Earth, in the form of creatures as alien as anyone could have imagined, in conditions as otherworldly.

In 1977, three human explorers had descended into a shockingly unearthly world a mile and a half below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. “Debra? Isn’t the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?” came the call from the small research submarine to its waiting mother ship up on the sea surface. “There’s all these animals down here.”

There was no live, global TV coverage of this event and little public awareness at the time. But some people would later compare it to the landing of
Apollo 11
on the moon: daring explorers using life-support systems landed in a treacherous, unexplored realm and returned with the first bits and pieces of a previously unsuspected reality. And, unlike the Apollo astronauts, they
did
find aliens.

The divers aboard the submersible
Alvin
that day, not so long after the Viking crafts had landed on Mars, discovered the first warm-water spring ever known to exist on the chill, sunless floor of the ocean. Cramped inside their life-support sphere, its inner wall dripping with condensing moisture, its spotlights casting the first light into the virgin darkness, the explorers peered out tiny portholes and glimpsed a stunning oasis of bizarre life-forms thriving in a setting that, until then, everyone had presumed was inhospitable to living things.

Over time, the lessons from that deep-sea encounter, and others to follow, would reveal previously unsuspected truths about the nature of life—about where and by what means living creatures on Earth (and possibly elsewhere) might sustain themselves. People learned from these explorations, for example, that some living creatures could thrive without light from the sun. The microorganisms at the base of the food chain here survived in darkness on sulfur and methane—poisonous to oxygen breathers. Some creatures lived at previously unthinkable temperatures (up to 235 degrees Fahrenheit) and crushing pressures.

Further up the food chain were crabs with the wizened faces of apple dolls, huge white clams with blood-red flesh, mussels, and anemones—and, most striking of all, vast, undulant fields of eight-foot tube worms, their white stalk bodies topped with bright red plumes. The Daliesque worms had no mouth or digestive tract. Instead, they drew nourishment from bacteria that lived in their tissues.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, some five hundred new species would be catalogued at vent communities throughout the world’s oceans. And in other settings around the planet, people armed with new technologies started turning up signs of biology in other extreme environments—two miles deep in oil wells, in desiccating salt marshes, in the polar ice, and in rock within Earth’s crust. Scientists had begun to study the possibility that a hidden biosphere below the planet’s surface and seafloor could equal or surpass the total mass of all surface life. (More than a decade later, a Stanford University group would report that some hundred trillion bacteria live in each human gut—10 microbes for every human cell, 395 different strains—and are so vital to the host’s well-being that they could be considered as one more body organ.)

Some of these organisms, astoundingly, would turn out to represent a previously unsuspected domain on the tree of life: an ancient group distinct from bacteria, plants, and animals, and linked to the first known organisms on Earth. An extreme environment, then, could have nurtured life’s genesis.

And there were other developments that informed the actions of Romanek and Gibson. One was the emerging evidence that life had sprung up on Earth with remarkable swiftness after the initial violent bombardment by space rubble that filled the young solar system. This primeval barrage should have boiled off Earth’s oceans, wreathing the planet for millennia at a time in vast black thunderheads shot with lightning, until they released their water, the rains raised new oceans, and the process was repeated again and again. And yet it seemed that within a relatively short time—possibly as little as 400 million years after Earth had formed out of that same rubble—life had become diverse and widespread.

Just months before Romanek first peered into the Mars rock in 1993, a paleobiologist named J. William Schopf, of UCLA, described a startling fossil find in Australia. He reported signs of eight previously unknown species of microbes, some of them amazingly complex, from as early as 3.465 billion years ago—when the planet was less than a billion years old.

At the same time, sky scientists had combined clever techniques with new technologies and (after a frustrating string of false positives) finally obtained convincing evidence of planets in orbit around stars beyond our sun. Among its many ramifications, this confirmation seemed to boost the statistical odds that there was an abundance of worlds where life might have found a toehold.

People who considered all these developments realized they were witnessing a paradigm shift—a major change in a shared system of belief and in the choices people like Romanek would make about which paths of exploration, and which career paths, might be most fruitful. Many people had been schooled on textbooks that said the emergence of life out of lifeless nature must have been so complicated and difficult that it had required a special set of conditions, which the Eden of the young Earth had secured as a rare blessing. Now here was a spate of evidence that, given the most minimal necessities (liquid water, any old energy source, whether sunlight or something else, and certain organic ingredients), the impulse for nature to come alive was irrepressible. Living things—at least
primitive
ones—could arise with astonishing speed and ease, and in almost any miserable, toxic, hellishly hostile place. Were a planet’s surface to be sterilized, life could retreat underground.

Life seemed to be a terrestrial imperative, and possibly even a cosmic imperative. Maybe it was only
intelligent
life that was so difficult and rare.

All the ferment on the nature of life served to ratchet up interest in the odd alien rock—and to lend respectability to young Romanek’s novel line of inquiry. If microbes could thrive in toxic, extreme, and, yes, “alien” conditions on Earth, it seemed less extreme to speculate about the possibility of microbes on a neighboring planet with the right specs—if not on the surface, then underground, in wet, warm regions of the interior. So the short answer was, no, this was not a lunatic excursion.

Romanek and Gibson kept going. Romanek took the new batch of images, along with the published pictures of Bob Folk’s putative dwarf bacteria—the nanofossils—to Gibson and asked, “Can you see the difference?” Gibson’s eyes lit up. The similarities were hair-raising. He knew he had a real mystery to work on here.

In addition to these images from Romanek’s etchings, which seemed so strikingly suggestive of biological influence, the men also had the results from Romanek’s laser-blaster work, which indicated that the carbonates had formed (a) on Mars and (b) in hospitable conditions. Right then and there, Gibson told Romanek they were going to go down the hall and talk to David McKay. It was the second week of September 1994.

Romanek knew McKay as a gray eminence who had a reputation for being very smart and very careful. McKay was also a recognized virtuoso at the scanning electron microscope, with a blister-inducing allergy to the film-coating chemical to show for it. And it was this skill on the microscope that initially brought the two men to McKay’s door.

McKay, of course, had already been inspecting the same Mars rock in the course of his unending soil studies. Duck Mittlefehldt, back before he’d turned the meteorite into a rock star, had requested a fresh allocation of samples from it and received a handsome quantity. One of the major problems in geology is that a practitioner needs to get a sample that is representative of the whole rock in question. For rock as coarse-grained as this one, ideally you would want to grind up a whopping 55 pounds (25 kilograms) for study. Since the whole mother chunk weighed only 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms), that was not going to happen. The goal, in meteorite work, is to find a proper balance between the smallest sample that (you hope) will give you good answers and the largest amount that will not unduly waste material. What Mittlefehldt had was, under the circumstances, a virtual truckload.