Life on Mars?

Usually it takes a juicy sex scandal, a military invasion, or an airliner crash to get a story on page one of the newspapers two days in a row. But science reporters across the United States managed this feat in early August, when NASA scientists announced that they’d found “compelling evidence” of fossilized life from Mars. The story broke when a trade paper, Space News, nonchalantly published a few paragraphs about an upcoming paper in Science, which purported to show that a 16 million-year-old meteorite originating from Mars carried potentially biogenic chemicals and what may be fossilized remains of 3.8 billion-year-old microbes. Mass media mayhem followed once the Associated Press picked up the story. Of course, in the US, even the headlines were laden with caveats. “Meteorite May Show Mars Once Had Life,” The Washington Post declared above the fold. “Mars Meteorite May Hold Evidence of Microscopic Life,” hedged The Boston Globe. “Signs of Primitive Life on Mars are found in Ancient Meteorite,” announced The New York Times. That’s the problem with a blockbuster science story. One can’t simply declare “We Are Not Alone!” with the same swagger that political reporters can use when they conclude, “Congress Deadlocked Again.” The challenge for science reporters was to give this extraordinary claim the attention it deserved, while not ignoring the possibility that the “discovery” could well turn out to be wrong. The British tabloids were characteristically less cautious: the Sun’s entire front page announced simply, “Life on Mars”. The media had some able help with hype from President Bill Clinton, who, after adding a caveat, said on TV, “It will surely be one of the most stunning insights into the universe that science has ever uncovered.” NASA Administrator Dan Goldin added some color of his own. “I want everyone to understand that we are not talking about ‘little green men’,” he said, evoking the very image he was purportedly trying to dispel. NASA also provided an able skeptic, UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf, at its news conference. This was a masterful stroke: NASA could let its enthusiasm bubble over, while portraying itself as scientific and sober. Science reporters dutifully spent time mulling the details and searching for just the right tone of caution. As a rule, they didn’t do very well at capturing the cosmic significance of such a find. Leon Jaroff at Time magazine tried to argue that the discovery “. . . raises that most profound of all human questions: Why does life exist at all?” But then he admitted that, “The rock from Mars does not answer such questions.” So much for the profound. An editorial in The New York Times raised the possibility that the announcement could be “a wild propaganda salvo fired by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at a time when all Federal agencies are desperately seeking to justify their budgets.” But the editorial didn’t settle firmly in that cynical ground. It acknowledged instead that the find, if verified, could have “profound intellectual and philosophical implications.” An accompanying piece by one of the codiscoverers of the “fossils” used the opportunity to argue for continued support for basic scientific research. Now, the deeper you go into a newspaper, the more fun the reporters are allowed to have. Joel Achenbach, writing for The Washington Post Style section, had the most. “They look kind of like Chee-tos,” Achenbach said, referring to the alleged fossils and a peculiar American form of junk food. “In Hollywood, the aliens are large and fearsome and fly around in superluminal spacecraft; in reality the aliens are slugs. The cynics always knew that when we finally made contact with extraterrestrials they’d turn out to be stupid.” Achenbach also poked fun at the scientists’ caution. “A normal person would have had the good sense to leap up and scream LIFE ON MAAAAAAAAARS. That’s not part of the scientific method,” he wrote. Yet he managed to explain why scientific syntax is loaded with caveats, even while making fun of it. Newspapers also dedicated many column-inches to the religious implications of the discovery, even though these turned out to be pretty dull. The New York Times found that theologians had no trouble with life elsewhere in the universe, as God may simply have laid down natural laws that favor evolution. “If the meteorite does indeed prove to be our first glimpse of alien life, both Darwin and God will thereby be enhanced,” the reporter concluded. Perhaps the oddest story was one that never materialized. Ray Walston, an actor who played the lead in the 1960s TV sitcom, “My Favorite Martian,” complained that he’d been bombarded with television interview requests. “Would you believe they were planning a sequence featuring two of the world’s most distinguished scientists evaluating this monumental discovery, and they wanted to sandwich me in as sort of comedy relief?” he told The Tennessean. “Of course, I said no.” And of course NASA said yes to all the coverage it received — and took the opportunity to tout its missions to Mars, which the experts agreed will provide the only satisfactory way to give a credible ending to this story. The National Science Foundation belatedly advertised the fact that the meteorite in question was actually found by an NSF mission to Antarctica, not a multi-million dollar NASA space venture — but the NSF lost the race for credit.