Michael Tinker Pearce's Blog

The Next Book in the Dwarven Rifleman series

Hey all, we have started a kickstarter for us to write the next book in the Dwarven Rifleman series and we need your help.

Kickstarter

Back in the Saddle Again

Finances have largely been an issue when writing and limited ‘creative capital.’  We’ve started a Kickstarter hoping to finance the writing and production of the sequel to Lord of the North, the third dwarven Rifleman novel with the working title ‘Called to Court.’  here’s a link to the Kickstarter where you can read about it and decide whether or not to lend your support.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1173937384/fantasy-novel-called-to-court?

If we get funded then we’re off!

Also Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press has picked up both the dwarven Rifleman novels and Rage of Angels!  Big things in the works.

A Sneak-peek at ‘Do Not Go Gentle,’ the sequel to ‘Rage of Angels’

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Here is an (un-edited) sneak peek at Do Not Go Gentle, the sequel to Rage of Angels:

Space Marines my ass…

There was a crashing/splintering sound to Char’s right and a strobe-bright muzzle blast illuminated the fire-shot darkness. The suit next to Char disintegrated, the slave arms flying through the air. An Abrahms main battle tank had crashed through a building down the block and fired. THOR suits were described as ‘resistant’ to small-arms fire up to 12.7mm; it didn’t even slow down the depleted-uranium penetrator from the tank’s 120mm smooth-bore.

Char put three armor-piercing bursts from her TSIW through the front sprocket of the tank. It was thick and strong, but the shots weakened it and the seventy-tone weigh of the tank twisted it, throwing the track and immobilizing it. Her eyes flicked to a series of icons on her HUD. Two kilometers away a HIVE2 missile boosted straight up from its launcher, and a countdown started on her HUD. The barrel began to track towards her, and she moved. She didn’t fire again either; the heavy slugs wouldn’t penetrate the tanks frontal armor. She didn’t seek cover; nothing in this town would stop or even deflect a round from the tanks main gun.

A good loader could have the gun reloaded in eight seconds or so. At five seconds the HIVE2 missile plunged through the top armor of the tank.  The turret lifted several inches and white fire shot out, then the hatches blew and geysers of white flame roared into the night like giant blow-torches.

Seivers, she thought. That was the name of the newbie that just bought it. More missiles flashed down from above and she saw a turret flipping into the air, high enough to be visible over the rooftops. The sound of small-arms fire was becoming sporadic and dying away.

The suit’s com spoke. “All broadsword units stand down. The enemy is in retreat with National Guard units in pursuit. Stand by for orders.”

Broadsword was the THOR unit call sign, and at this point Char was more than willing to take a moment. Cracking suit on a mission was against regulations, but at the moment Char did not give a good goddamn about that. Space Marines my ass, she thought again. All we’ve been doing so far is hammering shit-kickers with delusions of grandeur…

She shivered as the crisp air of the Montana night on her skin suit gave her a chill. They had in fact been to space. Once. Three months after Hammerfall, when the asteroid nick-named ‘Mjolnir’ had knocked the crap out of the Marabunta mother-ship and sent them fleeing into the deep solar system, their unit had been lifted into orbit in a cargo module on an RBFR to spend a day trying out the new MMUs in their modified suits. The launch was kind of exciting but hanging out in orbit in a big empty hold for hours while tests were run and adjustments made was definitely not. The MMU training had been comedy gold however.

There’d been nothing funny about tonight’s action though. The Free Montana People’s Militia had brought a few ‘liberated’ National Guard Abrams tanks to the party. Two of her newbs were dead thanks to the tanks. On top of all the blood, bodies and wreckage that meant there was also radioactive thorium scattered around the AO. Char didn’t care about that either. She was getting pretty damned sick of shooting up her fellow citizens.

The problem was that the FMPM had no such issue. They were perfectly happy to leave their compound and raid nearby towns for supplies and slaves from among their fellow citizens. Their definition of ‘citizen’ of course did not include women or people not of north-western-European ancestry. Since Skyfall their compound had become a Disneyland for psychopaths. Captured women and girls were either forcibly married into the clan, or if they were unlucky sent to staff the ‘comfort stations’ provided for the pedophiles and rapists among their members. Women too old or unattractive might become drudges if they were lucky. If they were unlucky they were ‘expended in training.’

The tanks had been a nasty surprise. Fortunately this hadn’t been a scratch mission; they’d had full fire support from a block of HIVE2 missiles and autonomous mortars. A lot of the tanks never even got a shot off before they ate a missile or a precision-guided mortar shell or five.

A suit loomed over her and Needle’s voice came to her over a private channel. “Button up, Char. We gotta bounce- 10th Mountain needs our support at the compound.”

She looked up at him and sighed. “Roger that. No rest for the wicked I guess.”

“You alright Babe?” he asked. They weren’t a ‘thing’ any more but they were still close. He didn’t comment on her cracked suit.

“Yeah, I’m fine, really. But this shit is getting old. We’ve got a crapload of alien assholes out there somewhere getting ready to come back and corn-cob us and all we’re doing is killing each other. It’s starting to really piss me off!”

“I hear ya, but we got it to do. Reload at the assembly point, our rides will be here in five.”

“K-O. I guess these shitheads aren’t going to kill themselves.”

At a silent command her suit closed with a clunk of magnetic latches and she got up and headed for the reload. She was down to a couple of hundred shots out of her fifteen hundred-round basic load. Still got ammo, so I guess it’s not officially a bad day, she thought wryly. Three new barrel-packs for her TSIW and a dozen or so grenades later she was on-board a Valor tilt-rotor heading for the FMPM’s home turf.

Moving on, Sequels and gettin’ busy with it.

First off- Rage of Angels has, in a very short time, become our best-selling novel, and thank you to everyone that has read and reviewed it!

Next- the sequels. It took five years to get Lord of the North, the sequel to DODR finished and published.  In between those two books we wrote Tyr’s Hammer and Rage of Angels; not a ton of writing for the amount of time it took. The thing is we had my shop burn down and essentially destroy out house, moving, resetting, moving back, medical issues, recovering our yard from the blackberries that took over while the house was being rebuilt (if you are not familiar with Himalayan Blackberries you probably cannot understand what an epic task this was) and, oh yeah, making a living, paying the bills and keeping a roof over our heads…  It hasn’t left a ton of energy for other things.

That needs to change, so we’re changing. Having released the sequel to DODR it’s now time for the sequel to Rage of Angels.  The working title is ‘Do not go Gentle,‘ and it’s moving along nicely.  But writing Military Science Fiction isn’t just a matter of slapping words down and hammering them into a coherent story. There is a lot of research needed- emerging technologies, climatology, sociology, theoretical physics… it all has to come together with compelling characters and an interesting story. It’s hard work- maybe the hardest thing we’ve ever done- and like many authors I have to do this while working full-time to meet our financial needs. OK, enough whining- plenty of other authors manage it and we will too.

Do not go Gentle will pick up within weeks of the end of Rage of Angels.  The Marabunta are fleeing to the deep solar system, the Earth’s ecosystem is trashed and the survivors are scrambling to survive their post-apocalyptic world.  The government is struggling to maintain order, which is complicated by the fact that no matter how bad things get, no matter how dire the situation, someone has always got to be an asshole.  Against this backdrop we need to pursue the Marabunta further from Earth than we have ever gone before and somehow defeat them- and we need to do it before they can rebuild and come back to finish the job. No problem, right?

Need to wrap this up, not the least because I need to get to work on DNGG.

Hope you all are doing well, and thanks again for buying, reading and reviewing our books!

Michael and Linda

Understanding Swords and the Microcosms of World-Building

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Some of you might not know that in addition to writing my ‘day job’ is as a sword-maker. I’ve attained a world-wide reputation for this, and its paid the bills for over twenty-five years. That reputation is based on the quality of my products, how much they mirror the look and feel of actual medieval swords and how they perform.

The first thing you need to understand is that most of what you can glean from popular media is wrong. Mediveal swords were not the crude product of a crude society- they were the end result of over two thousand years of development and refinement. They were, in their way, as sophisticated as an automatic rifle, and they were very effective. Medieval swords were not heavy or poorly balanced; they were balanced precisely as they needed to be to work most effectively for the task they were designed to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong- wherever people made swords the quality of those blades ranged from abysmal to excellent, but the bulk of them fell between those two extremes, somewhere around ‘Pretty damn good.’

Maybe you want to know about swords because they will feature in a story you are writing. Maybe you want to know just because it’s interesting. But here’s the thing- you can study swords for years, decades, the rest of your life. But if all you do is study swords you will never understand swords. Why? Because swords exist in context to the time and place they were used. If you want to understand them you need to understand that context.

That means is you need to be asking the right questions, and ‘How is this sword designed’ is not the right question. The right question is ‘Why is this sword designed the way it is?’ The answer to that is going to be hugely more complicated than you might expect, and the reason is context. To understand the context of the sword you need to understand the world that created it. The first layer that comes up is, ‘What was it for?  This leads into who was it used against? What sort of training did they have? What sort of armor did they wear? What metallurgical technology was available to the makers, what manufacturing technology, and how did those factors influence the design?  Those questions are just scratching the surface.

Because the Guild structure and the requirements and the restrictions they imposed in the time and place the sword was made influenced the finished product. The quality, price and availability of the raw materials. The societal and political forces driving demand had an effect.  Advances in technology will cause changes in the sword’s design. Hell, fashion will have an effect.  In the real world everything affects practically everything else.

Here’s an example. Around the 14th Century there were fundamental changes to the design of European swords. For centuries swords had been broad and flat, well suited to cutting. Now they started making them pointier and stiffer, with more dagger-like points. Why? Because a thrust with a dagger-like blade penetrated chainmail more easily. The broad, flat cutting blades had worked against mail well enough for centuries; why change now? Because armor makers were using more plates of metal to supplement or replace the mail. Why were they suddenly doing that? The technology to make plates of armor had existed for centuries. The answer is that chainmail was getting more expensive and harder to come by. Why? Because the Plague had killed huge numbers of people, including most of the people that knew how to make good chainmail. You can’t cut iron plates with the edge of the sword, so the sword needed a dagger-like point to attack the chainmail between the plates with thrusts.  OK then, swords got pointier because people were using more plate armor, right?

Not entirely. The climate was also changing- it was getting colder. This period was part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ that affected the world. This meant people were wearing more and thicker clothing that was more resistant to cuts, so a thrusting sword might also have been more effective against civilian clothing as well. Why would this matter? Because people were increasingly carrying swords with civilian clothing. Why were they doing that? Because advances in refining steel had made swords much, much less expensive than they were in previous centuries.  Suddenly the burgeoning Middle Class could afford them, and since they had always been an expression of wealth and power carrying a sword became an indication of status- a way of showing off.

Seems pretty complicated, doesn’t it? Oh, but the rabbit-hole goes much deeper than that, my friends. Disease affected armor, armor effected swords, and the ways that people fight with them. More economical steel and the sword’s status as a symbol of wealth and power affected how people felt about them. The Middle Classes wearing swords gave rise to schools of swordsmanship, which became rivals and gave rise to an entire subculture. That subculture led, indirectly at least, two the development of swords specifically for civilians, which led to the development of rapiers and the dueling cultures of the 16th and 17th C.

There are a lot of sweeping generalizations in the post above; Europe, after all, was rife with subcultures where things happened slower, faster or not at all. Still, it gives you at least an idea of how complicated these things are; and while specific factors were different in different parts of the world you can rest assured they were every bit as complicated. Of course we haven’t even addressed how these swords were used, which is a whole ‘nuther can of worms. Hell, it’s a can of cans of worms.

For the writer this means world-building. If you want your world to be immersive and feel ‘real’ you have to understand these inter-relationships and how they affect your world and the people that live in it. You also have to develop the ability to show this understanding in your world, your characters and their interactions, without explaining it in the story by ‘info-dumping.’  The reader doesn’t need all of the details- but if you, the author, know them it will inform your writing and the reader will feel the depth of your understanding.  That feeling is what will make your world compelling and lend it an aura of reality, no matter how fantastic the elements of the story are.

This will do for today, but there is more to come…

The Origins of Human Civilization and Occam’s Razor.

Several years ago when I first learned about the site at Gobekle Tepe in Anatolia the thing that impressed me was that the art represented a mature form, with established conventions and techniques. This is a pretty spectacular thing to see as the site is 12,000 years old. For those of you not familiar with Gobekle Tepe it is the oldest known megalithic site, possibly the oldest known city, and possibly the oldest known site of agriculture. It’s also not small, and most of it has not yet been unearthed.

Previously it had been believed that the only people living in that part of the world at that time were hunter-gatherers. When the site was first examined the immediate supposition was that somehow hunter-gatherers came together at this spot and pulled the techniques of stone-carving and architecture out of nowhere. Currently the leading theory (as far as I know- my information may be out of date) is that the site was a religious site, and that agriculture arose in response to the need to support the work force constructing it. Given that the stonework and art appear to represent a mature body of techniques this explanation did not ring true to me, and I am not the only one to find this conclusion questionable. Add to this new discoveries of other sites contemporary to Gobekle Tepe discovered nearby, and the obviously cultural ties between these sites and Gobekle Tepe, and I find my skepticism growing.

Graham Hancock is also skeptical of this version of events. He is an author, amateur archeologist, researcher, journalist and lecturer who is convinced that there was a lost global civilization that remains undiscovered. Like the craftsmen at Gobekle Tepe he’s not just pulling it out of his ass; he asks some very good questions and makes some very good points. But as much as I respect his work his suppositions often exceed the available data. For example he assumes the existence of an Atlantis that existed in prehistory as described by Plato. He believes that the existence of Gobekle Tepe can be attributed to refugees from the destroyed civilization. He points out there was a global cataclysm around 12,000 years ago that resulted in, among other things, a dramatic rise in sea level. So, we have an ancient story of a city destroyed about 11,600 years ago, we have a cataclysm that could account for that destruction, and anomalous technologies suddenly appearing in Anatolia. Gobekle Tepe must therefore have been an attempt by refugees from Atlantis to restart their civilization. It seems logical and it might even be correct, but there is a slight problem; there is no concrete evidence that his Atlantis existed.

Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is likeliest to be true, and frankly I don’t think that Graham’s explanation is the simplest one. It seems to me more likely that we are looking at a culture that pre-dates the site of Gobekle Tepe, but that does not mean we need to be looking for a connection to a hypothetical lost civilization.  To me we should be looking for predecessors of the builders of Gobekle Tepe in Anatolia. I think the most likely answer is that evidence of this culture simply either has not yet been discovered or has not been recognized as such.

I believe that the roots of human civilization go deeper than current theories allow. But I don’t believe this out of some sort of wish-fulfillment. I believe it because sites like Gobekle Tepe indicate that there are whole chapters of human history and the history of civilization that we are not yet aware of. I believe in human intelligence, creativity and energy and I have seen nothing in the historic record that could not theoretically have been accomplished with entirely conventional methods that are within our current understanding of physics and engineering.

People are fond of pointing to massive blocks of rock, obviously shaped by that hands of men, and say ‘There’s no way our ancestors could have done that with the technology available to them.’ I think this says more about the limits of their imaginations than it does about the capabilities of our ancestors. There’s a fellow in the mid-west, a retired contractor actually, who raised a twenty-ton slab of concrete ten feet in the air over the course of a day- with only himself and one helper. His tools? Four logs, some rope, a rock and a big pile of sticks. How did he know how to do this? He figured it out. Our ancestors were as smart as he is, they could have figured it out too. He did this with two people. Imagine what the Egyptians could do with a work-force of thousands. Or, for that matter, the early Anatolians. The works of ancient man did not require alien intervention, or technology transfer from an unknown, hypothetical advanced culture. It just required human ingenuity and invention. Sure, we might not know how they did it- but we’re clever too. We’ll figure it out.  Of course to do that we need to stop looking for phantasms and deus ex machina as our explanations.

 

The Road to Dystopia

Distopian futures have always been a popular theme in Science Fiction, particularly in young adult science fiction. But how do we get to these dystopian futures?

In older novels these emerged due to a catastrophe- alien invasion, nuclear war or some other disaster whether natural, man-made or alien in origin.  More recently the trend has been for these futures to be created by societal disasters- futures where society has taken our ideals and warped and twisted them into unhealthy, dysfunctional, oppressive and autocratic systems. To me these seem to be the most dangerous of disasters because they can creep up on you, stealing our freedom piece by piece with each step along the road to Hell being simply a logical extension of the one before it.

By and large people are good and have good intentions. They want the best for themselves, their families, their friends and neighbors.  So how could such a future emerge?

There are a lot of paths to such a future. One is the ‘Nanny State’ taken to  an illogical extreme. in this scenario we allow the government more and more influence over our private lives and freedoms- all for our own good of course. Regulate our speech to the point where it is socially unacceptable to express an opinion contrary to the popular sentiment, and eventually you can make it illegal.  Enact laws that restrict our actions in the name of safety; ‘Nope. That car is too fast, too powerful. It’s dangerous and you can’t have it.’ ‘People die all of the time in auto accidents; since cars can now drive themselves we can’t allow people to control them; this will save lives.’ Of course a car that is connected enough to drive itself can take you anywhere you want to go… but it can also take you anywhere the government wants you to go- like a Police station. Or an ambush.

‘That food is bad for you, and you aren’t smart enough not to eat it. We’ll help you out by removing it from the market. In fact, we’ll just decide what you can eat and drink, and when you can eat and drink it- and how much. It’s for your own good, really.” There are good, logical reasons for each additional level of control; reasonable people can agree to them individually but taken as a whole they eventually lead to absolute control over life and society. Sure, it will be a safe prosperous society… as long as people are willing to be cogs in the machine, never questioning, never stepping out of bounds… never thinking for themselves.

Naturally you want to remove the mechanisms for resisting your benevolent and beneficial policies. Control the Net to protect people from seeing offensive material.

The other side of the coin is where ‘freedom’ is used as a weapon against the populace. Social freedom, economic freedom, the freedom to place your religion or beliefs ahead of those or others… The concept of the ‘Free Market’ can lead to this. ‘Market forces will regulate industry in a free market!’ Indeed they might, in theory. But when industry controls the politicians, the government and even the flow of information to the populace you don’t have a free market. With the tail wagging the dog you wind up with government for business, of business and by business. With profit as the only God and the only good things get nasty pretty quick.

‘We don’t need environmental regulations. People will simply not buy from companies that pollute too much.’ Except of course industry will tell you it’s not a problem, not allow reports of issues to get out and use the government to enforce their will. ‘We don’t need to regulate the banks. It’s in their best interest to serve their customers.’ Except when they can steal or recklessly lose their customer’s money and use the government to insulate them from the consequences while they get richer.

You can help this along by demonizing the poor- implant the idea that poor people are poor because they deserve it. Combine this with tax laws and regulations that concentrate wealth in a small segment of the population. Pretty soon it isn’t just people’s own fault that they are poor; they are poor because they are inferior.

You can help this along in a lot of ways- make education prohibitively expensive. Warp primary education into simply memorizing data to fill out test forms instead of teaching people to learn, to think. Encourage failure by penalizing schools that under-perform instead of finding out what is going wrong and supporting them in correcting these things.

Use a two-part divide-and-conquer strategy. Create totalitarian political divisions and promote stereotypes about the ‘other guys.’ This is part of a strategy of fear; make the people fear each other. Oh, and provide scapegoats. Pick out groups to demonize- give the people enemies, someone to hate and fear in addition to each other. It doesn’t really matter who as long as you have someone- and if they can be easily identified by dress, skin color or whatever half your work is done for you.

Establish control of information by allowing huge corporations to obtain monopolies on information outlets. Pretty soon you can capitalize on people’s fears, poor education and mindless belief in your propaganda that the process becomes self-sustaining. People themselves will vote for your agenda because you’ve told them it is in their interest and have taught then to not think for themselves- while convincing them that mindless adherence to your goals is thinking for themselves.

The end result is a de-facto aristocracy with most of the wealth ruling over an under-class of ‘inferior’ workers with the game wholly and completely rigged. In pretty short order the class you are born into will matter more than your individual qualities or capabilities. Once you have rendered the masses politically and economically impotent you can institute any system you please.

These are only a few of the roads to Dystopian futures, and to some extent you can mix-and-match them. Whatever path you chose there are options than can warp your future into virtually any society you can imagine, and you can do it without a catastrophe, natural or otherwise.

Human, Do Not Touch!

In 1986 a criminal was shot, rupturing his the largest vein in his body. Typically you would expect him to drop from a catastrophic loss of blood-pressure in 25-40 seconds. Instead he didn’t stop until he was shot in the head two minutes later- after he had shot six FBI agents.

1993 a police officer was shot in the heart with a .357 magnum. She responded by shooting her attacker five times.  A year later she was back on unrestricted duty.

A young soldier fractured a large bone in his leg during basic training then completed the remaining three weeks of the course and graduated after doing a two-mile run in under ten minutes. Another lost his leg in combat, had a prosthesis fitted and continued to serve as a combat infantryman.

People have consumed objects ranging from broken glass to an entire airplane and survived. We poison ourselves recreationally.  We engage in sports where the objective is to beat another person into unconsciousness. Any number of extremely perilous endeavors are done in the name of ‘fun.’ Of all the creatures we could choose to share our lives, our homes, even our beds with we almost invariably choose predatory carnivores.  We can literally chase most other creatures until they drop dead from exhaustion. There is virtually no terrestrial environment we cannot survive in- without the aid of high technology. People engage in foot races over distances of 26-100 miles- for fun.

Check the news on any given day and you’ll find stories of people surviving and even prospering against ridiculous odds.

Then there’s our history- constant warfare. Jerry Pournelle once said, “Peace is a theoretical state of affairs whose existence we deduce from the fact that there have been intervals between wars.” That’s not an overstatement. We kill each other in droves over not just resources but belief systems, spiritual beliefs and even skin-color.

We occasionally wonder why, if there is intelligent life in the depths of space, they haven’t contacted us. I ask you, in all seriousness- would you? Humans are fucking terrifying. This could be the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Maybe we’re not picking up their transmissions because they are hoping we won’t notice them…

Space Cruisers- Let’s do This Thing

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We need interplanetary cruisers. Not single-use, purpose-built and mission focussed craft. True interplanetary spacecraft. Spacecraft that can change their mind about their course, destination and mission parameters. Spacecraft that can, in a reasonable timeframe, go to the rescue of other craft or missions. Ships that can refuel, resupply, perhaps change crews and head right back out to the next thing.


 


The technical challenges are daunting, of course. The biggest challenge is not technology; a ‘space cruiser’ (the Nautilus concept) that would use entirely existing and off-the-shelf technology was designed years ago. The biggest challenge may be people rather than technology. Space is an unforgiving bitch that will kill you in an instant the first chance it gets. Humans, even the best of us, are pretty good at giving things a chance to kill us. Another thing is that long-term exposure to microgravity is not good for humans. It creates all manner of health issues like bone-density loss, muscular degeneration and other things. We can rotate the spacecraft to produce a suitably gravity-like conditions of course, but this introduces technical complications that add to the difficulty and expense of designing such a spacecraft. These were addressed in previous design studies, and frankly the engineering issues are solvable. But the human issues?


 


We have submarine crews that spend months at a time isolated in cramped. confined quarters and while it takes a certain psychology to endure this we have no shortage of people capable of it. But the difference between a submarine and a spacecraft is that in an underseas vessel the possibility of escaping to a habitable environment exists. There is no such option for a ship in deep space. How will this effect the crew of such a vessel in the long term. especially when we are contemplating missions that can stretch to years? How will the stress of living in a fragile, confined space in an extremely hostile environment affect people long-term? We simply don’t know. This is part of why we need a fleet of such ships- the reasonable prospect that you could be rescued might greatly reduce this stress.


 


The need for true interplanetary spacecraft becomes even more crucial in the light of SpaceX’s plans to establish a permanent Martian colony. It might be a long shot, but betting against Elon Musk to accomplish his dreams is not a risk I would take- his track record is pretty good so far. Having a fleet of interplanetary cruisers would enormously increase the odds of survival for such a colony. Emergency supplies, medical relief- even law-enforcement issues could be simplified.


 


Such vehicles also have uses other than exploration and colony support- mining near-Earth asteroids would become a real possibility. Of course the financial viability of such activity remains to be established but having a source of materials that does not impact Earth’s environment would be a boon, and having a source of raw materials that doesn’t have to be boosted into space to be used there would be extremely useful.


 


Of course a current-tech interplanetary cruiser would not be fast- but with the proposed modular construction drive systems could be upgraded relatively simply as the technology improves. Which it will of course. If the potential of the EM-Drive or Mann-effect thrusters works out the solar system could be our oyster.


 


Life on this planet has all of it’s eggs in one basket as it were- for the first time ever we have the chance and the capability to change that. Becoming a multi-planet species will dramatically increase our odds for long-term survival. Plus it would be seriously, undeniably cool. That’s gotta be worth something…

Extraterrestrial Life May be Closer to Home Than We Think

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The possibility of extraterrestrial life is fascinating. There are subtle and inconclusive hints that life may exist or have existed elsewhere in our solar system. Europa appears to have a liquid-water ocean under it’s ice that could support life. We have photos of geological structures on Mars that if found on Earth would be suspected to be fossils of microbial mats- macro-colonies of bacteria. We know that Mars once had large amounts of liquid water on the surface, and still has liquid water ‘seeps’ in isolated places.


 


This brings to mind a few thoughts- first among them that life is damned persistent and adaptable. We have found some form of life virtually everywhere we’ve looked on our own planet no matter how hostile the environment. I suspect that if life was ever present on Mars some form of it, however simple and isolated, survives.


 


Another thought is that if we discover life it will yield information about life on our own planet, because for the first time we will have something to compare terrestrial life to. Of course their is always the tantalizing possibility that we will find it is actually related to terrestrial life, which would have profound effects on our understanding of life and cosmology. Also if we discover that life arose elsewhere it will have ramifications beyond our own solar system- we have now catalogued thousands of planets orbiting other stars, many of which have the potential for life. If life can arise multiple times within our own solar system it dramatically increases the odds of finding it in other star systems.


 


The thought that this leads inescapably to is this- we need to go to Mars and take the resources to find out. Unmanned probes can only do so much; they lack the flexibility, imagination and intuition that humans can bring to such exploration. We need boots on the ground and living minds to examine the evidence in real-time.


 


Finding life on Mars opens a can of worms of course- what is our responsibility to preserve the Martian ecology? Can we in good conscience Terraform Mars for our own use when this would almost certainly have catastrophic effects on the ecosphere? The first step to answering these questions is to find out if we need to answer them.


Let’s go to Mars.