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Sunday, February 09, 2003

Twice in the same hour, while visiting Carnegie Mellon University after the Columbia accident, people informed me of the expiration date of our current planet.

Consensus is that the seas will boil in 500 million years. Four billion years later, the sun will turn into a red giant and consume the first four planets in its orbit. Both Jay Apt, a former astronaut, and Dani Goldberg, a robotics researcher, each conveyed this intelligence with no more passion than a Port Authority driver announcing a forthcoming stop. It is, in some circles, a given that humankind must eventually hightail it off this planet, and that is why the space shuttle astronauts were up there doing life-science experiments. It is, in the broadest possible read of mankind's script, why anyone goes out there at all.

"We know that at some point in the future we're going to have to go someplace else," Apt told me. He and Rick Husband, Columbia's commander, shared an office in Apt's NASA days. The Earth's demise and replacement was as ordinary a topic as the quality of the office coffee.

What, after all, is mankind's urge to explore but a survival instinct without a sense of time?

In a world still squabbling over race and nationality, there are yet people dying for an entire species. What seemed on a Friday like the ravings of madmen -- the idea that we should leave the Earth someday and colonize Mars -- became the poetry of eulogists on a Saturday when burning metal and humans lit a Texas sky.

Neither Apt nor Goldberg, who sat in offices across from each other and didn't seem to know the other was there, had much time for teary eulogies. Goldberg worked on computer programs he believes will allow robots to cooperate on Mars. His plan is not to replace humans in space. He figures this work will police the area before the campers get there.

On the other side of the continent, in an office in San Diego, Calif., Jeffrey Bada, a university geochemist with grants from NASA, was calculating ways to turn Mars into Earth II.

"It's cold and uninhabitable. But we could change that by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Bada explained. The Greenhouse effect could, in short, be made to give one planet an atmosphere while it destroys another. Bada is researching the origins of life in the universe as something that could perpetuate life in the universe. He had an experiment ready to go on the next shuttle fight to see what kinds of chemical processes might have taken place in the early solar system. That will now have to wait.

This unboundaried picture -- so measureless we cannot quite pinpoint our place on the canvas even as we paint it -- informs the space program much the way the immortality of the soul informs church food banks. We live in the here-and-now. But somehow, we understand that we do not live in the only time that will ever be.

When scientists at the SETI Project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) set up rows of satellite dishes in the mountains of Chile to hunt out electromagnetic pulses from other planets, they factored in something called the Drake equation.

One of its variables is the idea that from the time a civilization advances to the level it can send radio waves to other planets to the point it obliterates itself or renders its own planet uninhabitable, is only 10,000 years. Such a sense of limitations was placed alongside the assumption that there are enough inhabited planets trying to speak to us that putting up satellite dishes in the Andes was worth the effort.

Steely-eyed calculations about ideas bigger than individual lives can lead to some odd disagreement. Apt wants the shuttle to go on. Freeman Dyson, both a physicist and the winner of the Templeton Prize for Religion, wants the shuttle scrapped.

"It's a dead end as far as I can see. I wish they would build a nice little two-seater, high-performance spacecraft so that people could really go somewhere. But that's not the way NASA thinks," Dyson told me. He is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. Forty-five years ago, Dyson worked on a project to build a spacecraft the size of an ocean liner, powered by nuclear blasts. Dyson thinks low-Earth orbit is a waste of time if we're planning to put life elsewhere.

"It's clear that life, sooner or later, will leave the Earth," Dyson said. "We know this can happen just in the normal course of events -- if an asteroid strikes the Earth and knocks off a chunk, and that chunk has bugs on it."

Where some view a departure from Earth as an act of survival, Dyson's view approaches something along the lines of an ethical aesthetic.

"I find a living universe is much more beautiful than a dead universe," he said. "I'm in favor of spreading life around. That to me is a sort of a fact that we're surrounded by apparently dead worlds and to me it's an attractive prospect that they will be brought to life.

"It doesn't have to be humans that have to do that, but that's up to us."

*

In days ahead, the crew of Columbia will be gathered up, given solemn rites in which eternal life is mentioned, and laid away.

Most of the rhetoric surrounding their deaths has dwelt on an amorphous sense of adventure, a need to explore, as if these things were about nothing larger than national pride or the Guinness Book of Records. The swells of music behind the news broadcasts gave a sense of feeling, but we no more understand this feeling of the need to discover than we comprehend what makes us desire a new car or a fine scarf.

The unstated truth is that they went out there, however unawares of their own intent, to perpetuate a species, preferably ours. They might not have known they were doing it. Most of us didn't even know they were up there. That they went is important. That others go after them is of immeasurable significance, a significance so profound that to state it is to invite incredulous laughter. Some thoughts are too big to enter our orbit without buffeting.

We belong out there -- without apologies or sentimentality. We are paying for an uninhabited home with blood, and it is our job to claim it in some unforeseeable year by which the names from Columbia will be forgotten, but the eternal present served.