the search for life on earth

The investigation of the universe beyond our own planet is often derided as a boondoggle. The money wasted on a robot sent to wander the barren wastes of Mars could be spent on starving children! 

There is plenty of money to do both. You know that, right? That we don’t do both has more to do with our human prejudices and politics than with the availability of resources. Besides, starving the space budget (metaphorically, of course) hardly guarantees that the freed up money would be transferred to those who need it most. 

Still, the ironies of searching for life beyond Earth while doing a mediocre job of learning about the varieties of life on Earth — let alone sharing the planet with a true generosity of spirit — occasionally jump out at one. I think that’s what happened to Sarah Johnson on this occasion:

Once, in one of my teaching labs at Oxford, … I’d been told to familiarize myself with the [fruitfly] larva’s functioning under a dissecting scope, then mount its brain on a glass slide, to study normal cell division, along with its testes, to study germ cell division into gametes. But even after my professor’s prompt to begin the dissection, I dallied. I pushed bits of sugar in the larva’s confused path and watched as it attempted to climb my tweezers. … What universes were down there [from a fruitfly’s perspective]? What noises were too small [for me] to hear beneath … blades of grass … ? 

I lifted the larva into the pocket of my lab coat and excused myself. I held the slide steady while I walked, glancing down into my pocket every few seconds as I descended … the stairs and found my way to the cafeteria. I left it on a bit of the banana I’d bought for lunch, spat out and dribbled from a napkin, in the base of rubber plant in the zoology building. I returned to the classroom and gazed for nearly an hour at a blank slide under the microscope, a vast field of emptiness.

That so much of the science of living things is based on the destruction of living things in the lab is either ironic or appropriate. I’m never sure which. 

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York