These are the tasks confronting scientists as they
plan to drill beneath the crust of Mars in their search for bacterial
life. The majority of them have finally admitted that it could not be
done in the way described above.
The welcome news, in short, is that there is now a
scientific consensus, shared by NASA, that astronauts will eventually be
needed for the search for life on Mars - a
quest upon which the space agency has set its heart. While robots can
perform preliminary searches on the Martian surface, the really
difficult parts of the project can only be carried out by humans.
This is particularly welcome news since, as recently
as a year ago, many scientists were insisting that the entire Solar
System could be explored by robots alone. It was always a vain prospect,
but academics seemed unable to understand that machines are not clever
enough - and may never be clever enough - to
carry out tasks where unexpected and formidable obstacles are liable to
arise. Solving them requires common sense and imagination, qualities
that machines wholly lack.
The same will apply to plans to search for life in
the ocean that is believed to exist beneath layers of ice on Jupiter's
moon Europa. The proposal is that a submarine should be lowered to
Europa's surface, that a hole should be punched in the ice, and that the
craft be launched into the ocean to carry out the search. I cannot
believe that it will be possible to conduct effectively such a vast
operation on Europa, a world that seldom comes closer to Earth than 400
million miles, simply by pushing buttons in a control room in Pasadena.
The trouble with our
computers-can-be-taught-to-do-anything outlook is that people tend to
forget that the cyber world is much simpler than reality.
One could easily simulate a search for oceanic life
in Europa in a computer game with convincing graphics, but the graphics
would all be clever fakery irrelevant to the real Europa, the real
distance from it, the real ice, the real ocean, the real submarine and
the real problems.
