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Qualität des Beitrags: Beteiligte Poster: Lord Roxton Forum: Red Squadron - Space Research Forenbeschreibung: SR aus dem Unterforum: Unmanned marsprobes Antworten: 1 Forum gestartet am: Sonntag 23.04.2006 Sprache: englisch Link zum Originaltopic: A LETTER TO BEAGLE Letzte Antwort: vor 16 Jahren, 5 Monaten, 30 Tagen, 1 Stunde, 43 Minuten
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Re: A LETTER TO BEAGLE
Lord Roxton - 27.09.2006, 23:17A LETTER TO BEAGLE
Der folgende Artikel ist von Stuart Atkinson, gefunden auf und zitiert von:
http://www.newmars.com/archives/000118.shtml
Der folgende Text ist, den Erforschern anderer Planeten wirklich aus dem Herzen geschrieben, eine Antwort auf alle fragen.
A LETTER TO BEAGLE
DEAR BEAGLE...
Greetings from Earth! I'm writing this to you on behalf of all the thousands - maybe even millions by now - of people around the world who are following your mission closely, and nervously awaiting your arrival at Mars. We all just want to wish you good luck, and Godspeed, and to let you know that we're thinking of you as you prepare to fly free for the first time.
There's another reason for writing though. You don't need me to tell you that you're a long way from home now; the fact that this message took several minutes to reach you proves that. In fact, you're over 70 million miles away from Earth now, so far away that if you asked MARS EXPRESS to pan around and look over its shoulder its cameras would see that Earth's just a blue star off to one side of the Sun, forming a brilliant double star with Jupiter. But please don't ask it to do that, don't do anything which might cause any problems. Not when you're so close. Not when so much is at stake.
That's the real reason why I'm writing to you - to let you know, as you wake up from your long sleep, just how important what you're about to do is.
To understand just how important your mission is, you first have to understand something about us, your creators. For we humans, back here on Earth, most days are roughly the same. We get up, go to work, have lunch, come home again, and go to bed. When we reach out to turn off the light at the end of the day, the world is no different to the way it was when we woke up.
But some days are different. Different and very rare. Since the dawn of time, there have been perhaps a handful of days when, without most people even knowing it, the Universe changed, shifted; days when Something Happened which meant nothing would ever be the same again.
Think about it. There must have been a single, magical moment on one day, thousands of years ago, when the secret of making fire was discovered. When that first flickering tongue of flame licked up from inside a pile of twigs, reflected in the wide eyes of its startled Creator, maybe he or she felt the Universe ripple in that moment, maybe they didn't. But I'm sure they sensed somehow, somewhere deep inside, that nothing would ever be the same again�
Many thousands of years later, when Galileo turned his crude telescope on the night sky for the first time in 1610, and saw Venus as a crescent, rings around Saturn and a quartet of tiny, pin-prick stars shining next to Jupiter, we finally glimpsed the true nature of the Universe. The cataracts of ignorance were suddenly removed from our eyes; we could see clearly for the first time. We were not the centre of everything after all, the Sun and planets did not dance around us. Through his telescope, Galileo looked out upon - and deep, deep into - a New Universe, a Universe that was no intricate, deity-constructed sculpture of tinkling crystal spheres, but a star-strewn abyss without end�
When Einstein stepped away from his blackboard, running a chalky hand through his shock of white hair and, looking at that deceptively-short equation, thought to himself "Hmm, e=mc2� I might be onto something here�" the Universe smiled proudly, thinking that maybe, just maybe, the human race was smart enough to survive its coming of nuclear age after all�
Three and a half centuries after Galileo saw the first spots on the face of the Sun, Man created the first artificial Sun, releasing the awesome power of the atom by exploding the first atomic bomb in the desert at Los Alamos, and as the first mushroom cloud ever seen blossomed upwards like a perverse, dark rose, the Universe sighed, and shivered with dread, saddened that another of its children had stumbled across the keys to its gun cupboard�
When Neil Armstrong stepped gingerly off the footpad of the lunar module Eagle and placed his boot on the dusty surface of the Moon, ignoring the whoops and cheers ringing in his ears to gaze up at the blue and white marble of the Earth shining above his head instead, he didn't merely take one small, meek step, he kicked open the doors of the Universe and led us boldly through them. On that day our millennia-long exile on Earth was finally over. The stars, our true home, called to us at last�
Fire discovered... the power of the atom unleashed� the first man on the Moon� all days on which the Universe - or at least our understanding of our place and importance in it - changed. And the next might be mere weeks away.
But that's up to you.
You might not be aware of this, hidden away inside that conical cocoon of yours, but you're actually part of a small fleet of spacecraft closing-in on Mars. I'm sorry, "Fleet" makes it sound like you're warships - despatched perhaps to avenge the death and destruction wreaked upon Man's Homeworld by three-legged war machines during the brief War of the Worlds chronicled by HG Wells! - but no, you are all explorers, ambassadors from three different countries, travelling to Mars in peace, to look for life, not to extinguish it. And the first to land - hopefully after the trailing member of the pack, the jinxed, solar flare-scorched NOZOMI probe from Japan slices past Mars without smashing into and contaminating it with earthly bacteria - will be you. Yes, you.
Right now you're riding piggyback to the Red Planet on the side of the European Space Agency's MARS EXPRESS, but soon you'll be flying free for the first - and last - time, a spacecraft in your own right finally. So, enjoy this quiet period, because you're due to plummet through Mars' thin atmosphere and land on its dusty surface in the early hours of Earth's Christmas Day, ten whole days before the first of the two US Mars Exploration Rovers which are racing up behind you.
It's true that the MERs are bigger than you, and will be able to move around Mars after they land, but a lot of people back here have very high hopes for you! Your 20th century predecessors, dramatically christened Viking and Pathfinder, were both bigger and more expensive than you too, but don't you let that worry or intimidate you either. You may only be small, barely larger than a bicycle wheel in fact, but you're nothing like those bulky, boxy robot laboratories. Compared to them you're an elegant marriage of origami and engineering, far more like a pocket-watch than a robot, and trust me, you're going to earn more pages in the astronomy history books than Viking and Pathfinder put together. Why? Because everyone back here who knows you, who's followed your mission from the start, is convinced that you're going to eclipse their achievements. You're going to find the Holy Grail of science.
Extraterrestrial life on Mars.
No-one wants to add to the pressure already on you, but as you approach Mars I wonder if you really know just how important you are, or how much we're all counting on you..? Beagle, if you find signs of life beneath the ruddy surface of Isidis Planitia, it will be a day to stand alongside those enjoyed by Galileo, Einstein and Armstrong. If your instruments detect a single living bacterium, or even a trace of the remains of extinct, ancient martian life, it will send a shock wave through both the scientific community and our race's consciousness and self-perception that will spread outwards like a tsunami, pulverising every theory in its path.
Not only that, but you could fire the starting gun for a new Space Race, with a manned mission to Mars as the finishing line. If you find life on the Red Planet, no scientist worthy of his or her white coat will be content with quietly studying your photos or readings on a monitor, no matter how good they are. They'll want more detailed data - lots more, and of the type and volume that could only be gathered by their own kind: people, flesh and blood scientists there on the surface, picking up rocks in their gloved hands, chipping them open with their rock hammers and studying the pieces under their microscopes.
When they eventually get there they'll almost surely make a pilgrimage to your landing site, to honour your achievement. Who knows, maybe one day there'll be a museum built around you, preserving and protecting you from the cold and the dust devils, and children born on Mars will come and see you on school trips as part of a history lesson..? Or maybe someone will pick you up off that dusty desert floor and bring you back home, here to Earth, so we can pay our respects too.
But that's for the future. Why are you there now? Why did we lovingly design and build you, only to send you so far from home, never to return? Why is finding life on Mars so damned important to us when there's already so much of it here on Earth? What drives us to hurl multi-million dollar machines like you across the gulf of space, again and again, to look for germs less-complicated than the mess we'd sneeze into a hankie when we're laid low with a cold?
Why are we so obsessed with finding a microscopic, primitive bug on a dusty, bone-dry, boulder-strewn world barely half the size of our own?
Because without the discovery of Life elsewhere - on Mars, on some other body in our solar system or out in the depths of space - we humans are left with the frightening and depressing possibility that we are flukes, that Mankind is just a ridiculous galactic accident. For all we know, the birth of life on Earth might simply have been induced by a fork of lightning stabbing down from a boiling, stormy sky into a comet-clouded puddle. We could be the result of a cosmic chemical spill.
If that's the case then true, things could be worse. Similar spills may have occurred on other worlds too. Perhaps the recipe for life is commonly-available across the curved, star-dusted arms of the Milky Way, and whenever we look up at a starry sky we're gazing out at a sea of suns which have shone down on civilisations as advanced as our own - perhaps far more advanced. We already know that when we gaze towards the Galactic Centre we are looking at stars which had been blazing for billions of years before our own Sun began to form, so it's possible that those distant suns were tanning the upturned faces of intelligent extraterrestrials even before the dinosaurs roamed Earth. Perhaps sentient beings have lived, laughed and loved on worlds encircling the jewel-hued stars of Sagittarius and Scorpius for longer than our Sun has shone, and right now, as we struggle to escape from Earth orbit, they travel in luxury between those stars in ships so huge and grand they would shame the Titanic -
But we just don't know.
And we won't know unless and until we find life Somewhere Else. Until then our minds won't be able to rest, we'll go back to the same nagging question, again and again, like a tongue probing a broken tooth; wondering, always wondering if we really are Alone in this beautiful, frighteningly-immense Universe.
That's what's at stake here, nothing more, nothing less. Until we find even a single bacteria, a lone germ, a wispy, microscopic trace of precious Life off Earth we won't know for sure that we're not All There Is.
That's why we sent you so far from home. To find life, and to help us stop feeling so lost and lonely when we look up at the sky.
The scientist Carl Sagan - a great man who sadly died many years before you were built and was one of the first people to think of Mars as a real world, back in the heady days of Viking - once mused that we can't be the only intelligent life in the Universe, because if we were then it would be "an awful waste of space", and no-one in their right mind could disagree. We now know that the Sun is just one of two hundred billion suns in the Milky Way, and that for every one of those stars there's another galaxy out in space, spinning slowly and silently through the void. We now know that there are as many galaxies in the Universe as there are snowflakes in a blizzard, each of them possibly home to tens of thousands of civilisations with their own art, religion and music, their own Botticellis, Buddhas and Beethovens. Assuming that in all the immensity of space, there is only one galaxy with a life-bearing world floating in its star-froth, and that that world is Earth, is arrogant beyond belief!
Yet we still have no proof to the contrary.
Refusing to be downhearted by their failure to detect radio signals from alien civilisations, SETI scientists back here on Earth constantly remind each other that "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence", and that's certainly true. It is also true, however, that until we hear even a single, plaintive beep coming from Out There then we are, to all intents and purposes, Alone. We're as alone, and as scared by our loneliness, as R2-D2 - a distant ancestor of yours - was, rolling through that canyon on Tatooine.
But that might all be about to change. We may be just months, possibly only weeks away from one of those days when the Universe changes, forever.
But as I said, that's up to you.
Have you ever wondered where your name came from? Why on Earth - or Mars - you were named after a cute brown and black dog? Well, you were actually named after a craft of a very different kind - a sailing ship of wood and cloth called "Beagle", which, almost two hundred years ago, carried a very famous scientist on a voyage of discovery just as exciting as yours. Charles Darwin travelled fewer miles than you, it's true, but his discoveries transformed our understanding of life, as we hope yours will soon, too.
That's why my heart will be in my mouth from midnight on Christmas Eve. Not in anticipation of a visit from Santa Claus - I stopped believing in him when I didn't find Shania Twain under my tree two years ago, having wasted a whole year being really, really good - but because, like every member of the team controlling you back here on Earth, I'll be imagining you falling, falling towards Mars. I'll try not to think of all the hundreds of things that could go wrong. Instead I'll be imagining you feeling the thin atmosphere's soft kiss for the first time before becoming engulfed, moments later, in sheets of flame; in my mind I'll be seeing you streaking across the martian sky like a meteor, trailing smoke and fire, casting shadows behind each boulder and rock scattered across the shattered, cratered landscape beneath it; I'll imagine myself standing on the ancient plain of Isidis, shielding my eyes from the Sun in the hope of seeing your parachute blossoming open behind you, slowing your descent�
And I'm sure I'll still be wide awake at 3.00am, imagining I'm standing next to you as your solar panels open up like the silvery-blue petals of some exotic, Bradburyian martian orchid searching for the Sun.
What a long wait then, until the first signal is received from you - a Close Encounters-esque sequence of notes and tones composed by the pop group Blur, did you know that? Then, and only then, will all your controllers, and all the Beagle-watchers like myself all around the world, allow ourselves a sigh of relief. And maybe some sleep too.
Then days of impatience will surely begin. When, we'll ask, in person and on world-spanning message boards, will we see the first pictures of your landing site? When will we get the first measurements from your instruments? When will your Search for Life begin?
When will we Know?
I know. When you're ready.
By the time this reaches you the first part of your journey will almost be over; you will be preparing to detach from your faithful carrier and complete the rest of your voyage alone. Power will have started to course through your wire and silicon veins once again, waking you from your slumber and warming you against the chill of deep space. Millions of miles away millions of people will be watching you eagerly, on their TV and computer screens, willing you on, crossing their fingers for you as you prepare to begin your long fall to the surface of a world which has called out to us across the gulf of space for centuries.
What you will find there, and photograph, we can only guess. No images of throbbing, glistening-tentacled war-machine builders, that's for sure. Nor - sadly - will you send back pictures showing families of peaceful, golden-eyed martians. And to the crushing disappointment of every male Mars scientist inspired in his youth by the John Carter adventure books, the raven-haired, caramel-skinned Princess Thuvia will not step out from behind a boulder, proud and naked, bathed in the light of the shrunken sun. No, you travel to the dusty, dry Mars of Sagan, Mutch and Pillinger, not the swamp-covered, canal-crossed Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
But you travel there for us, to be our hands and our eyes, to go where we cannot. Yet. And you go to look for the one thing we yearn to find more than anything else: life.
Should you find it, everything will change. History will stop, and start again. From that moment on, Time will be divided into two parts - everything that came before you, and all that came after. Here on Earth we will rejoice, knowing at last what we had always suspected - that we are not Alone. And after rejoicing we will look at the starry sky with new respect - and, perhaps, renewed fear. For who will then be able to look at the heavens without wondering how many curious, jealous alien eyes are staring back..?
So, little Beagle, as you speed towards Mars, know that on that bright sapphire-hued lantern shining behind you we are watching, and waiting, counting off the hours to your arrival just as you are counting down the miles. Along with your cameras, microscopes and Mole you carry our hopes and dreams.
Godspeed Beagle, from the world of Galileo and Einstein, Oppenheimer and Armstrong.
We know you won't let us down.
The author of seven children's spaceflight and astronomy books, Stuart Atkinson spends his spare time running a Science Outreach program in the north of England, and is a frequent lecturer in local schools.
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