The Enchanted Region Of Speculation

Dr Piyush K Mathur, astrophysicist, Mumbai

Every three years, as punctual as migratory birds, a happy throng of astronomers, astrophysicists, science fiction writers and amateurs, linked by a single belief, meet to discuss the exploration and colonisation of Mars with all the infectious excitement and self-assurance of the chosen

keepers of a faith.

At this year's "Case for Mars" conference, held in Boulder, Colorado, a few weeks ago, the certitude about Mars being the lost-and-found-alive-and-kicking cousin to Gaia (the politically correct post-Modernist, retro-environmentalist name for Planet Earth) was

unequivocal and palpable.

Among the audience was amateur astronomer Satish Gavalli from Faridabad, who says that he begs and scrounges for money to attend every Mars conference to date. "I've been following the Mars trail right from its beginning: I remember 1962 not because of India's war with China but because Russia launched the world's first Mars probe. This flyby got lost because communications with the Earth station failed, but the launch itself, primitive by today's standard, has become the stuff of legend. It was a disaster -- but it was the pioneer."

"Even then, we literally thought of the so-called polar canals as

carrying the water of life. I grew up with H G Wells' War of the Worlds as the definitive statement on alien life. However genocidal and technologically superior alien life might have been, I would have given my right arm to meet a Martian. I still would."

This, then, is the mindset of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) enthusiasts, with the rest of the sardonic scientific

community thinking of them as barmy, on the same seriousness quotient as fantasy science fiction.

Only, now it is the government-funded NASA that is unconditionally in charge of the programme: it feted the Oval Room's recent go-for-it-bully-boy decision. NASA's revival of its pledge to finecomb the known universe for signs of life, following nearly a decade of crippled derring-do and severe funds cutback by Congress, came like a release from a coffin.

Dr Alok Srivathsa, an Indo-American astrophysicist retired from NASA a couple of years ago, says that the Agency is

frenetically resurrecting the comatose SETI programme: a flurry of 10 trillion-dollar robot landings on Mars, some with unprecedented return-to-Earth facility, have been blueprinted for the next decade. It is common knowledge in the Sriharikota launch complex that India too has fingers in the pie up to its knuckles, although the extent of its involvement is confidential.

The so-called Mars Programme, which pre-balkanised Russia had been plugging away at with fanatical fervour and which NASA had brazenly decided to piggyback, had envisaged manned landings and

excavations by a support and landing team representing just about every nation, including India, which had nothing more than a glancing interest in issues relating to space. The key to this seeming generosity lay in the mammoth cost of the project, which could be implemented only if everyone pooled in with ready cash.

India was said to have been willing to go just short of turning out its pockets, despite the justified argument of detractors who said that the billions of dollars could be better spent housing Earth's homeless. In a flash of seeming irrationality, Washington even exhumed a five-year-old think-tank comprising science fiction writers and futurologists.

This colourful tribe had hitherto been treated more with fond amusement than the seriousness it deserved by a dogmatic, unadventurous and po-faced scientific establishment whose "self-limiting interest," said the late SF writer-academic Ursula Le Guin, "lay in tenure."

Even more unfortunately, the Mars Programme has been dogged by what some people in NASA, says Dr Srivathsa with no trace of mockery, "believe is a jinx". Superstition, he adds, in scientific circles, which pride themselves on their capacity for cold, objective ratiocination, is far more enduring and schizophrenic than common societal superstition. (In fact, the American space programme is generally believed to be haunted by the tearful ectoplasms of the three astronauts who died in the Apollo 13 conflagration, which set back the benumbed American space programme by a decade, allowing the Soviets to take the lead.).

This is also where India comes in: for all purposes a technological and industrial parasite riding the

shoulders of the Soviets, it was privy to large globs of the Russian space programme, and still is. On its part, Hindu astrology with its acolytes in just about every sector of life, says that Mars is big, authentic trouble.

A Manglik, for instance, is one whose horoscope houses Mars in one of these houses -- the 1st (anatomy), the 4th (happiness at home), the 7th (conjugal bliss), the 8th (immortality), and the 12th (hedonism and raw lust). It is difficult for a Manglik to tie up with a non-Manglik and remain untroubled by infidelity. Mars here doesn't bring life: it brings death, alien or no.

But then, who said interstellar travel is easy?