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33  Are There Bugs on Mars?
    The Washington Post, Sunday, February 26, 1967
     The quarantine of the planets must work both ways.  A spacecraft
might carry an accidental spore from Earth to Mars, or the reverse.
We are still uncertain whether life can survive on Mars, and whether
Mars has indigenous life to send back to the Earth -- but if it does,
the results are unpredictable.
     The introduction of the cactus plant or the rabbit to Australia;
of syphilis to Europe; of the English sparrow, the starling, or
smallpox to America; of tuberculosis to the Africans, are only a few
chapters of a long sorry history.  We hardly want to bring Martian
diseases or pests back to Earth as the price of space glory.
     Since manned flight to the planets is already being seriously
discussed, questions of interplanetary hygiene need the gravest
consideration.
     The most serious criticism against this concern is that we cannot
so far detect life at all on any planet.  But we have hardly looked
closely enough.
     It is also argued that any Martian microbes would not attack
Earthlings, since they have never been adapted to us.  But that
argument cuts both ways.  We have learned to live with our Earthly
microbes by developing antibodies and other defenses to recognize
and cope with them.  The strangers might be the most insidious of
possible saboteurs by the very innocence of their multiplication
in our blood stream -- or overwhelming of our septic tanks and
sewage disposal plants.  We just don't know enough to make reliable
predictions.
     The space engineers want hard answers right now -- for missions
they are planning for 10 or 20 years hence.  But biologists aren't
that clever.  If we believe in conserving the Earth, we don't want
to take even small risks with our posterity.  If we had to answer
now, we would have to say "Stay away, we cannot give you rigorous
assurance that the trip is a safe one for our future".
     This hardly has to stick forever.  An orderly program would take
safe, distant -- but progressively closer -- looks at each of the
planets.  Each such trip would bring us deeper and deeper insight
as to what the surface is made of, its history, where any life may
be found, and the odds of inadvertently destroying its pristine
condition by a premature landing.
     When we know enough to predict what we might find, we can move
to instrumented landing experiments.  There would be landing systems
guiding the probes to calculated locations likely to give us the most
information.  These sophisticated landers would also be able to move
about the surface, searching for the most interesting variety of
terrain.  They could be guided from the Earth in their meandering
and return television pictures of the terrain.
     They would also constitute general purpose laboratories under
computerized control, so that many different and sometimes contending
investigators on Earth could conduct experiments.  The laboratories
would be constructed and reprogrammable so that new experiments could
be quickly devised and implemented on the basis of the results of
previous ones.
     At a third stage, we plan the return of samples.  The selection
of material for an automated return journey would first be governed
by experimental analysis on Mars.  Even so, it might be more desirable
to use the moon as an intermediary quarantine station for further
laboratory study at a manned base.
     Finally, if no danger to the Earth is evident from the preceding
steps, we could trust man to the return trip -- confident we would
not have to face an awful conflict, in case of emergency, between
sacrificing the astronaut or the quarantine.
     In principle, these precautions might apply to the moon as well,
and the Apollo mission is of course nearly upon us to test our
thinking.  However, the moon lacks an atmosphere and therefore has
little chance of carrying moisture where life could persist or
flourish.
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