Of Martians and Haligonians

The news early today: No pope elected.  Well, I suppose what does not happen can be news. Oddly though, there were few reports of all the other things that didn’t happen today.

One thing that did happen happened on a distant planet.  The Curiosity Rover, an astonishing feat of human ingenuity if ever there was one, sent word that Martian rock contains clay minerals formed in a watery environment and, as if that weren’t enough, it also contains all the key elements needed for life: carbon, sulphur, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and nitrogen.  In the out-of-this-world world of exobiology, it’s the next best thing to finding organic molecules.

More years ago than I care to count, I was a newly-minted graduate student at Dalhousie University in Halifax and NASA’s second Mars Viking Lander was prospecting on the Red Planet.  I decided to do a seminar about it. This will shock some of you younger readers, but during those quaint days of yore everything wasn’t instantly available everywhere.  I needed images, and I was just innocent enough to write (remember snail mail?) to the venerable Cornell professor and the father of exobiology Carl Sagan to see if he would send me some. And he did.  He generously sent me slides (OMG - this was before PowerPoint!).  He “wished me luck bringing Mars to Halifax.” 
 

I teed up what I still think is some of the eeriest music I have ever heard to provide a suitable sonic ambiance for the grainy images of the Martian landscape. ‘Darkness: Earth in Search of a Sun’ and 'Light / Sun' are the first two tracks of ‘The First Seven Days’ (remember LP’s?) by Czech composer and keyboardist Jan Hammer: his musical rendering of the Genesis creation story.   The presentation took place in a cavernous concrete lecture theater devoid of any concession to earthly comfort. It was perfect! As the house lights dimmed and images of an alien world appeared, Hammer’s otherworldly compositions amplified the shear barrenness of a place that has yet to reveal signs of life.  I’m referring to Mars, not Halifax.
 
I think my very conservative professor had his worst fears confirmed: I was some kind of west coast weirdo.  He was good enough not to mention it.