Freymond _1999abstr

 

 

A Human Signature On Mars As A Symbol Of A Future Terraforming

 

Pierre-Phillippe Freymond, Claude-Alain Roten and Dimitri Karamata

Pierre-Phillippe.Freymond@igbm.unil.ch

 

 

As stated by Robert Zubrin, two questions are leading humans towards the exploration of Mars: i) is or was there any life and ii) will there be life in a near future? A similar biochemistry between the Earth's and Martian life forms would imply a common origin attributable to stone-borne interplanetary transfers or to a seeding of our solar system during its formation. Presence of Martian life or traces of its previous existence will have not only scientific consequences, but also cultural and social implications for humans, regarding their intellectual, philosophical or religious attitudes towards the origin of life on the Earth. The terraforming of Mars and, more generally, the spreading of Earth's life forms to other celestial bodies are questions of primordial importance that should be the focus of a public debate.

 

To provoke such a debate and to symbolize the crossroads at which our civilization now stands, we propose a mixed art-and-technology project. The symbol we propose is the image of an open human hand transformed into an image composed of 391 pixels of four levels of gray, allowing the recognition of the hand without any consideration of age, gender or race. This newly created picture is translated into a nucleotide sequence, using the biochemistry of the genetic code common to terrestrial life-forms, such that each level of gray is associated with one of the four DNA bases according to their complexity content. Once synthesized, this non-functional, 391-nucleotides-long sequence is inserted into the chromosome of Bacillus subtilis, a spore-forming bacterium. One gram of spores of this engineered strain contains 1012 cells, and, therefore, an equal number of copies of the synthetic message. Since spores embedded in amber can remain alive for at least 30 million years, this human generated artifact would be almost eternal.

 

As a beginning of a universe-wide dispersion of terrestrial life forms, people will be soon on Mars, exploring and contaminating it. The "open hand" symbol will be that of the mankind starting the terraforming of Mars. It will be destined to highlight the responsibilities taken by humans in this adventure. It could be a label, denoting that the enterprise has been freely and widely debated by men, within the limits of their hopefully ever progressing consciousness of what this adventure may open up to humanity.