The NASA rover “Perseverance” has been exploring the surface of Mars for over a year now. Equipped with the mini-helicopter “Ingenuity,” which allows it to launch and land on the red planet’s terrain, it is fitted with sixteen cameras and six wheels. The vehicle, which is the size of a small car, has been traveling around the rocky landscape of the Jezero Crater taking measurements, recording footage, and carrying out experiments since February 2021.

Life on Mars?

While Perseverance’s technological prowess is impressive, the materials that it is collecting are even more remarkable. It carries thirteen tubes containing rock and other samples drilled and cached from the surface of Mars that could hold traces of ancient microbial life in outer space. As part of its mission, the rover will take another two dozen samples over the next few months. Then it will seal these and deposit them in a specific location where they will remain until a Mars Sample Return mission is carried out to take them back to Earth. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) will be working on how to pull off what is probably the most complicated package pick-up in history over the course of the next decade.

If they succeed and are able to find potential signs of life (biosignatures) in the samples, then we will soon come face-to-face with the question of what the possibility of alien life could mean for the human race. The Einstein Circle “Exploring Otherness on Earth and Beyond: Integrating Perspectives from Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities” at Freie Universität Berlin has been investigating precisely this issue since February 2022. The interdisciplinary team, which receives funding from the Einstein Foundation, is made up of researchers from a broad range of subjects, from planetary sciences to psychology, to astrophysics, through to philosophy and communication studies.

Three researchers from the natural sciences came up with the idea for the project. Lena Noack, professor at the Institute of Geological Sciences at Freie Universität, is one of them. “For a long time we’ve been looking at things from the perspective of the natural sciences when it comes to thinking about what alien life could look like,” she says. “So we’ve been more preoccupied with the effects of gravity on a planet, which chemical elements exist there, whether there’s water or an atmosphere on it, and so on. But we’ve come to realize that as scientists we’ve contributed little to the discussion on what finding traces of life would actually do to us on a societal level. If we were to rely solely on methods from the planetary sciences, for example, then we would soon reach a dead end when it comes to anticipating how our society would handle encountering alien life or what kind of psychological or philosophical questions would arise in response to an event of this magnitude.”

The Ethics of Exploring Mars 

This was the initial thinking that inspired Noack and her colleagues in the natural sciences to start up a dialogue with experts from other disciplines. Of course, they were not necessarily interested in asking film scholars why aliens tend to be depicted as little green men with balloon-like heads in the movies. Instead, they wanted to discuss with their peers from philosophy, religious studies, communications, and psychology whether and how we should open the packages from Mars, and whether we as humans even have the right to land on Mars – or if it were to come to it, colonize it.

One of these researchers is Steffi Pohl, professor of methods and evaluation/quality assurance at the Department of Education and Psychology at Freie Universität. What she finds fascinating about her work with the participating astrophysicists and planetologists is how broadly the concept of alien life as “otherness” is interpreted by researchers across the different disciplines. “People working in the natural sciences are literally looking for this ‘otherness,’ in that they invest huge amounts of energy and resources in trying to find signs of alien life throughout space,” says Pohl. “Whereas in the social sciences the category of ‘otherness’ is often understood to be a challenge, where we ask ourselves questions like ‘How do we deal with this?’ and ‘How do we create cohesion in spite of our differences?’”

Pohl is also interested in whether and how the world’s community should debate and later make decisions concerning how to proceed with any potential signs of alien life. If there really are microbes on Mars or a moon of Saturn, will the majority of people be in favor of bringing them back to Earth? Or, to flip the question: Should we even travel to Mars if we are not able to confirm whether life forms exist there, even if they’re just microbacterial in nature? Can we ethically justify colonizing a planet like Mars and changing its atmosphere? And who has the authority to make these kinds of decisions?

Is Our Universe Teeming with Alien Life?

The issues that the Einstein Circle are investigating do not revolve around the possibility of encountering extraterrestrials who might someday visit, abduct, or overthrow humans; instead they focus on the ethical implications of microbacterial contamination of not only our planet, but other planets too. An international “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” was first drawn up in 1967. One of its core tenets is that the exploration of all planets and moons should be conducted in such a way as to “avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.

Noack is well aware that many people think of science fiction rather than microbes when they hear the words “alien life.” Yet the implications for the planetary sciences – and all other disciplines, too – would be colossal if traces of life were found on Mars. After all, this would mean that other species, whatever form they may take, would not be as strange a prospect as many tend to believe. One astrophysicist was able to conclude from evidence in microbes native to Mars that the universe could simply be teeming with life. If even just two life forms were to exist in the same solar system and we found proof on another neighboring planet, then this would mean that there were more of them elsewhere in our universe.

But the problem here is that it would be rather difficult to reach out to these alien life forms – the journey would simply be too long and arduous. Noack says that the same goes for Mars. Because of its distance from the Earth, direct communication is impossible – never mind communicating with planets in other solar systems. The gaps between messages would be longer the more light-years lie between those sending them.

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This article originally appeared in German on September 27, 2022, in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.