The Curiosity rover on Mars in 2018.
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech via Associated PressSarah Stewart Johnson knows exactly when she found her calling as a planetary scientist. She was a sophomore in college, on a class trip to Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii. Kicking a black rock, she exposed a tiny fern, “its defiant green tendrils trembling in the air.” The little plant, amid such barrenness, inspired her, because “it was just so impossibly triumphant.” It also led to a vocation: “It was then, on that trip, that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me.”
Today Ms. Johnson is an expert looker-for-life as an assistant professor at Georgetown University and as a veteran of three NASA missions to Mars. In 2013, she published an essay that made the cut for the following year’s edition of “The Best American Science and Nature Writing.” Her subject was Antarctica, and she had gone there to examine how microbes might survive in a brutal, Mars-like landscape.
Now she has written her first book, “The Sirens of Mars,” an account of the search for Martian life that blends memoir with history and science. The title is peculiar, evoking the monsters of Greek mythology who drew sailors to their doom as well as “The Sirens of Titan,” a comic novel by Kurt Vonnegut that lampoons human enterprise. For Ms. Johnson, a siren seems simply to lure, without danger, and Mars is her lodestar.
In snatches of autobiography, Ms. Johnson describes her upbringing in eastern Kentucky, where she played with a special-needs sister and taught herself trigonometry. When she was 11, she handled a 141-year-old toenail, exhumed from the grave of Zachary Taylor. Ms. Johnson’s father was a lab technician who helped conclude that poison had not killed the 12th president.
The Sirens of Mars
By Sarah Stewart Johnson
Crown, 266 pages, $28.99
Instead of pursuing the study of death, Ms. Johnson took up the quest for extraterrestrial life, in a field sometimes called “exobiology.” Her ambitious goal is to find evidence of life on Mars and solve “the enigma of a neighboring world.” As she displays the love of discovery that drives so much scientific inquiry, it’s easy to cheer her on.
The cruel irony for exobiologists, however, is that for all of their pluck and determination, they still haven’t found what they’re looking for on the solar system’s second-smallest planet—and they probably won’t. There are no little green ferns on Mars, let alone little green men. Millions of bacteria can thrive in a pinch of Earth’s soil, but it’s starting to appear as if not a single one inhabits Mars. “The Sirens of Mars” is an elegy, though its author may be too hopeful to realize it.
Ms. Johnson acknowledges that the fourth rock from the sun is a “cold, hard, desolate world.” You wouldn’t want to live there, and it isn’t even a nice place to visit. Dry as a desert and drenched in radiation, it’s a harsh and hostile place that thwarts orbiters and landers. “Half the missions to Mars have failed,” she writes.
Her book describes the planet’s progression in the human mind from a rosy twinkle in the night sky to a mysterious world watched through telescopes. Some of its early observers dreamed up canal-building civilizations. They powered the imaginations of early science-fiction writers, such as H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Percival Lowell—a pioneering turn-of-the-century astronomer and the namesake of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona—theorized about a society led by “a group of benevolent oligarchs.” In 1924, reports Ms. Johnson, the astronomer David Peck Todd persuaded the U.S. military to cease all radio communication for two days so that he could listen for Martian transmissions.
He heard nothing. Since then, the hunt has slipped into a cycle of diminishing returns. As the absence of intelligent life became obvious, the speculators demoted Mars to a “vegetated world” of plants. The truth hit hard when Mariner 4 flew by Mars in 1965 and snapped the first close-up photos of its sterile surface: “Exobiologists [were] as stunned as the rest of the world,” Ms. Johnson writes. “Suddenly it seemed like they might be wasting their time.”
Yet they kept probing. In 1996, they touted a “nanobacteria fossil” found in a Martian meteorite, a rock formed on Mars but ejected into space and hurled to Earth after a violent impact. President Clinton hailed it as potentially “one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.” Scientists soon rejected the idea, making this too a time-wasting tease.
By the 21st century, the exobiologists had suffered through a long slog of disappointment. When the Curiosity rover found organic molecules in Martian clay a few years ago, it marked an important development—these are the building blocks of life, after all—but also an example of how an invigorating exploration for actual life had been downgraded into a humdrum search for the merest hints of it.
Ms. Johnson remains upbeat: Life, she writes, is “stunningly resilient.” Maybe it lies buried beneath the Martian soil, where we haven’t found it yet. Conceivably it could arise from “an entirely different molecular foundation.” She likens this notion to “trying to imagine a color we’ve never seen”—and when she does, her yearning for signs of life starts to feel more like fantasy than science. What might be a cautionary tale becomes for her an opportunity to wax lyrical about “an almost existential endeavor to confront our own limitations, to learn what life really is, and ultimately to defy our own isolation in the universe.”
Great advances can spring from apparent defeat, of course. Perhaps the Mars Perseverance rover, scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in a few weeks, will enjoy better luck. At some point, however, we may want to admit that the red planet is a dead planet—and that the search for life on Mars is a siren song.
Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and the author of “Reading Around: Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas.”
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