Science Fiction
As I set out the round bales using the skid loader, a quasi-tractor piece of equipment with hydraulic lift arms on to which a number of end tools can be attached, I couldn’t help noticing my tracks in the snow and mud while pondering the landing of Perseverance on Mars earlier this week.
This machine is my number one tool right now. Mounted on a quick-connect armature is a bale spear—actually three spears that stab into 900-pound bales of hay. Other attachments include a bucket, a manure fork, and an auger. To operate the diesel driven powerhouse I basically sit inside a cage and use joysticks and foot pedals depending on what actions I want the machine to perform. Each time I strap into the seat I feel like one of Dale Brown’s CID robots, only not as cool.
Within days my tracks will melt, dry, and fade away only the have the process repeat each time I reloaded the livestock’s hay feeders, but how long will the tracks made by Perseverance, well…persevere? We’ve been leaving tire tracks on Mars since 2004 when Spirit and Opportunity rolled around the Red Planet.
Blame it on Battlestar Galactica, but I’ve been a fan of science fiction and space exploration since the day Mom called us in from outside to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I’ve gone from watching Captain Kirk and his communicator to having my own Motorola Razr. My favorite genre of science fiction are the stories that weave actual science with the moral implications new technologies and interstellar/multidimensional exploration examines. Classic authors like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin and Terry Pratchett are always a good bet. A big fan of audiobooks on my weekly treks to the city, a good story always makes the drive much easier. One of my more recent listens, Margaret Atwood’s Orxy and Crake hit a little too close for me as a farmer, especially the ChickieNobs.
One of my high school friends who left for MIT his junior year and went on to be a particle physicist hunting muons and neutrinos at the South Pole described the Universe to me as a giant set of Legos. The whole darn thing is made up of the same parts that get assembled and disassembled on a scale so grand that we can’t fully comprehend with our human minds.
Had he become a farmer instead of a physicist, he would have been blessed with seeing this process on an Earthly scale. Each season I watch as sunshine gets turned into someone’s dinner, with all the steps from growing grass to fat lambs headed off for processing. Each output is dependent on an input, an allocation of energy. For instance when the snow subsides and the soil begins to warm, the first places to green up will be the spots over which the portable chicken pens were moved last year. It will look like a fictional giant took a fat marker and scribbled emerald lines on the dull brown fields.
As I rolled around in my own version of a rover leaving tracks I thought about what it is our explorations of Mars hopes to find—biomarkers, signs of (past) life in the barren geology. NASA and the scientific community are focused on microscopic evidence. But me with my penchant for science fiction and agriculture wants to find something else--artifacts.
Explorers never know what they’re going to discover when venturing into uncharted territories. From early civilizations circumnavigating the globe using only the stars as their guides to ROVs finding abundant life in the deepest ocean trenches feeding on the sulfur from volcanic vents, we’ve amassed an astonishing amount of information about the world in which we live and often that knowledge runs contrary to what is the accepted current belief. We are so attached to our truths that throughout history we’ve put people to death who reveal new information based upon science. Better yet, take a good look around at all the anti-maskers believing COVID fiction over pandemic science.
This week I’m going to take a little liberty with science fiction as to what I’d like Perseverance to discover and question what impact it would have on society. What if we found evidence of planetary farmers? They’re working with the same basic elements we know today—all the inputs needed in order to sustain life—as their own planet began to die. If we discovered irrefutable evidence of a mass extinction caused by a path similar to our own global emergencies, would we change for the sake of future inhabitants?
Another environmental conundrum is that of invasive species. In science fiction, it’s always invaders from another planet we worry about, like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man and Mira Grant’s lab engineered zombies and tapeworms. However, we’ve got plenty to deal with right here on Earth. From multiflora rose overrunning the pastures to Spotted Lantern Flies infesting crops, farmers are often on the front lines when it comes to being on the losing end of an unwanted biological invasion. The determination between good and bad often exists on the outcome being either beneficial or destructive. Despite honeybees being non-native to North America, introduced by European settlers in 1622, they are now considered beneficial, actually quite critical to our food system.
But what if it is humans that are the invasive species gnawing the Earth down to bare rock? Imagine if we would find evidence that we’ve done this all before…on Mars. I keep asking myself how humanity as a whole would react to the discovery of evidence that turns our entire existence on its head, where an ancient species of beings farmed a new home, seeding a young planet, like a spring field, with the building blocks; four simple nucleic acids to code life in a new environment of elements.
I scour the stories of JPL’s success, follow NASA’s social media, and enjoy the images and information beamed back from over 132 million miles away, intertwining it with my daily wonderings of what if. For now, I need to go shovel more Legos on to the fields in preparation for spring.