Writing the History of Mars: Using the New Rules of Historical Discovery
Martian history is hardly the topic of intense study in the academic field. In fact, we have barely yet to define what we shall refer to as “Martian History”. Interplanetary history itself is only a step forward in the experience of human history, but geological history is another extension in human history BACKWARDS in time.
We are accustomed to thinking of “history” as the record of human activity, in the sense that someone has written down an account of the deeds of men. But while that definition may have sufficed for a couple thousand years, modern science has allowed us to explore the past at many different levels which lack only the insight that a contemporary language provides for the thoughts and beliefs of a culture or civilization.
In other words, 500 years ago “history” was defined by the written records available to the scholars of the day; today, “history” is defined by the written records we have kept or discovered and the supplemental information we have derived from archaeology, geology, climatology, biology, and even astronomy.
We now know about great climactic events, huge movements of peoples, and entire cultures of which the historians prior to the late 20th century had absolutely no knowledge or inclination. We now routinely include these data in our historical analyses and summaries for they are confirmed facts within the scope of our present knowledge.
We assign names to these events and peoples much as the ancient Greco-Roman writers assigned names to events and peoples who did not write their own histories, whose legends were only vaguely recalled and passed on by the writers of antiquity. Our names are not contemporary, and in fact are more distantly removed from the things we have discovered about antiquity than those names that the historians of 2,000 years ago gave to things, people, and places which preceded them.
The modern student of history is often cautioned to be wary of confusing ex post facto designations with self-appointed designations; and yet, we conveniently rely upon contemporary external designations for people and places whose local names were not preserved in native written records. Our history bears many gaps in the record — gaps which, so far as we can determine through present science — will never be filled in properly, for all those who possessed such knowledge have long since died.
And yet as we continue to expand our knowledge of the past here on Earth we write new chapters of history which are detailed, robust, and fascinating as well as supported by many branches of scientific discovery. We may even know more about some aspects of Viking culture than the Vikings themselves could have told us, for they never bothered to look at themselves as anthropologists, sociologists, and historians choose to.
We have pushed the boundaries of our knowledge of the past back ever further. We can now even speak somewhat knowledgeably about a 2 million-year-old hominid boy who appears to have died along with members of his family, a family that seems to represent a previously unidentified hominid group, Australopithecus sediba.
The vast majority of documented events in “prehistoric” human history are rare, only broadly illustrated by archaeology, but they are growing in number. Further, our analyses of geography and geology help us understand what the world looked like at the times of those events. And our study of the climactic record preserved in ancient ice and other media helps us see how the world’s ecology behaved at those times. Our study of DNA lineages not only for modern humans but also for many animal species confirm or refine our analysis of the “bone record” left behind by thousands of animal species that lived beside ancient humans.
These methods of course allow us to look back even farther in time. We have documented the rise of the hominids, of canids, of cetaceans in the 63 million years since the great dinosaur die-off. But using science we can look back at the geology, ecology, and cosmology of the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. We have discovered traces of scattered dinosaur and pre-dinosaur communities and events such as migrations, family sleeping grounds, great die offs, sudden tragic deaths, even possibly some forms of disease. We study the herd movements of dinosaurs, the evolutionary specializations of creatures that hardly fit into any animal tree the average person can think of, and we imagine what life must have been like with finely drawn strokes of the imagination.
These methods we have now turned to the study of other planets. We can only crudely examine Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, although our probes have now landed on several Solar bodies including Venus, Mars, several moons, asteroids, and even comets. We analyze their climates, their geology, and their cosmology. We have sent several automated laboratories to study Mars in greater depth and detail in both the hope of finding life there and of learning how to eventually live there ourselves.
Because we can now speak of “history” as a continuous chain of events that need not have been observed and named by scribes we can realistically compile a history of Mars. We believe we now know, for example, that Mars was covered by liquid water for only a few thousand years, a period which ended maybe 600 million years ago. We know that something large collided with the planet, perhaps in an event similar to the collision that we believe led to the formation of Luna, our moon.
But whereas Earth survived its collision event and went on to build an atmosphere and oceans and develop seasonal cycles that helped to transform life, Mars lost most of its surface water and its atmosphere — a fate perhaps ordained by the planet’s small size anyway. The iron core of Mars, we believe, is no longer churning hot like the Earth’s iron core — so Mars lacks a planet-wide magnetic field that is capable of deflecting Solar radiation. That Solar radiation chisels away at the gaseos envelopes of planets (although recent research shows that Earth is presently losing atmosphere faster than Mars and Venus).
As our knowledge of Mars’ past increases, we must document two historical timelines for Mars: the first and presently most significant timeline is that documenting human interaction with Mars, extending back to ancient observations of the planet; the second and eventually more important timeline is that documenting all that has happened on and to Mars, to the extent that we can document such things.
Martian history is written in the records of its geological and climactic processes. If we find life on Mars there will be history written in the genetic records of the living organisms we study. We even have about 3,000 pounds of Martian rocks found here on Earth which tell us something about the cosmological history of Mars.
Martian history books, for now at least, will not speak of the rise of cultures and civilizations or of great wars; instead they will document the slow evolution of the planet and its elementary system of surface compounds, atmosphere, and liquid or semi-liquid water. They will document Mankind’s efforts to reach the Red Planet, to explore it, and to find ways to connect with it — just as early American history books began with Columbus’ voyages of discovery.
Unlike the first historians of the United States, however, we will bequeath to the first human historians born on Mars a wealth of knowledge that includes a formal study of the planet’s birth, struggles, and evolution through billions of years of interacting with the Solar System. To those historians it would be as if Columbus had arrived in the New World with at least some rudimentary archaeological and geological surveys to guide him and those who followed in his footsteps.
But so far, unlike Columbus, we have yet to make contact with any Martians, or even to find an ecosystem of any kind on Mars. That may prove to be more beneficial than disappointing in the long run, for human history is filled with the consequences of a clash of cultures; human genealogy reflects the bitter reality of the competition for resources between multiple hominid groups, of which only one finally emerged the victor (albeit with some traces of DNA from other groups).
Mars may offer us an opportunity to learn how to be good neighbors in space, while we still have time to learn such lessons. For as some people have pointed out, if we do meet another space-faring civilization in the universe, we may do so only to learn that we are the Native Americans meeting Columbus, and that clash of cultures did not go well for the Native Americans.