Fred Hoyle - Element 79

When the news media saw how the mountain labored, they dropped the whole thing like a hot potato. Time enough to wrestle with the Martian problem as soon as there was something or someone to wrestle with. So the massive-hearted, palpitating public got itself back to the latest aspects of sex-worship.

By 1984 the stories currently popular on the screen would have seemed pretty ripe material to an earlier generation. Entertainment had been enjoying an apparently never-ending boom, a boom soundly based on affluence and leisure. Yet as it grew, the entertainment industry destroyed itself by consuming, like a fantastic lotus-eating dinosaur, the very material on which it depended for its existence. By now it seemed as if every idea had been flogged to death, as indeed it had. Suspense stories were the hardest hit of all. With each succeeding year, sensation had to be piled on sensation. By 1970, the successes of 1965 seemed woefully out of date. By 1975, it was exactly the same way with the successes of 1970. The human race was steadily becoming “sophisticated,” it was burning out its natural responses, first to more or less normal situations, then to abnormal ones, then to utterly pathological ones.

Every so often someone came up with a really new gimmick. Then you always kicked yourself for not having seen it first yourself. Gimmicks no longer needed to be clever. The important thing was to be quite new. Like snow in May, they didn’t last long, but while they lasted, you did all right.

It was easy to understand why in these circumstances sex had become such an intensely marketable commodity. This was the major field of entertainment now, because it was the one field in which originality was not important. Evolution proceeded, not by increased sophistication, but by increased display, by an increased emphasis on realism, the very opposite from the suspense area. Unrelenting pressures from a wealthy industry had forced censorship into retreat after retreat, until by now all attempts at control had virtually broken down. Against sex, the Martian story barely made it as a nine-days’ wonder.

Yet there was something on Mars, something below the glaciers. It was reasonable to suppose that, whatever it was down below, there were several of them, for they seemed to be communicating one to another with the aid of the sound in the ice. They used sound in ice perhaps like we use sound in air. It made sense, so far. But continued failure to establish any kind of link with the Martians eventually set up a frustration complex, both in the scientist-explorers themselves and at NASA headquarters. Injection of man-made sound into the ice was tried at an early stage. It produced no apparent response, although it was never made clear quite what response could have been expected.

Many theories about the Martians were advanced. They were all outrageous, but of course even the correct theory had to be outrageous. Any explanation for an intricate system evolving out of an initially simple situation must always seem outrageous. Nothing could be more so than the story of biological evolution here on the Earth—to an outsider, to a Martian, say. It is usual for complex situations to collapse into simpler ones, not the other way round. Most theories were due to cranks who completely missed this point: How does one invert the usual time sense of natural events? How does one get simplicity evolving into complexity?

The importance of metals near the surface of Mars, metals below the glaciers, was first noticed by a theoretician. Not all the metal would be the same stuff. Because of the different work functions of different metals, there would be contact potentials. Next, what were the important volatiles liberated from the interior of a planet? In order of decreasing quantity: water, carbon dioxide, chlorine, nitrogen. Water and chlorine could give you hydrochloric acid. Different metals in acid gave you an electric current.

How much energy could be expected? Reckoning a depth of electrolyte, say of one hundred meters, at least an equal depth for the metallic skin, taking 109 erg for the output per gram of material, the grand energy total came out at 1031 erg, equivalent to the output of about ten trillion tons of coal and oil, not much different from the actual coal and oil reserves of the Earth. This could be a minimum estimate. The actual energy total could be one to two orders of magnitude higher still.

These ideas were first put forward at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. The biologists wanted to know their relevance. Maybe there was an electrical storage battery on Mars, so what? Energy wasn’t the same thing as life, although admittedly it was necessary to life. A coal mine, or an oil well, wasn’t alive just because there was energy in it. The point seemed well taken, but the reply was also well taken—in some quarters, at least.

A coal mine wasn’t alive because for one thing the energy was in a bad form. Coal had to be burned to release the energy, and the heat was disorganized. Electricity was much better, it could be converted directly into controlled motion. Everybody knew this perfectly well. You plugged devices in the home, like a shaver, into the electric supply, not into the boiler—at least you did if you were a physicist. No cognizant biologist liked this crack. Okay, you have an “electric motor” on Mars, so what?

Well, with controlled motion the logical possibility existed for a feedback between the motion and the flow of electricity. In principle, it was possible for the system to affect itself. In view of the tremendous amount of energy that must be released on Mars, it was quite un reasonable to suppose feedback never happened. Evolution by selection was then just as possible in an electrical system as in a chemical one. It was no more unlikely for complicated surface effects to arise, complicated circuits under continuous modification, than it was for complicated molecules leading to living cells to develop. The principle of competition for the available energy supply, whether chemical or electrical, was the same. The basic logic was the same, and it was this that really counted, not the realization of the logic in practical terms. To push the argument further, it was biological evolution that was really inefficient and rather stupid. First a complex chemical system—the cell—had to be produced. Then cells were put together into what were still chemical assemblies. Only at a late stage did the interesting things happen, with the development of the brain. Wasn’t it through the brain that we think, make judgments, feel emotion? What is the brain but an electrical instrument? Terrestrial biology had evolved through a lot of cumbersome chemistry before it reached the real point, the electronics. On Mars, it had been electronics all the way.

The popular news media were back on the job now. Displaying to the full their twin characteristics, incredible persistence and incredible inability to see the point, they clamored for an answer to the absurd question: Could Martian computers be said to be really alive? The theoretician, hopelessly harassed by every newspaper from the Herald to the Calgary Eye-Opener , by gangs of men—camera men, sound men, photographers—who had descended on his home, replied that since life was no more than organized data-processing, in accordance with some preassigned program, this could be done just as well by a computer as by a human. He was asked to put it in terms that could be understood by the ordinary housewife. Well, hadn’t a computer just won the world’s chess championship? But was winning a chess game the same thing as being alive? Anyway, wasn’t it necessary to instruct a computer about how to play chess? Wearily, the theoretician explained that humans too were instructed, they had been programed by millions of years of evolution. In any case, what was the aim of a commercial on T.V., what was the aim of an ad in the newspapers? Surely to program people.