Will Martian Sheen Save Humanity... Well I Mean Rock Varnish, Not To Be Overly Cute

Bamako is the largest city and capital of Mali and Timbuktu is the most famous place in the country. It wouldn't surprise me if Robert Wexler (D-FL), Howard Berman (D-CA), Brad Miller (D-NC), Gary Ackerman (D-NY) or even Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) or Ron Paul (R-TX), all members of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, could tell me where to stay in Bamako and possibly even Timbuktu. But when I was planning a trip deep into the heart of Mali's inaccessible interior, I knew there was only one member of Congress I could turn to for advice on where to stay in Bangiagara and Sangha: Alan Grayson, who isn't even on Foreign Relations but is the most well-traveled member of Congress and one of the most intellectually curious. (He told me no matter where I stayed in either place to bring my own sheets because there would be no escaping the bed bugs. I took his advice.)

Today I was working out an as yet unwritten post on the history of the Hutus and the Tutsis and I recalled learning that the tall, light-skinned Tutsis had moved south into Hutu country in around 1400 and conquered and enslaved the smaller, darker Hutus (who had arrived 300 years earlier and conquered the even smaller Twa pygmies). The Tutsis were the cattle-owning aristocracy and the Hutus were the food growing peasants. My interest was stoked because Christiane Amanpour did a tear-jerking special on the Rwandan genocide yesterday and my sympathy turned to thoughts about not really feeling very sorry for Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy when I read how they were guillotined. Actually, truth be told, I cheered. Didn't feel much sympathy for the Romanovs either. And if I were to read that a bunch of Wall Street Masters of the Universe went to their Maker prematurely... I don't drink but I might make an exception. This line of thought made me start thinking about one of my favorite scenes in a Hemingway book, the one where the people in a small town lock the abusive, oppressive priests in a church-- long the enforcers for the landed aristocracy in the area-- and set it ablaze. But which book? Which town? And the phone rang. It was Grayson. He wasn't sure either, like me figuring it was probably For Whom The Bell Tolls. But he thought I should stick to using A Tale Of Two Cities for my literary analogy.

But he was eager to tell me that there are alternative theories and I should look into it more thoroughly. I knew he had spent some time in Rwanda and, sure enough, he had been to the Kigali Memorial Center, a museum of the genocide. There, they push the theory that Tutsis and Hutus are one big happy genetic family and that the colonials-- they had Germans and then Belgians there-- had created artificial definitions to play the old divide-and-conquer routine. Obviously, this isn't what the congressman had called to talk to me about.

Nor did he know that I've been worried sick over what I'm reading everyday in Thom Hartmann's latest book, Threshold. It was bad enough last week when I found out all the fish will be gone by 2048 but now I'm in the part of the book about air-- and that doesn't look too promising either. Quoting a startling paper, widely considered the "smoking gun" identifying man with global warming, by James Hansen, the top climate scientist for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hartmann paints a very dismal picture of what kind of world we are creating-- just in case that End of Days fairy tale that nuts like Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence, Virginia Foxx, Trent Franks, Heath Shuler, John Boozman, Randy Forbes, Marsha Blackburn and Zach Wamp are always pushing, somehow doesn't turn out to be reality. Some of the paper sounds technical (meaning it involves arithmetic):

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

You can see why Grayson caught me in a funk. Hartmann rubs it in, by emphasizing that we're "near the point where our use of carbon-based fossil fuels could throw the planet so out of balance that eventually the oceans will heat up to the point that they're uninhabitable for complex current life forms and much of the complex life as we know it will vanish." And some of the stuff Hartmann quotes isn't even that abstract-- like Hansen's conclusion:

Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the ear beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

But Grayson had no way of knowing I was dwelling on any of this stuff. He had just called with some good news, an article he had read in New Scientist that he thought I should take a look at Martian Sheen. It seems to offer a glimmer of hope that if we screw this planet up badly enough, we could just like Michele Bachmann and Dick Cheney and all the conservatives to reap what they've sown and... move the rest of humanity to Mars!

When NASA's Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were looking for signs of life. Instead, all their cameras showed was a dry, dusty-- and entirely barren-- landscape.

Or so it seemed. But what the 1976 Viking mission, and every subsequent one, saw was a scene littered with rocks coated with a dark, highly reflective sheen. That coating looks a lot like a substance known on Earth as "rock varnish," found in arid regions similar to those on Mars. The latest evidence hints that rock varnish is formed by bacteria. Could there be microbes on Mars making such material too?

Rock varnish has long been something of a mystery. It is typically just 1 to 2 micrometres thick, but can take a thousand years or more to grow, making it very hard to discover whether biological or purely chemical processes are responsible. If it is biological, though, the race will be on to discover whether the same thing has happened on Mars-- and whether microbes still live there today.

Future missions will be better equipped for the hunt. The next rover to land on the Red Planet will be NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, due to arrive in 2012. MSL can detect rock varnish, says Roger Wiens, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who will run a new instrument on MSL called a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer. This will fire laser pulses at the rock coatings, and the wavelengths of light emitted as the coating atomises will tell Wiens what elements are present.

NASA is also working with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars programme, which will send two rovers in 2018, in part to hunt for evidence of life on rock surfaces. A subsequent ESA mission, Mars Sample Return-- pencilled in for 2020-- might finally get the definitive answer, as for the first time the mission will bring Mars samples back to Earth.

If the cave varnish and the Mars varnish turn out to be the same as rock varnish, then Mars Sample Return might actually be bringing Martians to Earth.