Meanwhile, all eyes are turned toward a couple of rocks called Yogi and Barnacle Bill on a planet 120 million miles away. Having been raised on a heavy diet of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s wonderful adventure novels based on Mars, Venus and points beyond (yes, he did write a lot more than Tarzan tales), I, too, share a fascination with what might exist in the far reaches of outer space. And although my 5-year-old son Michael ran screaming from the theater during the first seconds of ““Men in Black’’ and resisted all my attempts to put him back in his seat, I fully appreciate the public’s fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. But there was something about all the fuss over the latest surveys of rocks on Mars that bothered me. At first I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Then it became clear: the justification for spending millions of dollars to send probes to these planets is much the same as that used by field biologists surveying the flora and fauna in poorly documented ecosystems on Earth.
On Mars we might have located fossils of one-celled organisms that resemble the earliest forms of life on Earth several billion years ago. On Jupiter’s moon Europa, under two miles of ice, there appears to be water where life might possibly exist. This interplanetary biodiversity, if it exists, would be quite interesting. But what about the vast, yet undiscovered variety of life that exists on this planet?
Today’s sophisticated technology enables us to launch space probes, and computers can cram millions of bits of information onto tiny silicon chips. But we languish in the Dark Ages when it comes to understanding the diversity of life on Earth. Harvard University professor, biologist and author Edward O. Wilson estimates that scientists have thus far described between 1.4 million and 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms. Yet the total number of species could run from 10 million to 30 million to 100 million or more (I believe the 100 million figure). We don’t know to within one and perhaps two orders of magnitude how many forms of life share this planet with us. If we look at the complex ecological interactions among this vast array of life forms, we are probably an additional two or three orders of magnitude off in our lack of knowledge. And we’re even more ignorant about the potential values these biological resources hold for humans.
This planet’s intricate web of life is what we earthlings ultimately depend upon for our own survival as a species. This diversity provides us with the basics for living, as sources of food, clothing, shelter, medicine and recreation. The onslaught of destructive forces on the planet’s living resources means that we will probably never know just exactly how many and what kinds of other life forms share the planet with us.
I have seen the medicine men and women in Suriname’s jungles cure fevers and infections by directly applying healing plants to their patients. This knowledge is now sought by pharmaceutical companies to help develop drugs in the laboratory. One such drug, Vincristine, was originally created from alkaloids of the rosy periwinkle, a small plant native to Madagascar. When the young daughter of a colleague of mine was diagnosed with a rare blood-related cancer several years ago, this drug helped save her. In the course of pursuing lemurs through Madagascar’s rain forests, I’ve come across many wild species of coffee, some of which could one day be critical for the survival of one of the world’s largest agricultural commodities. In general, the key role played by uncultivated relatives of our most important crop species in maintaining genetic diversity and resistance to disease is well known. The examples of our dependence on other forms of life are almost endless.
The latest Martian probe is said to have cost $260 million, a truly low figure for such endeavors, especially when compared with what was spent in the 1960s and 1970s. To put that figure in perspective, however, it is more than a full year of government spending on biodiversity research on our entire planet.
All the attention and hoopla surrounding the Mars expedition would be less troublesome to me if exploration of other planets in our solar system were couched in terms of astronomy, physics or chemistry. To justify this expense in order to find new species in outer space, while our own world faces the most severe extinction spasms in the past 65 million years, seems a bit disingenuous. Based on some current biological estimates, in the 211 days it took for Pathfinder to make the journey to Mars, more than 20,000 rain-forest species might have become extinct. During that same amount of time, by one estimate, more than 20 million acres of tropical forests were destroyed, wiping out some of the most diverse habitats on the planet.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not against space research. I take as much delight as any other casual observer in seeing the diminutive Sojourner stumbling around the rocks of Mars. But let’s be reasonable. If we are going to spend another $260 million in the name of extraterrestrial life, let’s spend at least as much on conserving and cataloging living species on this planet. After all, Earth is still the only place in the entire universe where we know with certainty that life exists.
