Here's Why A Leading Futurist Hopes We Don't Find Life On Mars

By Ajai Raj and Jennifer Welsh

The Red Planet has been getting a lot of attention recently, between India's low-cost MOM probe successfully entering Mars's orbit, NASA's MAVEN doing the same, and the Curiosity rover reaching the most potentially fertile site yet for signs of ancient life. Elon Musk has even talked about building a city there. For most people who look out at the night sky and wonder whether we're alone, Mars holds our best hope for proving that we're not.

But not for Nick Bostrom. The famed futurist, author, and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, thinks that any sign of life we find on Mars would be a bad sign, an argument he developed in a 2008 paper entitled "Where Are They?: Why I Hope The Search For Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing."

He writes:

It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.

Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form — some bacteria, some algae — it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something looking like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life we found, the more depressing the news of its existence would be. 

Scientifically interesting, certainly, but a bad omen for the future of the human race.

So why the apparent negativity?

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Scientists around the world are hoping that NASA's Curiosity rover will find silicon in these rocks on Mount Sharp, an indication that this might have once been an environment for life. Nick Bostrom hopes the rover finds nothing of the kind.

Simply put, a lack of life on Mars would mean humans still have a chance to become an interstellar civilization — that the reason we haven't met any aliens is because creating life in this universe is the big hurdle, not necessarily surviving as an intelligent species and leaving the home planet.

If there is life on Mars that had developed separately form Earth, then that means the big barrier to becoming an interstellar species isn't the life-creating part, but the surviving this technological adolescence part without destroying ourselves.

An empty universe?

Bostrom reasons his argument against Martian life from two simple facts:

1) We have had no credible contact with any alien civilizations, not even a trace;

2) The observable universe contains a mind-boggling number of solar systems, many of which similar to Earth in mass and in temperature, and also much, much older.

"You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe," Bostrom writes.

In other words, if it's possible for life to evolve to the point that it can take to the stars, it has had plenty of opportunity to do so. The fact that we see no evidence for life outside of humanity in the universe is an indication that it is extremely difficult to do.

Bostrom suggests in his paper that the reason for all of this is a "Great Filter" that stops civilizations from becoming interstellar. The question is where this filter lies.

That difficulty could lie in the past — i.e., in the evolutionary steps that have led to us — or in the future, the steps between where we are now and where we'll need to be to go interstellar on the regular.

A problem of creating life?

We don't really know how life got started on Earth, but our experiments so far suggest it's not as simple as sloshing a few molecules around and waiting for them to come to life.

So one reason for that is that the Great Filter is behind us — in the creation of life itself. If the rise of intelligent life on any one planet is sufficiently improbable, then it follows that we are most likely the only such civilization in our galaxy or even in the entire observable universe, which would explain why we haven't seen any others out there.

On the other hand it could be that the leap from a universe that allows for life to happen to the creation of a species of tool-using creatures as daunting as Homo sapiens is the Great Filter — and we are the only ones who have made the leap so far, which is why it would be disappointing to find advanced organisms on the red planet.

One potential other option, is that the same life lived on Mars as does on Earth now. That would mean that life somehow originated on Mars and was transferred to Earth, or vice versa. In that case, the origination of life would still be an extremely improbable event that only happened once. It would thus still be a good candidate for the Great Filter to have come before current time.

Or surviving it?

The other probable conclusion is more devastating for us, and is the reason we should rejoice at an empty Mars — it means that the hurdle to interstellar civilizations is behind us, not in front.

As Bostrom writes that finding life on Mars would mean that:

There is some great improbability that prevents almost all technological civilizations at our current human stage of development from progressing to the point where they engage in large‐scale space‐colonization and make their presence known to other technological civilizations.

This second possibility is, for Bostrom, the really frightening one. Whatever catastrophes the Great Filter might entail, they could easily be awful enough to not merely keep us in low-Earth orbit, but to completely destroy humanity.

"There are planets that are billions of years older than Earth," according to Bostrom. "Any intelligent species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a thousand times before they succeeded, they could still have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago."

Bostrom writes: "We hypothesize a terminal global cataclysm: an existential catastrophe."

In other words, if we advance technologically to the point that we might take to the stars, we might also be at a point where we can — and likely will — reduce ourselves to atoms. This could be the result of a terrible accident, warfare with the unthinkable weaponry of the future, or some other danger we haven't yet conceived of.

Another option

OK. So what's the good news? Or if not good, not frightening and depressing?

"We would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great Filter is in our past if Mars is indeed found to be barren. In that case, we may have a significant chance of one day growing into something almost unimaginably greater than we are today," Bostrom writes.

It's possible that we've overcome some absurd odds to exist in our present form and that incredible odds stand between us and interstellar travel. But, in a barren, lifeless Mars, Bostrom sees a ray of hope that the greater challenge is already behind us.