Life Existed On Mars, But Where Did The Martians Go? - A Troubling Existential Question

There was no doubt in the mind of Dr. Harrison Fielding that life existed on Mars - not just microscopic bits of DNA, molecular shards, and infinitesimal traces, but the real thing, civilization even, a race that flourished and then disappeared. 

How did Fielding know, and how could he be so certain?  Surely he must be conflating Ray Bradbury with hopeful science.  Mars was an unlivable planet and always had been. 

Fielding explained:

Triangulation - digitally-enhanced images by Webb and Hubble, Rover exploration, and surprising evidential shards, not unlike the Mycenae pottery unearthed by Drs. Able and Marsh, but of course of different geological extraplanetary origin, have suggested that there was once what might be called a non-human but humanlike settlement on Mars.

After the expected debunking, snide comments, and kazoo whistles from the back of press room, a reporter asked,  'Where did they go?'

Again guffaws from the audience.  Why on earth - no pun intended - had they been gathered to hear such nonsense? 'Trust the science' had been the meme during the discredited COVID years when scientists rushed for cover each time one of their bloated theories of infection, contagion, vector, and probabilities of morbidity and mortality was debunked.  So now, the press and the American public wanted no more bloviating nonsense from the scientific community. 

'This', said Dr. Fielding pointing to the image on the screen behind him when the jeers and catcalls had quieted down, 'is what I am talking about.'

Again howls and snarky comments from the back of the room as reporters craned their necks to make sense out of the grainy, indistinct image on the screen. 

'Ladies and gentlemen, what you are seeing is a fragment of an instrument, a tool if you will, of intelligent design', but of course the spatula-looking thing could have been anything, anything all; but the lecturer went on. 

 

'If this is confirmed - Rover is on its way to the site as we speak - and if spectrographic and cellular imaging show what we think it will, we must consider that we are not alone'.  

Again rolls of snickering and asides from the audience. The 'we are not alone' bit was worth the price of admission, and many reporters made for the exits.  A good lunch hour spoiled. 

The yellow press jumped on the story.  For decades the National Enquirer had been running stories about aliens in Roswell, had printed eye-witness accounts of spaceship abductions and reports of Defense Department coverups of gnarly alien bodies in crypts miles below the Utah desert. 

The Reverend Isaiah Jones, nodded approvingly at the Fielding 'discovery'.  He had suspected all along that God had not just created one intelligent form of life in the universe but many.  One look at the stellar array in the night sky suggested that in His infinite wisdom, God was a generous Creator and, if one were honest, a savvy one. 

The human race was not much to speak of, and had not turned out as God had hoped. In fact he destroyed the world once in the Flood, incinerated Sodom and Gomorrah, and in exasperation sent his only begotten son to earth to try to set it all to rights, all of which did no good whatsoever, and the human race was as pitifully ignorant, intolerant and vile as ever before. 

'Hedging his bets', a rather crude term but an apt one, was the way the Reverend Jones phrased it in one of his sermons at the Mt. Airy Baptist Church of Chillicothe.  'God does not play dice with the universe', Albert Einstein had once said, referring to what he thought was a divinely inspired cosmos; but 'of course he does', Reverend Jones argued.  'He created an almost infinite number of intelligent races in the hope that some would turn out right.'

This was a roundabout, somewhat illogical premise; but given God's infinite wisdom, anything was possible; and this new discovery on Mars gave additional credence to the 'multiple intelligences' theory of Creation.  Far be it from him to challenge Genesis 1:1-5, but he knew that such a powerful deity would not stop at just one intelligence, and a pretty sorry one at that. 

Reactions to the news presented at Dr. Fielding's press conference varied, with most in the meh range.  They had heard speculations about space life before, and these grainy scraps supposedly suggesting an alien toolmaker were worse - a disgraceful waste of the taxpayer's money. 

Yet others took the news more seriously.  The Pentagon had long since assumed some form of extraterrestrial life and had planned accordingly.  Of course they could not know whether these non-human life forms would be hostile or friendly, nor what their military capabilities might be, but it didn't hurt to plan ahead. 

Typical of the generals who, one critic noted when information about the Pentagon's AIU (Anti-Interstellar Unit) was leaked, were always looking for something to shoot at; so the operation went deep-cover and deep underground with budget allocations securely hidden in the defense spending bill. 

The most interested group in America were evangelical Christians who have debated long and hard about the meaning of other non-human intelligent life but with little agreement.  

Creationist Kenneth Ham, for example, observed that:

Earth was specially created by God and the sin committed on Earth would affect the rest of creation. The Bible makes it clear that Adam's sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam's sin, but because they are not Adam's descendants, they can't have salvation. Christ's work of salvation can only apply to humans as the descendants of Adam. 

Other Christians disagreed, noting that although God’s dominion extends to all beings in the universe, if  an extraterrestrial lacks a spiritual aspect, an eternal soul to save, then it does not need saving.
Christian Weidemann, a German Protestant theologian takes a somewhat different tack suggesting that  perhaps extraterrestrials aren't sinners, like humans, and therefore aren't in need of saving.  But given the fact that all known intelligent beings (human beings) are sinners, it is likely that all other intelligent life in the universe would also be. 

 

Assuming that the latter argument is true – all intelligent life must sin – than God may have incarnated himself multiple times according to the particular configurations of sin and intelligence on other planets.  Clara Moskowitz, a journalist writing about space and religion reports on another of Weidemann’s speculations:

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of himself down to save each inhabited planet separately. However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God's incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, Weidemann calculated.

Nathan O’Halloran, a Catholic theologian, suggests that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross here on Earth was the moment of salvation for all intelligent life in the universe:

So why can his death not include other alien races too…?  Maybe what Jesus assumed that is important is not the human form, but the rational free spiritual form, and this is what he redeemed, thereby including all personal races, alien or human.

Sanford Lowe, a Harvard anthropologist who was an expert on the Mayan civilization of Central America and who had been troubled by the complete disappearance of an advanced American civilization with seemingly no rhyme or reason, felt there might be something to the Fielding-Mars story. 

Something might have startled the Martians into leaving the planet - perhaps cosmological intimations of doom, suggested as a reason for Mayan disappearance - or environmental disaster (typical of any humanoid race, ruining their own planet out of greed and moral indifference) or any other of a variety of plausible answers.

Following this last thread, Lowe knew of others who assumed that the Martians were not unlike us, aggressively territorial, and left home to conquer other, richer worlds. 

Political progressives were the most concerned about this discovery.  An alien presence on Earth would upset the applecart, force a completely revised worldview, ethos, and moral plan.  If there were any groups on the planet which would be immediately and instantaneously dismissed, it would be those who were convinced of a very human Utopia, the product of devotedly progressive efforts. 

Conservatives took possible alien arrival as par for the course. The world, all worlds in fact, were just random bits of matter in an expanding universe of no absolute worth or meaning, so why worry?

Ham and eggs jokes made the rounds of late night television.  'Over easy', summed up Jon Stewart when he saw the spatula-like Martian implement; and with that, all interest in Dr. Fielding disappeared. He was a Dr. Fauci, discredited front man for COVID hysterics, a loony professor, a sci-fi adolescent, a gamer, a cipher. 

 

Only the likes of Reverend Jones kept up the vigil. 'Semper Paratus', he said, always be prepared, referring to his Marine Sergeant Uncle Harry who had fought at Iwo Jima; and prepared he was to receive whomever came from the stars and to shout the good news of Jesus Christ.