Life or Death?

It is 7:00 and the sun is about to set. Also about to set, is mighty Orion with his celestial court. And just beginning to emerge from the glare of the sun's light, is the goddess of love, Venus. Or at least the planet with that name. For months we have missed Venus in the nighttime sky. First visible only in the morning sky and then lost in the glare of the sun. But she's back now, and will grace our evening skies for many months, drawing further and further from the sun as the months progress. Venus, called a sister of the earth, Venus was perpetually hidden in clouds once thought to be water vapor. It was believed to be a watery world, teeming with life.

That was a dream, shattered by the discovery that these clouds were carbon dioxide, trapping the heat of the sun, turning the surface of Venus into an inferno. With a surface temperature of over nine hundred degrees, nothing remotely like us could live there. The problem? Venus lacked oceans to dissolve the carbon dioxide forming limestone and marble. That's what happened on the earth. If Venus had oceans it would have been a cooler planet, and there might have been life there.

We turn the other way, and there is ruddy Mars, a planet where life may have begun as it was beginning on earth. The spaceship Martian Pathfinder is now streaking there to search for more definite signs of early life. But there is no life there now. Why? Again, lack of oceans. Smaller than the earth, Mars has a weaker gravity. It was unable to hold on to its oceans, and they evaporated into space. If life did begin on Mars, it found no oceans there and could not evolve into higher forms.

Oceans make the difference between life and death. That's why workers at NASA are so excited by the pictures sent back by the spaceship Galileo -- pictures of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, that might show signs of oceans there. If there are really oceans there, there might be higher life forms. We wouldn't be alone, and our neighbors would be right next door!

(4/23/97)