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'The Mars Minute'

Aired January 30, 2004 - 13:34   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: From the tragedy of space exploration to a bit of the triumph now, let's focus on Mars. We're going to call this our "Mars Minute Plus," because we're joined by a guest who is going to look at some of these pictures with us, and then talk about some of the implications. Roger Bingham, who is with the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego.
We're going to ask you some big questions first, but first, let's take a look at some rocks.

Do you want to join me while we look at rocks?

All right, first of all, this is new material from Spirit, which is good. As you recall, Spirit is the rover that had that little difficulty with its memory. Don't we all as we get older, but Spirit was young, and had to have some files freed up. I want to call your attention to this, this one they're calling cake, because it kind of looked like a piece of cake, I guess, right? And that is one of the rocks of interest to them. This one is called blanco, because it kind of looks white to them.

What's significant about these images, is that we're seeing them at all. It was not tool long ago, there was some concern they could ever get Spirit back and resuscitate it. Spirit is now not only sending back pictures, but scientific information.

Now when you look at rocks like that, if you were to turn over one of those rocks and there was a fossil there, wouldn't that be something?

ROGER BINGHAM, CTR. FOR BRAIN AND COGNITION, UNIV. OF CALIF. AT SAN DIEGO: A fossil yes, although I hadn't seen these rocks before. The implication, obviously, is that there's sedimentation. If there's sedimentation, there was water flow and so on, so forth, and therefore maybe life.

O'BRIEN: Water, which of course leads to -- you know, there could be an aquifer under Mars. Wouldn't that be interesting, if there were little organisms under there.

Let's look at the next image. Go ahead, carry on.

BINGHAM: A lot of people that have been working on protocol is about this, what do you do if you find some kind of life, never mind intelligent life. What about just little bugs? I mean, is it then -- are they Martians? Is their land? Do we go there?

O'BRIEN: And do we come back and bring them back, put them in a zoo?

BINGHAM: Exactly.

O'BRIEN: I mean, there all kind of implications.

What we just saw there was a wide shot of the rock they call Adirondack where Spirit is, and progressively we're getting into close-ups here. Now that is a very, very close-up view of the rock. Those are just teeny tiny little pores. What is interesting about this rock is they've actually gotten some of the initial science back on this, Roger, and apparently, it's of volcanic origins. If you were to hit it, it would ding, it would ding, because there's that much iron in it. And that yes, that actually makes the scientists kind of unhappy.

This is significant. I show this not to impress you with scientific knowledge, because I have no idea what these spikes mean, but what's significant about this, is this comes from Spirit. This is the first piece of science from the moss factor (ph) spectrometer coming from Spirit. And see "FE" there. That's iron. That tells you there's a lot of iron in that rock. It's volcanic. The bottom line is they're going take a quick look at that rock, but then they're going to motor on, because the chances are it was not formed in the presence of water. So, so far, no smoking gun.

What happens, Roger? Take us down the steps? First they find clear-cut evidence that there was water there. What does that tell us?

BINGHAM: Well, the speculation has been that there's water 4 billion years ago, that Earth and Mars were, in fact, both little warm, wet planets. One of them still now has this extraordinary life form on it, called Miles, and the other one has just has possibly microbes, we just don't know. It's interesting, i just have to say that these Miles minutes -- my specialty is brain and neuroscience. I have a feeling that if I had been a plumbing contractor, you would have had me in off the street saying, what's the plumbing story on Mars? They found water there now.

O'BRIEN: That's a good idea, by the way, Roger, I like that idea.

BINGHAM: Absolutely.

On a -- you know, the person I always think of when I think about Mars, I mentioned this to you one day, is Carl Sagan. His footprints, handprints are all over the Mars mission. Steve is one of Carl's students.

O'BRIEN: Steve Squires, principal investigator on this, yes.

BINGHAM: And I was also thinking, watching that memorial that Sean was doing, I wish that I wasn't sitting here, and I wish that Carl was sitting here, I wish he was able to talk about that, because the two things he talked about so well, one was Mars, and the other was communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. And I actually brought this book along for you. You can look at it afterwards. It's proceedings of the first conference on extraterrestrial intelligence. That was in 1971, jointly between the Soviets and the Americans. It was supposed to be a cooperative idea, and the ideas in here -- there's a whole chapter called "Contact" -- what do you do? And you probably know that, in fact, "Contact" became the title of a novel that "Sagan" did, to say exactly what happens...

O'BRIEN: And a movie.

BINGHAM: ... what happens if there's a signal comes to Earth? and they had a signal coming in, if you remember. It wasn't "The War of the Worlds," it wasn't...

O'BRIEN: But it changed things in a profound way. Would you predict the same thing happening?

BINGHAM: Sure, but we don't know exactly how it -- in the movie, if you remember, the religious people found something to talk about, the scientists found something to talk about. Whatever your little database up here was that contained all your thoughts, dreams and memories, was activated by that possibility in spades. So people went in whichever direction they were already going in.

What was nice about the contact story is they found a way for the extraterrestrial intelligence to cloak themselves in human garb, if you like, so that we weren't frightened. They were sufficiently advanced, technologically, and also probably sociologically, so that they didn't scare us, and they came to us as if they were friends.

O'BRIEN: Interesting. So it's a long way from perhaps finding water or even maybe a fossil on mars, but it's something to ponder as this begins.

BINGHAM: Well, he talked about the great demotions. I like to think of them as the great increases. You know, the great demotions, we used to be the center of the universe. Then along comes Galileo and Copernicus, and you're just a little planet in the boondocks somewhere. And you think you're God's special creation, along comes Darwin and says, look at all these other species. And you think you're the rational animal, and then along comes Freud, and says, now there's this seething stuff going on in your unconscious, forget about that. And then if this came true, or if there was a message, a signal beamed in by radio waves, that said you're not alone. I mean, that's an extraordinary event that's extraordinary event. How you react, I really don't know at this point, but hope to find out one day.

O'BRIEN: Stay tuned. Roger Bingham, thank you very much for dropping by us. Roger Bingham, with the Center for Brain and Cognition at the university of California at San Diego. Thanks for dropping by. Appreciate it.

BINGHAM: Thanks, Miles.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired January 30, 2004 - 13:34   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: From the tragedy of space exploration to a bit of the triumph now, let's focus on Mars. We're going to call this our "Mars Minute Plus," because we're joined by a guest who is going to look at some of these pictures with us, and then talk about some of the implications. Roger Bingham, who is with the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego.
We're going to ask you some big questions first, but first, let's take a look at some rocks.

Do you want to join me while we look at rocks?

All right, first of all, this is new material from Spirit, which is good. As you recall, Spirit is the rover that had that little difficulty with its memory. Don't we all as we get older, but Spirit was young, and had to have some files freed up. I want to call your attention to this, this one they're calling cake, because it kind of looked like a piece of cake, I guess, right? And that is one of the rocks of interest to them. This one is called blanco, because it kind of looks white to them.

What's significant about these images, is that we're seeing them at all. It was not tool long ago, there was some concern they could ever get Spirit back and resuscitate it. Spirit is now not only sending back pictures, but scientific information.

Now when you look at rocks like that, if you were to turn over one of those rocks and there was a fossil there, wouldn't that be something?

ROGER BINGHAM, CTR. FOR BRAIN AND COGNITION, UNIV. OF CALIF. AT SAN DIEGO: A fossil yes, although I hadn't seen these rocks before. The implication, obviously, is that there's sedimentation. If there's sedimentation, there was water flow and so on, so forth, and therefore maybe life.

O'BRIEN: Water, which of course leads to -- you know, there could be an aquifer under Mars. Wouldn't that be interesting, if there were little organisms under there.

Let's look at the next image. Go ahead, carry on.

BINGHAM: A lot of people that have been working on protocol is about this, what do you do if you find some kind of life, never mind intelligent life. What about just little bugs? I mean, is it then -- are they Martians? Is their land? Do we go there?

O'BRIEN: And do we come back and bring them back, put them in a zoo?

BINGHAM: Exactly.

O'BRIEN: I mean, there all kind of implications.

What we just saw there was a wide shot of the rock they call Adirondack where Spirit is, and progressively we're getting into close-ups here. Now that is a very, very close-up view of the rock. Those are just teeny tiny little pores. What is interesting about this rock is they've actually gotten some of the initial science back on this, Roger, and apparently, it's of volcanic origins. If you were to hit it, it would ding, it would ding, because there's that much iron in it. And that yes, that actually makes the scientists kind of unhappy.

This is significant. I show this not to impress you with scientific knowledge, because I have no idea what these spikes mean, but what's significant about this, is this comes from Spirit. This is the first piece of science from the moss factor (ph) spectrometer coming from Spirit. And see "FE" there. That's iron. That tells you there's a lot of iron in that rock. It's volcanic. The bottom line is they're going take a quick look at that rock, but then they're going to motor on, because the chances are it was not formed in the presence of water. So, so far, no smoking gun.

What happens, Roger? Take us down the steps? First they find clear-cut evidence that there was water there. What does that tell us?

BINGHAM: Well, the speculation has been that there's water 4 billion years ago, that Earth and Mars were, in fact, both little warm, wet planets. One of them still now has this extraordinary life form on it, called Miles, and the other one has just has possibly microbes, we just don't know. It's interesting, i just have to say that these Miles minutes -- my specialty is brain and neuroscience. I have a feeling that if I had been a plumbing contractor, you would have had me in off the street saying, what's the plumbing story on Mars? They found water there now.

O'BRIEN: That's a good idea, by the way, Roger, I like that idea.

BINGHAM: Absolutely.

On a -- you know, the person I always think of when I think about Mars, I mentioned this to you one day, is Carl Sagan. His footprints, handprints are all over the Mars mission. Steve is one of Carl's students.

O'BRIEN: Steve Squires, principal investigator on this, yes.

BINGHAM: And I was also thinking, watching that memorial that Sean was doing, I wish that I wasn't sitting here, and I wish that Carl was sitting here, I wish he was able to talk about that, because the two things he talked about so well, one was Mars, and the other was communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. And I actually brought this book along for you. You can look at it afterwards. It's proceedings of the first conference on extraterrestrial intelligence. That was in 1971, jointly between the Soviets and the Americans. It was supposed to be a cooperative idea, and the ideas in here -- there's a whole chapter called "Contact" -- what do you do? And you probably know that, in fact, "Contact" became the title of a novel that "Sagan" did, to say exactly what happens...

O'BRIEN: And a movie.

BINGHAM: ... what happens if there's a signal comes to Earth? and they had a signal coming in, if you remember. It wasn't "The War of the Worlds," it wasn't...

O'BRIEN: But it changed things in a profound way. Would you predict the same thing happening?

BINGHAM: Sure, but we don't know exactly how it -- in the movie, if you remember, the religious people found something to talk about, the scientists found something to talk about. Whatever your little database up here was that contained all your thoughts, dreams and memories, was activated by that possibility in spades. So people went in whichever direction they were already going in.

What was nice about the contact story is they found a way for the extraterrestrial intelligence to cloak themselves in human garb, if you like, so that we weren't frightened. They were sufficiently advanced, technologically, and also probably sociologically, so that they didn't scare us, and they came to us as if they were friends.

O'BRIEN: Interesting. So it's a long way from perhaps finding water or even maybe a fossil on mars, but it's something to ponder as this begins.

BINGHAM: Well, he talked about the great demotions. I like to think of them as the great increases. You know, the great demotions, we used to be the center of the universe. Then along comes Galileo and Copernicus, and you're just a little planet in the boondocks somewhere. And you think you're God's special creation, along comes Darwin and says, look at all these other species. And you think you're the rational animal, and then along comes Freud, and says, now there's this seething stuff going on in your unconscious, forget about that. And then if this came true, or if there was a message, a signal beamed in by radio waves, that said you're not alone. I mean, that's an extraordinary event that's extraordinary event. How you react, I really don't know at this point, but hope to find out one day.

O'BRIEN: Stay tuned. Roger Bingham, thank you very much for dropping by us. Roger Bingham, with the Center for Brain and Cognition at the university of California at San Diego. Thanks for dropping by. Appreciate it.

BINGHAM: Thanks, Miles.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com