Hugo Chavez: Capitalism destroyed life on Mars

For people familiar with international politics, the name Hugo Chavez is one that, for many, is an immediate cause of snickers. Now, the man who referred to President Bush as the Devil and accused the U.S. of causing the Haiti earthquake, has perhaps outdone himself in a statement that combined a lack of knowledge in space science with a fanatical opinion on economic philosophy. The assertion being questioned: Capitalism destroyed life on Mars. 

In a statement during his World Water Day speech, Chavez, not one to normally interject in the realm of science, made statements speculating about the possibility for life on Mars. Starting by saying that he had heard that life on Mars was, in theory, once possible, Chavez then went on to say that “maybe capitalism arrived there ... and finished off the planet.”

Really?

So far a science knows, there is indeed no life on Mars. However, when it comes to addressing the question of whether there is/ever was life on the Red Planet, this is one of the areas where science has very few answers.

Ever since antiquity, mankind has had a fascination with Mars, perhaps due to the planet's distinctly red color, its disturbing changes in brightness, or its most obvious of the superior planets retrograde motion, all of which stood to set Mars apart from the other planets, let alone the stars. In more recent times, Mars has served as the setting for many a tale about fantastic life on another world. From the benign Martians of Percival Lowell to the murderous aliens of H.G. Wells and later Orson Welles to the fantastic Barsoom sagas of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mars has had, more than any other planet, the hopes of mankind for fellow intelligent beings riding upon it.

With the coming of the Space Age, though, the science fiction gave way to science fact. The Mariner probes of the mid 1960s revealed Mars to be a barren, desert world. There were no cities, vegetation, canals, or four-armed barbarians. However, the Mariners photographed a very tiny fraction of the planet's surface, leading to hope that, somewhere else on Mars, conditions could be ripe for life. This hope eventually led to the creation of the Viking landers, which touched down on Mars in 1976 with what was, at the latest time, high technology that even had the capability to look for life. Unfortunately, the Viking experiments showed Mars to be a sterile world devoid of even single-cell life. Disappointment in the air, the United States would undertake no more Mars missions for 20 years.

However, come 1996, Mars was in the spotlight once again as the Pathfinder/Sojourner mission found itself on its way to Mars. When the Sojourner robot started trekking around the Martian surface on July 4, 1997, the world was swept with Mars mania. Scientists were intrigued, too, as some of the data gathered from Sojourner pointed to signs of water on Mars. So far as we know, water is essential for life. After Sojourner, a new wave of Mars missions would be sent to the intriguing planet, with the current twin Mars rovers, which first landed in 2004, being the pinnacle of achievement. As is often the case in science, more data leads to more questions, and in the case of Mars, more intriguing theories about the planet's possibly life-supporting past.

Unfortunately, so far as science can determine, there was never any life on Mars. Yes, the building blocks of life sans liquid water (all Martian water is frozen in its polar ice caps) are all present, but the remnants of life forms are nowhere to be found. However, that doesn't mean that life could not have existed on Mars as, to date, only the tiniest fraction of the planet has been explored in a situation akin to aliens launching a probe to Earth, having it land in the Sahara Desert, and then determining that, because there is no life at the landing site, there is no life on the entire planet.

Back to Chavez and his uninformed statements. If there was once capitalism and thus, high civilization on Mars, there should be some trace remnants, of which there are none. In all probability, if there was once life on Mars, it was obliterated when, through mechanisms yet not fully understood (a popular current theory is a loss of its magnetic field), the planet lost its atmosphere. With no shield to keep warmth on the planet, all the liquid water froze, thus depriving the hypothetical Martians of life-giving water. Without water on the surface, all life either died or had to migrate underground, which has nothing to do with economics.

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