Welcome Aboard Air Marineris

I went back and drilled down deeper. Still no results and no more gas under the cap. That was a little puzzle, easily explained. If there was metabolism nearby, you would expect more methane, especially with the cap protecting it. I hadn’t seen any reason to refuse Dini’s request to dig deeper. I thought it likely useless, but I agreed because it was all we could do with the equipment we had. It obviously was far off the mark for drilling, however. We had a discussion on it before I left that morning:

“I am going out to use the last core bits we have, but because our first core didn’t produce at all, I don’t have much hope for it.If ten meters won’t do it, twenty is unlikely to be an improvement. I believe these little bugs are likely to live in analogous ways to those on Earth, close to warmth and chemicals. That’s deep. To pass the time, I agree we should keep on looking with what we have. We might find something. Just one hole won’t prove any point.

“I think, though, in the long run, we need to go deep, like they did on Earth. I think it will be the same way here. The puny drills we have on our constructors are designed to dig holes a meter deep or so, nothing more. The samples we want are down where the pressure allows liquid water, and the fading warmth of Mars affords more heat for chemical reactions. We are going to need drilling rigs.”

“Where are you going to get that here? There’s no oil business anywhere. Not even on Earth. There aren’t any cars there, and power is all nuclear now. They still use crude for petrochemicals, but that’s all. I’ve never heard of any drilling on the Moon, but they do extract minerals. They may have some. We could ask.”

“You’re right. Even if they did have something there, and I doubt that, it wouldn’t make sense to ship it. There is a way though. We could easily build the hardware here. Lou has lots of experience with trusses. We could get the high efficiency electric motors from Moon Tools. Lots of rare earth metals there. They mine those all over there. We can get the bits from the manufacturing web at Elysium. They make all kinds of diamond drills. For the design, we can approach one of the remaining drill rig firms on Earth and take advantage of the universal patent. They will be happy to supply us with their plans. It’s not as if there was any question that they would ever be able to ship up to us, and they get the publicity of having their designs used on Mars in the search for life. It will take us some time, but eventually we will be able to do some serious drilling. I have another thought. Is there any way to find out when the methane was produced?”

“Well, now you’ve come upon another aspect of my vast experience as a surgeon, my love. Abdominal surgery acquaints you intimately with methane. I don’t have much experience with emanations from the ground, though. I do remember from organic chemistry that it contains carbon, and any compound of carbon can take advantage of carbon dating for anything produced by living creatures. They fix the carbon when they produce it. But my recollection is that the limit for carbon dating with any accuracy at all is far short of geological time frames.”

“That’s no problem at all. All we need to know is whether it’s new or not. We don’t need to set it in some time frame. We can do that with the surrounding materials. There’s lots of other materials in the Martian geosphere that have much longer half-lives. We can wait until we find something to date it precisely.”

“You’re such a clever person, my love. This is the perfect thing for us to work together on. All we need is someone who knows what she is doing. And I just got a text from a biologist in Germany overnight. She wants to come up. Maybe Linus raised some questions about German academics in your mind, but I assure you they are not all the same. This woman is of Turkish extraction. Unfortunately, that still makes a difference there. People haven’t gotten any more tolerant living in close quarters.

“Her name is Jihan Avci. She’s a professor at the Free University of New Berlin, and she’s well thought of. I checked. And I looked at her picture. She looks nice. That’s important too, isn’t it? Since they haven’t released scientists in the life sciences, we are going to need to pull her from her current job. But the release of physical scientists has put everyone on edge, so it might not be such a difficult task. We have a real shot at this search for life. People have been speculating about the possibility of life on Mars for several centuries. Now we are here with the tools to look exhaustively. Not remotely, but right up close. If I can’t persuade Jihan to come here with my surgeon’s skills for convincing patients to submit to surgery, I’ll give up.”