Imagining New Worlds

By Nancy Marie Brown

If I had never been to Iceland, I could not have imagined it. The landscape, in places, is truly otherworldly. NASA geologists have said it looks like Mars (only not red). The Apollo astronauts trained there for the Moon Walk, in deserts of volcanic ash.

Last summer I walked across ash that had fallen on snow: It felt like walking on a waterbed; six months later, the snow still hadn’t melted. In Iceland I’ve seen bubbling sulfur pits and blue lagoons of hot mineral water. Mountains striped pink and orange, blue and green. Glaciers that I know have lakes beneath them and, beneath the lakes, volcanoes. Some days the sun never sets. Other days it never rises, and the aurora borealis turns the sky green. And yet things live there: microbes, people, everything in between.

Other places on our planet are even more extreme: Antarctica’s frozen lakes, the hydrothermal vents in the seafloor, deep within the very rocks of Earth. Imagine a planet where such conditions were the norm. What would “life” look like there?

Scientists in the hybrid field of astrobiology, like those featured in this issue, spend their days on such questions. So do artists like Wojtek Suidmak, with whom astronomer Alex Wolzszcan collaborated on an exhibit to “envision” the next millenium. How do we abandon our assumptions about form and function? As Wolzszcan says, How do we break out of “the golden cage created by the laws of nature”?

For only if we let our imaginations out of that cage will we see creatures like the iceworm (on the cover of this issue) that biologist Chuck Fisher found on mounds of methane ice on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Creatures that expand our very definition of life as we know it. Creatures that let us see how new another world could be.