For years after the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA kept lobbying for a manned mission to Mars. It was sold as an exciting mission to discover life on another world. This sales pitch was very dubious, because the unmanned spacecraft landed on Mars had never given good reason for much hope about finding life on Mars. Two experiments on the 1976 Viking mission to Mars had seemed to give enouraging results, but the same lander had found no organic molecules, which was profoundly discouraging for all hopes of finding life. Other unmanned missions to Mars had failed to find any of the real building blocks of life. None of the twenty amino acids used by living things had been found on Mars, and none of the nucleotides used by DNA or RNA had been found on Mars.
But passionate pitchmen kept saying that on Mars there had been found what they called "ingredients of life" or "building blocks of life." They were referring to biologically irrelevant carbon molecules that were not at all "building blocks of life," and were no more "ingredients of life" than the sand particles on a beach are "ingredients of computers." And even if there were "building blocks of life" on Mars, this would no more make life likely than it would be likely for a long useful technical manual to arise from someone throwing Scrabble squares against a wall. But since congressional representatives and senators were woefully bad at understanding chemistry, they were easy marks for a "let's send men to find life on Mars" sales pitch based on misleading claims that "ingredients of life" or "building blocks of life" had been found on Mars.
NASA wanted to take four astronauts to Mars, but the final mission design specified that only three astronauts would take the trip. A nuclear rocket vehicle would take the astronauts to Mars. Two astronauts would descend to the surface of Mars in a chemically-powered lander, while one astronaut stayed in the nuclear-powered rocket vehicle which would keep orbiting Mars. After three months, the Mars lander would return to the nuclear rocket vehicle, and the three astronauts would return to Earth.
The landing craft had no problem descending to the surface of Mars. At the moment of landing, Mission Commander Ned Jackson announced triumphantly, "Today, the planets; tomorrow the stars!"
Jackson was very gung-ho about the possibility of discovering life on Mars. He and his fellow astronaut Frank Sellers got busy gathering soil samples from the crater where they had landed. It was believed that the crater was once a pond long, long ago.
The astronauts took the soil samples to the large scientific instruments inside the lander, and began analyzing them. But they found no sign of currently existed life. Nor could they find any sign that life had once existed in the gathered soil. The soil did not even have any amino acids or nucleotides.
"If at first you don't suceeed, try, try again," said Jackson. "Let's keep gathering more soil samples."
"But maybe it's a waste of time," said Sellers. "Maybe there never was life on Mars."
"Mars once had lots of water," said Jackson. "The origin of life couldn't have been some kind of miracle. It must be something that happens automatically whenever there's enough water and enough time."
So the men spent weeks gathering more and more soil samples, and they kept analyzing them, using the fancy instruments onboard the lander. Still no trace of life was found.
"Mission un-accomplished," said Sellers. "We'll just have to tell the world we struck out."
"No, there's got to be life here," said Jackson. "If it's not in the soil, then it must be hidden in the rocks."
So the men started gathering rocks, and bringing them to the lander. They pulverized the rocks, in order to analyze them. This created lots of dust inside the lander that irritated Sellers very much. But no sign of life was found.
"So now that we have a filthy, dusty lander vehicle, we're still empty-handed," said Sellers.
"If life isn't in the small rocks, it must be in great big rocks," said Jackson.
"We have no way to break open big rocks," complained Sellers.
Jackson then announced a strange plan. The men would gather quite a few big boulders and take them back to the lander. They would then lift off, and return to the nuclear-powered rocket orbiting Mars. The boulders could be broken up on Earth, where a check for life inside the boulders could be made. Sellers thought this plan made no sense, but Jackson was insistent.
Jackson prodded Sellers to help haul more and more boulders into the lander, until finally a great heavy mass of boulders had been gathered and brought into the lander.
"This is crazy," said Sellers. "With all this weight, lifting off will be a gamble."
"We've got to do it," said Jackson. "I think we can improvise some booster chemicals to super-charge our lander's fuel, to make it perform better. I remember some paper saying that a certain combination of chemicals will make our rocket fuel work 20% better."
The chemicals were added to the lander's rocket fuel. Then the two men got in their spacesuits, strapped themselves into their seats, and revved up the lander's rockets to ascend into the sky.
At first things seemed to go well. The lander started to rise into the Martian sky, rising 1000 meters.
But then the chemical rocket engines seemed to sputter.
"We have too much weight!" yelled Sellers. "We haven't got enought rocket thrust!"
"It's got to work!" said Jackson.
Finally the chemical rockets of the lander stalled entirely, making a sputtering noise like some car running out of gas. The lander began to fall back to Mars.
"Try and restart the rockets!" yelled Jackson.
"It's no use!" cried Sellers.
The lander vehicle crashed back on Mars, hitting its ground at a speed at 70 meters per second.
Strangely, Sellers and Jackson then found themselves apparently floating around inside their lander. Sellers looked down and saw two bodies still strapped into seats of the lander.
"Who the hell are those two bodies below us?" asked Sellers. "And why are we floating around?"
"There must be a scientific explanation," said Jackson. "Probably our falling back to the Mars surface created a temporary gaseous disturbance which is temporarily elevating us in the air. No doubt we'll float back to the floor in a few seconds."
But a minute passed, and that didn't happen. Still floating about, Sellers took a good look through the cracked helmet visors of the spacesuits strapped into the chairs. He saw the motionless faces of Sellers and Jackson, frozen in an expression of horror.
"Those are our own faces in those suits!" said Sellers. "What the hell is going on?"
"Well, I guess that rules out my previous hypothesis," said Jackson. "But I have another explanation. When we hit the ground, we probably suffered a concussion that has caused hallucinations. We're not really floating in the air. We're still in our seats. In a few seconds the hallucination will end."
But minutes passed, and such a thing didn't happen. Sellers began to panic.
"I think I know what happened!" said Sellers. "When we crashed back to Mars, our bodies died! And our souls have floated out of our dead bodies!"
"No, that can't be!" said Jackson. "They're must be a scientific explanation. Maybe this is just some weird Mars gravity anomaly that is causing us to float about, or some strange quantum fluctuation."
"Look at the arms of your body that is floating around," said Sellers. "They aren't solid arms, but kind of transparent shining ghost-arms, just like mine."
"I see what you mean," said Jackson. "That's probably just an optical illusion, possibly caused by eye damage we suffered in our crash."
Jackson was very good at this type of thing. He and his colleagues had been doing it for many years. They could quickly dream up reasons for thinking they were seeing exactly what they wanted to see, even when before them was something that looked like something totally different. Whenever they saw something that seemed to defy what they wanted to believe, they always had some speculation to explain away the undesired observations. And when many thousands or millions of other people saw things that didn't fit in with the beliefs of Jackson and his colleagues, such observations were always explained away by some speculations, often by claims of hallucination. When nature didn't act in the way expected, there was always some reason dreamed up why the unexpected result was some illusion that was not the real truth. Jackson and his colleagues could pull out these "why you didn't see what you seemed to see" speculation stories with dazzling speed, which often involved claims that the reality was the exact opposite of what someone seemed to see.
Finally there seemed to open a large mysterious hole at the top of the ruined lander. The hole had a kind of weird quickly-spinning vortex edge, and seemed to lead into some very long strange tunnel. Jackson and Sellers began to feel themselves sucked up by some mysterious force pushing them through the hole, and into the tunnel. Then they felt themselves traveling through the tunnel at dazzling speed, heading towards some unfathomable numinous light at its end. Coming from the end of the tunnel, both Jackson and Sellers could hear some magnificent choir of voices singing, "We are the brave astronauts who died, and you will soon meet us."
"Remember, this is all just a very complex and unusually vivid multi-sensory hallucination, with both of us experiencing exactly the same details because of a gigantically improbable series of coincidences that might happen only once in the history of the multiverse," said Jackson. "Don't believe a single thing you see, hear, or feel!"
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