LET'S FIND THOSE LITTLE GREEN MEN

By Charles Krauthammer

When archaeologists from Alpha Centauri alight on earth and begin excavating the rubble of our world, they will be astonished to find, on reaching the stratum circa 1996, that they have stumbled upon a civilization that at the same time produced 1) Dick Morris and 2) pictures of Jupiter's largest moon (430 million miles away) taken from a distance of 162 miles.

Our quadrennial immersion in the ridiculous that is the American election campaign tends to overshadow the occasional eruption of the sublime in our national life. Yet three such eruptions have occurred this year. All three will be remembered long after the name William Jefferson Clinton (let alone Dick Morris) has taken its historical place alongside Rutherford B. Hayes. All three are independent enterprises. Yet all three, remarkably, point in the same stunning direction--to the existence of life in space.

First, the Galileo spacecraft orbits Jupiter, surfs its moons, comes closer to Ganymede than New York City is to Washington and sends back pictures sharp enough to find a small building. (None found yet.) This, after an earlier sweep by the moon Europa brings back news that under Europa's cracked and shifting ice cover may lie huge oceans of water--exactly the kind of incubator we look for to find life.

Then more life news: the discovery in a Martian meteorite of organic molecules that might be the residue of some extinct life form. Not terribly solid evidence, but suggestive enough--and brilliantly hyped by a beleaguered NASA--to start a mini-boom for Mars exploration.

And then the announcement of the complete genetic identification of an organism that lives at the bottom of the sea in the extreme heat and pressure of a volcanic vent. The headline was that this class of microbe, Archea, represents a completely new branch of life. But classification is not the stuff of passion. The real excitement here is the implication for extraterrestrial life.

We have long speculated that if there are other warm, wet and cozy planets like ours, they might harbor carbon-based life like ours. Unfortunately, the vast majority of places out there are depressingly and forbiddingly unearthlike. We figured that life there, if at all possible, would probably come in highly exotic forms based on completely different chemistries from ours (silicon, for example). And yet here in front of our noses are deep-sea, carbon-based microbes able to live in hellish, almost Venus-like conditions. If here, why not out there?

It is a sign of the times that amid this explosion of great science, the space story that has got by far the most TV coverage has been Shannon Lucid: plucky, hard-luck astronaut sentenced to six months of sponge baths and Russian food. I salute her spunk, but surely the publicity surrounding her represents a nadir of the shuttle program. Space-endurance records are the equivalent of watching grass grow. The endless hurling of men and women into near space has indeed made us the world's authority on zero-G nausea and other fascinations. But can we move on, please? Is monitoring bone decalcification the reason we ventured into the cosmos in the first place?

We went up in the first place for Edmund Hillary's reason: because it is there. For adventure, for romance. And yes, for competition. Like Amundsen and Scott racing for the South Pole, Americans and Soviets wanted to get there first.

True, but there was more. We were propelled too by a keen sense of awe and wonder about challenging the void. That sense was nicely captured by Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 film 2001. Three decades later, 2001 looks a bit campy. We're far too jaded and too used to space now to take that metaphysical stuff--remember the psychedelic ending?--very seriously.

It is said that when Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into space, returned from orbit he reported that he had looked and found no trace of God. It was a hilarious case of village-atheist, Soviet stolidity. But even in negation, it tacitly acknowledged one of the prime motives for space exploration: its heavenliness--the stirring, humbling mystery of traveling through nothingness, attested to most dramatically by the Apollo 8 astronauts reading Genesis upon circumnavigating the moon.

Our age is not one to look for God in the cosmos. As befits the more introspective, domesticated '90s, we are looking for life, for contact, for a reflection of ourselves. It is not quite as exalted a motive as metaphysics. But then piercing the frontier--whether the New World in the 16th century or the American West in the 19th--is never as heroic the second time out.

Nonetheless, as motives go, looking for our counterparts in the cosmos is exalted enough. It is certainly exciting enough to get us to look up again. Galileo and Archea and the Martian meteoroid point the way: up, looking for life. Bring on the probes, the landers, the rovers for Mars and Europa. Then bring on man--O.K., Europa might have to wait--for the greatest biological voyage of discovery since Darwin sailed the Beagle. Enough tumbling about in terminal near earth orbit. Up and out.