A recent Morning Edition story about a good reason to renew moon exploration is a delightful showpiece of what's possible in the medium of radio. Click here to listen to it and hear what I mean.
In the NPR piece, the University of Washington's Peter Ward and former UW graduate student John Armstrong describe an idea for pushing back how far we can reach into the past in our search for the earliest life on Earth. Don't look for it on the Earth, they argue. The Earth has made hash of any rocks older than about 3.5 billion years. If you want to find fossils of micro-organisms older than that, go to the moon, since early asteroid collisions on Earth probably stirred our rocks up enough to leave some on the moon. Ward admits that when three young men came to him with the idea, he said, "Yeah right!" Later he decided the idea was sound.
The NPR story lays out the full hypothesis, but now... the rest of the story.
Who exactly originated this idea, there at the University of Washington? It seems it was intelligent design proponent Guillermo Gonzalez, and NPR covered the story in the summer of 2002.
In the recent Meyer/Ward debate, Ward said he thinks the design argument Gonzalez and Richards make in The Privileged Planet is rubbish (he actually referred to it as The Perfect Planet and then mischaracterized their argument), but he said he loves the great astrobiology research Gonzalez has done otherwise, such as his work on the galactic habitable zone, featured in a Scientific American cover story.
Now he's proving his latter point by arguing for Gonzalez's moon exploration idea on NPR. I e-mailed Gonzalez about it and he reported that he had the idea around 1999:
In about 2000, I got two graduate students at the UW interested, Llyd Wells and John Armstrong (since graduated). I was a post-doc at the time. We published a paper on it in 2002 in Icarus [pp. 183-96].*The basic idea is to search the Moon for Earth meteorites that were blasted off the Earth about 3.9 Gyrs ago. The rocks should contain relatively unaltered samples from Earth's distant past.
The NPR story follows on the heels of the SETI Institute's Seth Shostak, also a vocal opponent of ID and The Privileged Planet, lovingly recapitulating another Gonzalez moon argument, in this case not on NPR but at Space.com. Go here to notice the striking similarities between the way Ward has treated Gonzalez and the way Shostak has. (There are dissimilarities, too: Ward goes to greater lengths to make clear that the idea wasn't his own).
What is clear from these two instances is this: Apparently we finally have something that design theorists and their opponents can agree to love--Gonzalez's research and insights, other than his Privileged Planet hypothesis.
The Privileged Planet argument, meanwhile, is largely based on the very insights and research findings his opponents so appreciate--which means that, even if you have no use for intelligent design, you'll find The Privileged Planet a feast of cutting edge science in the broad-ranging and emerging field of astrobiology.
And the issue is still more complicated. The book's wealth of evidence and insights supports the book's design hypothesis, but the design hypothesis also led to some of the book's individual insights, such as the one Ward enthusiastically summarized on NPR. As Gonzalez and Richards explain in The Privileged Planet:
As we mentioned in Chapter Three, Earth's geophysical processes have erased much of the early history of life. If measurability and discoverability are optimized from our vantage point [their thesis], however, then we might expect that such information will be preserved somewhere accessible to us. The origin of life is a particularly important question. It would be surprising assuming the correlation, if it could not be investigated. In fact, we might predict that such evidence is available somewhere, if we search diligently enough. It was precisely this prediction that led one of us (Guillermo) to consider the value of lunar exploration for uncovering relatively well-preserved relics of Earthly life from this early period. (P. 319)
Gonzalez also wanted me to note that he and his former UW colleagues have since learned that someone else had noted that the Moon should have collected debris from Earth (Joshua Lederman in 1960 in Science devotes about two sentences to the possibility). Gonzalez and his colleagues, arriving at the idea independently, were the first to do a detailed study.
Gonzalez mentions Lederman's brief reference not only to be scrupulously fair in giving credit where credit is due, but also to make clear the modesty of his claim about the fruitfulness of his correlation hypothesis. He's stating that, as a matter of fact, his hypothesis motivated him to search for and discover the idea about the moon containing the fossilized remains of life on the early Earth. He isn't claiming that there was no other way to happen upon the idea. To take another example, early scientists like Kepler and Newton were motivated by their belief in a rational designer to search out patterns of mathematical order in the movement of the planets. That alone doesn't prove that such a view was absolutely necessary to the breakthroughs they achieved, but it does strongly suggest that it proved very useful to them.
* See also the News and Views piece reporting on their study in Nature (2002): 791-94.
