Between Knobel and Wien, south of the Aeolian Plain, to the west of the ditches of Cerberus, the mighty strata of Mount Sharp rise out of Gale Crater. None of these names have ever been spoken on Mars, where this photograph was taken by Nasa's Curiosity rover before it started its slow journey across the landscape this week. They are names given by humans, some in the official language of scientific nomenclature, Latin, others – like Mount Sharp – more pet names for vast and remote geographical features.
If the first vague images from Curiosity seemed pale beside science fiction fantasies of life on Mars, this high resolution (and colour-adjusted) picture of Mount Sharp is sublime and awe-inspiring. The 18th century writer Edmund Burke said the glorious horror of the sublime is evoked in us by phenomena that might threaten our existence. The immense cliffs, screes and gullies of this mountain vista, set in an atmosphere too weak to sustain humans, reveal a landscape of lifeless grandeur that surely inspires such mixed emotions. It is a marvellous place that eerily mirrors the most spectacular sights on earth, from the Grand Canyon to the Sahara.
It is easy to see from this picture why Nasa has chosen Mount Sharp as a destination for its most sophisticated robot explorer yet. Curiosity's job is to search for evidence that Mars could have once supported life. The exposed strata that can be seen here must contain, like rock strata on earth, a rich geological history of Mars. Evidence of ancient life-supporting conditions may be found here if anywhere.
Yet "rich" may not be the word. How much chance is there of even the tiniest fossil life form being encountered by Curosity? On Earth, the remote ancient rocks of places like the Burgess Shales in Canada contain weird forms such as the early Cambrian creepy-crawly Hallucigenia. Go for a walk nearly anywhere and you can find fossils of some kind. You don't have to look long, in other words, to find evidence of ancient life in Earth's rocks. Meanwhile in this desolate Martian landscape a machine sent by Earth's most ambitious life forms will pick over the pebbles in search of the merest trace of the possibility of life.
This picture is thrilling and it is terrifying. It is a mirror of Earth's rocky architecture if somehow our planet became lifeless.
Meanwhile on Earth, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was making the speech of his life as he launches his bid to run the world's most powerful democracy. "President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet", he said. "My promise ... is to help you and your family."
And that's when the scientific magnificence of this photograph turns to dread. While we gaze in wonder at a dead planet, what is happening to the living one? The start of Curiosity's mission has coincided with a summer full of danger warnings for life on earth. Suddenly, debates and pseudo-debates about climate change are ancient history. The record melting of Arctic ice this summer points clearly to ice-free summers in the Arctic in the near future. Nasa itself, not long before its Mars mission touched down, discovered startling satellite evidence of an equally dramatic melting of the ice sheet on Greenland. Even former sceptics are accepting the reality and urgency of a change in the life of the Earth caused mainly by human activity.
Mars is a beautiful place, as this picture shows, but it is majestically dead. The universe appears to be full of places like that. What no one has so far found much trace of is a place like this: a planet that jumps with life. Earth is a miracle, quite possibly the greatest miracle in the entire cosmos. It is now proven beyond any reasonable doubt that we are playing dangerously with the very fabric of that miracle, endangering the biological balances of our amazing world. Endangering ourselves. In this picture we look on a dead world. Do those silent strata reveal the Martian past, or our future?
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