Mission to Mars (2000) & Cambrian Explosion Theories
Almost by accident today I caught the the second half of the movie Mission To Mars. Mission to Mars is a 2000 science fiction movie directed by Brian de Palma about a rescue mission to Mars following a disaster during the first manned voyage to the planet. For those unfamiliar with the movie’s plot, see here. Being a sci-fi buff and secretly hoping one of my offspring will travel to Mars one day, I quite enjoyed what I saw of this movie.
The pivotal part of the movie is right at the end, when the human astronauts on Mars stumble upon a giant Martian structure on the planet, fashioned in the shape of a Martian face. Gaining access inside this structure, it turns out that it is actually a giant museum-like facility put there by the Martians for when Earthlings eventually arrived on Mars, giving a complete audiovisual presentation of the last moments of Martian civilisation, following a devastating asteroid strike. This strike destroys the habitability of the once lush Earth-like planet, presumably by stripping Mars of its atmosphere, resulting in the entire Martian civilisation fleeing the planet for another unnamed galaxy. Before they go, however, the Martians shoot off some of their own DNA lovingly towards neighbouring Earth during the Gondwana period of it’s development, just as the continents were separating. This DNA then spawned single cell life on earth that then rapidly grew legs, and a brain large and complex enough to ponder its own existence and origins via evolution.
The writers obviously have in mind the theory of exogenesis or panspermia – the concept that life on earth was seeded from some other extraterrestrial source, as their explanation of the Cambrian Explosion (the apparently sudden and diverse development of complex life on earth as revealed by the fossil record). In typical contemporary pop culture fashion, the writers want their cake and to eat it too, by wanting both ET and Darwin in their theory of life’s origins on this planet.
But I was left with a couple of nagging questions:
If life on earth was seeded by DNA from extra-terrestrial life on Mars, where did life on Mars come from? Was it seeded by DNA from another extra-terrestrial place? Where did that life originate? You see the inevitable and irrational infinite regress? It doesn’t solves the problem of how DNA on earth seemingly spontaneously self-assembled out of the primordial soup; it just pushed the problem back one step, and then an infinite number of steps before that.
If Martians seeded the earth with their DNA, why would it only spawn amoeba? Surely their DNA would code for a fully fledged Martian straight up? I’d personally be a bit miffed if all my DNA could manage to spawn was a protozoa.
Of course the panspermia theory does nothing to explain the actual process of evolution, which has some how managed to spawn, by complete accident, a species so over-powered in the brain stakes that they have developed the intellectual capability to discover the amazing structure of the cosmos and the infinite complexity within themselves. Way to go monkey brain!
The writers wanted to convey the typical secular humanist notion that the human race is a child of the cosmos, with seemingly infinite value in the mind of the universe, despite the fact that our species developed quite by accident, by blind and purposeless natural selection. Anyone else see the ironic dichotomy?
Anyway, I know it was just a movie, but most movie-makers have a philosophy that they want to convey (think Avatar). I thought that the philosophy of the makers of this movie was a predictable mish-mash of rock-solid scientific rationalism with just a longing hint of L. Ron Hubbard.