“Yes.”
She looked up at him. “What do you think science is for?”
Sax shrugged. It was their old argument, again and always, no matter what kind of beginning it had. To terraform or not to terraform, that is the question … He had answered the question long ago, and so had she, and he wished they could just agree to disagree, and get on with it. But Ann was indefatigable.
“To figure things out,” he said.
“But terraforming is not figuring things out.”
“Terraforming isn’t science. I never said it was. It’s what people do with science. Applied science, or technology. What have you. The choice of what to do with what you learn from science. Whatever you call that.”
“So it’s a matter of values.”
“I suppose so.” Sax thought about it, trying to marshal his thoughts concerning this murky topic. “I suppose our … our disagreement is another facet of what people call the fact–value problem. Science concerns itself with facts, and with theories that turn facts into examples. Values are another kind of system, a human construct.”
“Science is also a human construct.”
“Yes. But the connection between the two systems isn’t clear. Beginning from the same facts, we can arrive at different values.”
“But science itself is full of values,” Ann insisted. “We talk about theories with power and elegance, we talk about clean results, or a beautiful experiment. And the desire for knowledge is itself a kind of value, saying that knowledge is better than ignorance, or mystery. Right?”
“I suppose,” Sax said, thinking it over.
“Your science is a set of values,” Ann said. “The goal of your kind of science is the establishment of laws, of regularities, of exactness and certainty. You want things explained. You want to answer the whys, all the way back to the Big Bang. You’re a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that’s a real achievement, right?”
“But that’s the scientific method itself,” Sax objected. “It’s not just me, it’s how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself.”
“There are human values imbedded in physics.”
“I’m not so sure.” He held out a hand to stop her for a second. “I’m not saying there are no values in science. But matter and energy do what they do. If you want to talk about values, better just to talk about them. They arise out of facts somehow, sure. But that’s a different issue, some kind of sociobiology, or bioethics. Perhaps it would be better just to talk about values directly. The greatest good for the greatest number, something like that.”
“There are ecologists who would say that’s a scientific description of a healthy ecosystem. Another way of saying climax ecosystem.”
“That’s a value judgement, I think. Some kind of bioethics. Interesting, but …” Sax squinted at her curiously, decided to change tack. “Why not try for a climax ecosystem here, Ann? You can’t speak of ecosystems without living things. What was here on Mars before us wasn’t an ecology. It was geology only. You could even say there was a start at an ecology here, long ago, that somehow went wrong and froze out, and now we’re starting it up again.”
She growled at that, and he stopped. He knew she believed in some kind of intrinsic worth for the mineral reality of Mars; it was a version of what people called the land ethic, but without the land’s biota. The rock ethic, one might say. Ecology without life. An intrinsic worth indeed!
He sighed. “Perhaps that’s just a value speaking. Favouring living systems over non-living systems. I suppose we can’t escape them, like you say. It’s strange … I mostly feel like I just want to figure things out. Why they work the way they do. But if you ask me why I want that—or what I would want to have happen—what I work toward …” He shrugged, struggling to understand himself. “It’s hard to express. Something like a net gain in information. A net gain in order.” For Sax this was a good functional description of life itself, of its holding action against entropy. He held out a hand to Ann, hoping to get her to understand that, to agree at least to the paradigm of their debate, to a definition of science’s ultimate goal. Net gain in information. They were both scientists after all, it was their shared enterprise …
But she only said, “So you destroy the face of an entire planet. A planet with a clear record nearly four billion years old. It’s not science. It’s making a theme park.”
“It’s using science for a particular value. One I believe in.”
“As do the transnationals.”
“I guess.”
“It certainly helps them.”
“It helps everything alive.”
“Unless it kills them. The terrain is destabilised, there are landslides every day.”
“True.”
“And they kill. Plants, people. It’s happened already.”
Sax waggled a hand, and Ann jerked her head up to glare at him.
“What’s this, the necessary murder? What kind of value is that?”
“No, no. They’re accidents, Ann. People need to stay on bedrock, out of the slide zones, that kind of thing. For a while.”
“But vast regions will turn to mud, or be drowned entirely. We’re talking about half the planet.”
“The water will drain downhill. Create watersheds.”
“Drowned land, you mean. And a completely different planet. Oh, that’s a value all right! And the people who hold the value of Mars as it is … We will fight you, every step of the way.”
He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t. At this point a biosphere would help us more than the transnationals. The transnats can operate from the tent cities, and mine the surface robotically, while we hide and concentrate most of our efforts on concealment and survival. If we could live everywhere on the surface, it would be a lot easier for all kinds of resistance.”
“All but Red resistance.”
“Yes, but what’s the point of that, now?”
“Mars. Just Mars. The place you’ve never known.”
Sax looked up at the white dome over them, feeling distress like a sudden attack of arthritis. It was useless to argue with her.
But something in him made him keep trying. “Look, Ann, I’m an advocate of what people call the minimum viable model. It’s a model that calls for a breathable atmosphere only up to about the two or three kilometre contour. Above that the air would be kept too thin for humans, and there won’t be much life of any kind—some high altitude plants, and above that nothing, or nothing visible. The vertical relief on Mars is so extreme that there can be vast regions that will remain above the bulk of the atmosphere. It’s a plan that makes sense to me. It expresses a comprehensible set of values.”
She did not reply. It was distressing, it really was. Once, in an attempt to understand Ann, to be able to talk to her, he had done research in the philosophy of science. He had read a fair amount of material, concentrating particularly on the land ethic, and the fact–value interface. It had never proved to be of much help; in conversation with her, he had never seemed able to apply what he had learned in any useful manner. Now, looking down at her, feeling the ache in his joints, he recalled something that Kuhn had written about Priestley—that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist. It seemed that something like this had happened to Ann, but what then was she now? A counter-revolutionary? A prophet?
She