Sunday, Oct. 3, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Zooming to the future.
The UNLV Foundation Board this past week held its first in-person meeting since COVID-19 landed in town. It was yet another step toward some normalization in our lives as Las Vegas continues to move forward as cautiously as possible.
As an aside, when this whole COVID thing is over — whenever that is — we should all look back with gratitude for the leadership in this state that made the hard, yet unpopular, decisions that allowed most of us to live through the pandemic.
The Zoom option was still available to those of us who were either out of town or not yet convinced that everyone in the room had been vaccinated. So I opted to use technology.
The first thing I noticed while looking at all of the other Foundation members who were also Zooming, was both the youthfulness of those attending and some of the names attached to the pictures.
The board, mostly while I wasn’t looking, had grown significantly younger, and the children and grandchildren of some of Las Vegas’ pioneer families and UNLV’s biggest supporters had stepped into those shoes.
That’s exactly how it should be.
So now I consider myself among that group that we shall call experienced and wizened with age. Hopefully not soon to be replaced!
One of the agenda items immediately caught my attention: “Rebels on the Red Planet.”
I thought immediately to comic book and movie serial characters from my youth — like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (many of you will have to use Google at this point) — and how they caused me to dream about one day taking a rocket ship to Mars.
Today, people are dreaming of Mars for different reasons, mostly because we are befouling our own home at a pace that will leave us no other choice but to find another planet to sustain our lives. But that is a discussion for another day, many days, in fact.
This is about UNLV and Mars. Who’d have thought?
Board Chair Diana Bennett introduced the two presenters — both brilliant young UNLV scientists.
Arya Udry is an associate professor whose research program seeks “to better constrain the interior composition, magmatic processes, and general evolution of the planet Mars.” As best I can tell, she studies rocks.
Libby Hausrath is a professor at UNLV whose educational background and achievements seem without peer. She, too, is part of NASA’s team studying the samples collected by the Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance. All of this is happening real time and it will take a long time because space travel back and forth to Mars — which is how the samples collected will get back here to be physically studied — is still moving in the slow lane. Libby and her team, as best I can tell, also study rocks.
The bottom line to their presentation had a whole lot to do with the proposition that life on Mars could have existed. Whether that is true today is a question that my grandchildren’s generation will most likely learn.
What should not be lost on anyone is the fact that UNLV, our university, is a significant part of the Mars science program that may one day provide answers to that question from my youth.
Is there, was there, can there be life on Mars?
What was just a dream a few decades ago is fast becoming a reality in large part because of these two brilliant female professors at UNLV. And that story, as big and exciting as it appears, is just one of the many incredible academic achievements that is taking place at UNLV.
UNLV President Keith Whitfield has a faculty and student body that is coming into its own as it grows — from one generation of dreamers to a new generation of doers — to take its place among some of the best universities in the country.
But just like the Mars 2020 space program, we still have a long way to go and it will take time to get there.
Buckle up.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.
