Why Mars?

Last week the international edition of Newsweek asked me to do a little piece for them on Spirit that would, inter alia, try and deal with the "so what?" issue that bedevils a lot of science reporting. The problem -- keenly felt by editors, especially those higher up the chain than the science editor -- is the hypothetical bloody-minded reader who, presented with a neat account of some ownder of the universe or other, just says "so what?" The most common solutions are to try and find implication sof practical import, which skews a lot of science reporting in strange ways, or to try and tie the report into some greater narrative that is considered sufficiently fascinating of itself to pull the report out of so-what land; for Mars, this greater narrative is almost always one involving life.

This piece doesn't talk about life: it just talks about some of the reasons why Mars fascinated people more than most other things in the sky. So it's an indirect answer to so-whatters: it explains why others find the subject interesting, but doesn't try to justify that interest. Newsweek had to shorten it a touch for space reasons; here's their version. Below there's a slightly fuller draft

"If you saw this patch of barren, rock-studded wasteland in the Mojave desert, a couple of hours drive north east of Pasadena, California, you wouldnt look at it twice. After a trip of 300 million miles, though, its a sight for sore eyes. The ecstatic reception that greeted the pictures which Spirit, NASAs Mars Rover, sent back to JPL, the laboratory in Pasadena that runs Americas Mars exploration program, was in part one of simple relief. When NASA tried to land a trio of spacecraft on Mars four years ago it failed with all three, just a couple of months after having lost an orbiter there, too. Another failure would have been a terrible blow for the space agency, and for the scientists at JPL and elsewhere who have devoted years of their life to this project. For the people waiting at JPL even a bad picture would have been bliss; the technically excellent set of pictures  far and away the best yet taken on the surface of Mars  they ended up with was very heaven.

"But apart from the sheer difficulty of getting there and the relief that comes with success, what is it that makes this desert so exciting? What makes it so exciting that scientists see it through tears of joy, so exciting that NASAs web-servers groan with the strain of sending the pictures to eager screens all around the planet? What makes it so exciting that President Bush thinks a promise to send humans to walk in Spirit's tire tracks, at a cost somewhere in the hundred billion dollar range, is something the public is going to be turned on by in an election year?

"Part of the answer is that Mars, though a mere planet, has many of the attributes that make a star  a movie star, that is. For a start, it has a famous face. Its a face weve had a long time to get to know, because its features are discernible from earth with just a modest telescope. That unique attribute  no other planets surface is so open to inspection  means that for the past few centuries idle thoughts about life elsewhere have settled on Mars just a bit more easily on the other planets. Its why "the man from Mars" became and remains the archetypal extraterrestrial, and why the world he came from was the one chosen by the great writers of science fiction and planetary romance, like H G Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The space-age revelation that Marss features  its mountains and craters and polar caps  look pretty good in close up, too, hasnt hurt.

"A striking face alone isnt enough, as any PR person worth her salt can tell you. But Mars has more. It has an easily identifiable character: redness. This may seem pretty trivial (and it borders on the untrue  seen close up under proper lighting Mars is more a sort of yellowish brown than a real red). But redness is something simple that everyone can know about Mars, and people like to think they know something about celebrities. With the exception of ring-girdled Saturn the other planets are lacking in simple, easily-identified attributes. And unlike Saturn  which NASAs Cassini mission will arrive at later this year, having set out back in 1997  Mars is relatively approachable. Its quite possible to imagine astronauts using todays technology to get there in less than a year, land safely, walk and drive around, grow crops in a greenhouse, melt ground-ice for drinking water and so on. While Venus, too, is not that far away, its surface is a hellish place where its hard to imagine a rover or a human lasting a minute. An inaccessible surface beneath impenetrable clouds may give Venus a certain I-want-to-be-alone allure; but if Venus is Garbo, Mars is Lucille Ball. Its attraction lies in a life not that unlike ours, one we can imagine sharing.

"Perhaps the key to Marss appeal, though, is the fact that it has a story. Mars is a planet with a past. The reason Spirit landed in Gusev crater is that many geologists believe the crater was once not a desert but a vast lake. Mars was once very different: wetter and warmer, though probably not as warm as all that. The hows and whens and whys of this great Martian will occupy scientists for decades or centuries, and the story of a world transformed they piece together promises to be fascinating and evocative. This may be why, while many experts see building a moonbase and sending expeditions to Mars as an either/or proposition, President Bush seems set on both. Theres some interesting science to be done on the moon. And as a place to learn the craft of living beyond the bonds of earth the moon has the great advantage of being near enough that you can get back into bondage quickly if things go wrong. But the moon is old, lifeless and unchanging. It may be a great place for new infrastructure, but not for new stories. The president probably understands that stories are the things that excite us.

"Especially when we dont yet know how they end. Just hours after Spirits first pictures got back to earth, image processors at NASA and elsewhere had produced three-dimensional versions of them. But our imaginations had already gone one better. In our minds eyes we added a fourth dimension of time, a future that stretches through the screen and over the horizon, a future that Spirit will soon be rolling into. Gusev crater, and Mars itself, may be empty now  but the future is always empty before we get there. Mars is a real, solid, kick-a-rock-and-youll-stub-your-toe place and at the same time a dream of whats to come. A future we can see but not yet reach, a future full of mystery, a future unlike the past. Thats whats exciting."

Comments

[Majeed]

Gerald, I don't doubt that perhaps this is a new constiolion of Mars that we are seeing on the above video. however I feel that the planet does not give oxygen, but a gaseous atmosphere which would not be suitable to human habitation. I do feel that Venus could be a possibility for human habitation now, but would not be as beautiful a planet as Gaia. She has been recovering from her destruction now for millenia and I think that colonies of humans could now be upon her albeit but small colonies. Can you confirm or rebut my assumption by remote viewing Venus and posting a video or report on your findings. Thank you. Judith.