Mars has just been all over the place in popular culture, ours and everyone's, since people first looked up at the wandering red star. Speculation, and fascination, about life on Mars mushroomed in the 19th century and somewhat surprisingly has not abated at all since. Mark Shea points out that rather desperate scientific theorizing regarding evidence of Martian life has only intensified since President Obama made it clear that he's just not that into Mars. "B--b-b-b-ut!..." blurt the scientists, "If we don't go to Mars, we'll never know if we might have missed out on the Greatest Scientific Discovery Ever, which we swear is right around the corner! We might find some new mineral or element that would cure Cancer/AIDS/The Common Cold (though very unlikely) or uncover proof of extra-terrestrial life (though - okay - that's really, really unlikely), or invent some new and better... solar panel! Yeah! That's it! Just let us go up and root around and we practically guarantee we can dig up out of the Martian soil some new and promising source of funding that will last us all well into retirement."
For a long time, now, when people of the Modern West speculate about alien life, they naturally think first of Mars. Chesterton's friend and loyal opponent H.G. Wells famously wrote about Martians (as we have noted), and C.S. Lewis wrote an entire trilogy of novels about Mars.
That Mars occupies this sort of default position is only reasonable. Of all the planets in the Solar system, it is most like ours. Forbidding and toxic, of course, but for all that, more cozy and comfortable than any other of the spinning spheres, by far.
Mars is also our next door neighboor, and it should not be at all strange if we would like to drop in and pay a social call. There may be nobody home, but we might at least try the doorbell and (like we did with the old abandoned house down the block where I grew up) step inside, hear the floorboards creak and see if the ghost stories might be true. Maybe we just need someone to Triple-Dog-Dare us... someone like China, maybe (hey, it worked for the Moon!).
I don't disagree with Mark Shea's thesis that NASA scientists are highly motivated by a potential loss of income and position, but I would have to disagree with the idea that we have no good reason to go to Mars. Let's just admit that all the Russians did in the 1960's was to give us a really plausible excuse to go to the Moon. Heck, we pretty well knew there was nothing much there. Buzz Aldrin called the lunar landscape a "magnificent desolation", which was no great surprise, no more a surprise than finding the top of Mt. Everest to be on the chilly side.
But by galactic standards, the Moon is, let's face it, a little like tent camping in your own back yard. It doesn't come near exhausting the idea of going "where no man has gone before". A great start, but shoot!... from the moon mankind can collectively say "I can see my house from here!".
We've always been a little obsessed with Mars. We've dreamed of going there since long before it looked remotely possible. Does everything have to have a scientific justification? Must every endeavour add up to a positive number on someone's balance sheet? We should go, but we should do so just for the poetry and adventure of the thing, and hang the sense of it.
When we went to the Moon, people around the world watched and many cried and prayed. Those who did so in India and Africa and elsewhere were not crying and praying that we would beat the Russians. They did not get a lump in the throat hoping that we would bring back some good moon rocks. They didn't get all misty eyed over the science. When we went to the Moon, the whole world in a real sense went with us. WE - mankind - were going to touch the Heavens.
Not that I think there will be much real manned exploration to do past Mars. The universe is, well, a big place and odds are very heavy that no human being will ever walk outside the Solar system. But until we go to Mars, we just haven't checked off all the items on our To-Do list, I don't think.
To me the question is, why not go? Because it's expensive? I would bet we've sunk enough money into the Wall Street bail-outs to go to Mars and back. Maybe more than once. What does "expensive" mean anymore to a nation that uses play money? What's a dollar really worth? One can find of a lot of brain-warpingly expensive items on the national budget that are not only far more useless than a trip to Mars, but that are positively harmful.
Then there is the danger. Okay, it's a dangerous undertaking. There you go. It is not unlikely that we will lose some people. Still, just as with project Mercury and the entire early space program, there will be astronaut wannabes lining up around the block for the chance to go. Some things are worth the risk (and I don't mean a few scoops of Mars dirt).
I've been leaning heavily on Chesterton here at TLBC, lately, but he's a big guy and can hold me up with no problem. This passage is from Heretics and for me sums up the difference between our great, vigorous leap for the Moon just a few decades ago, and the current hand-wringing about Mars following an extended period of dithering about in low Earth orbit;
When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem. There can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency to run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for the moon.
None of the strong men in the strong ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency. Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for the Catholic Church. Danton would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even if the ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs, they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics. They did not say, "Efficiently elevating my right leg, using, you will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are in excellent order, I--" Their feeling was quite different. They were so filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase that in that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash.
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