to mars!

Say this to a physicist, you'll get one of two reactions: "Yeah, go for it!" or "Utter waste of perfectly good research funds." Say it to any science fiction fan and, depending on their age, one of several books immediately spring to mind: Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, or Kim Stanley Robinson's more recent Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. All are ripping good yarns of space exploration and colonization, some more technically astute than others, some with a more cultural bent, some focusing on the foibles of the explorers. My favorite of this group is Bradbury's Martian Chronicles for its humanism. But my real favorite is one that seldom gets mentioned, by my old standby Robert Heinlein: The Green Hills of Earth. This is because it's dead romantic. And that should make the naysayers pay attention.

Before you all go "Yuck! What's that got to do with Science?", let me steal a minute from the admitted romance of Seanifer (or "Jean" as El Finster calls the happy couple) to remind you that science is an endeavor of exploration. Exploration is inherently romantic, whether its equipment is pipettes, positron emitters, or pitons. It often doesn't seem very romantic or glamorous when you're pipetting solutions, calibrating instruments, or clinging to a cliff-face thinking "I'm gonna dieeee!" And you know, it's not. Sweat is not glamorous, whether it's intellectual or literal. It's the discoveries that are glamorous, and that shine rubs off on both the discoverer and the slog that led up to it.

Exploration and discovery have more than just tangible benefits. More important than the actual knowledge or invention, sometimes, is just the fact of the attempt, including the ignominious failures before the final success. The thing about discoveries and exploration is that they're never just an individual effort. All those guys who get credit for being the first? They didn't get there alone. In the background pushing their buttocks up the mountain were loving wives and husbands, parents, Sherpas, earlier researchers, financial backers, grant agencies, universities, graduate students, journalists, poets, and novelists.

Yes, poets and novelists. Cue "The Green Hills of Earth." First printed in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947 and later collected as part of Heinlein's "Future History" stories in an eponymous anthology and later in The Past Through Tomorrow, "The Green Hills of Earth" uses one of the oldest of tropes, the blind minstrel, to give readers a snapshot of "spacer" culture in an age when Mars is settled, asteroid mining is common, and even Venus is being homesteaded. When I say this is an old trope, think Homer and the Odyssey. "Green Hills" has the same kind of helpless longing for home coupled with hopeless fate-driven wanderlust. It romanticizes the most exotic type of travel imaginable: into the unknown. There's a long tradition of exploration literature, of blind minstrels singing about mad explorers going off half-cocked and ill-prepared only to come home fabulously wealthy for having seen unspeakable wonders. The Old English poem/poet Widsith gives us a catalog of his traveling companions that includes Offa and Attila, and the Israelites and the Egyptians. Okay, so he exaggerates a little. Think of it as a metaphor. But before giving us his long list of travels, Widsith (literally "far traveled") says,

Therefore I passed through many foreign lands
and through spacious ground.  Good and evil
there I became acquainted with while my native country was remote,
tho my kinsman's spirit followed from afar.

It's that last line that sums up the importance of exploration. It explains why thousands of people line the streets of New York for the marathon every year to cheer on the runners. Every time someone attempts something extraordinary, whether it's a physical or mental feat, that attempt and the eventual success shines a little reflected glory on all of us, makes us stand up a little straighter, try a little harder, think a little more about what we might leave as a legacy. Great accomplishments inspire us. Every time there's a shuttle launch, I'm there in spirit screaming "Go baby go!" as the rockets fire because a part of me goes with its occupants.

Heinlein was a former naval officer himself and knew very well that the siren call of the sea was both a literal hankering for new sights and sounds, and a metaphor for the human restlessness and curiosity that drives the survival of our species (and sometimes seems to be helping us into extinction, along with the rest of the planet). "Green Hills" takes its title from a song written by "Noisy" Rhysling, the story's blind singer, one of the few tunes mentioned that Heinlein bothered to flesh out. It's Kiplingesque in style and tone, and yet not by any means doggerel. The stanza that always chokes me up is this one:

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

It was the first thing I thought of when the Challenger exploded and again when we lost Columbia. Those two disasters are usually the strongest part of the arguments made against going to Mars. It's not safe. We don't have the technology. It's too risky. What crap! I'm sure that's been said to every explorer from Odysseus to Admiral Perry. In just over twenty years, we have lost two shuttles and their crews. For a sobering comparison, check the worldwide shipwreck list at Wikipedia. One database has documented 100,000 wrecks in North American waters alone over the last 400 years, an average of 250 per year. Safety is a poor argument to stay home. Most of us would never get out of bed if that were truly an issue, let alone leave the house. If you compare our levels of past and current technological sophistication, we basically went to the moon in glorified tin cans. What's stopping us now?

The waste-of-money part, perhaps? Look, we've all got our pet projects, our turf we want to protect, discoveries that are just around the corner, that need just a little more time and money to make, and it's never easy apportioning the limited dollars, especially in this grossly anti-science milieu. One way to counter this problem is to invite everyone else on board. I don't think the US should be the only ones going to Mars. It should be an international scientific commission planning it, and it should solicit commercial investment. For a start, talk to Sir Richard Branson of Virgin. He's into funding big new projects. He's already got dibs on SpaceShipOne's X Prize technology for Virgin Galactic. Mars seems like a good destination. And tourism is a great way to fund the scientific research bonanza that Mars colonization represents. Some of the best R&D has come out of commercial ventures like Bell Labs.

For that matter, we all know that some great developments have come out of the space program itself. I have a bad habit of thinking of space exploration as "pure" research, which it isn't. It's much more akin to applied research. Launching a rocket into space, getting it to its destination, keeping its crew alive and healthy while they explore, and then getting them home all present a series of problems to be solved. Many of those problems have applications to existing problems on earth, and have resulted in advances in everything from medical technology to new engine lubricants.

But again, that's not the main reason to go. The main reason to go is the view. Many of the Apollo and shuttle astronauts have talked about the effects of seeing the whole globe at once, and I've often thought it should be a requirement that any newly elected leader take a little trip into space to, uh, broaden his or her horizons. Talk about a radical change in perspective. It won't by any means solve all our problems, but it would be a sobering experience at worst. (And there's more than one politician I'd like to ship to Mars permanently. After a couple hundred years as a penal colony, maybe they'd all turn out okay after all, like Australians. And of course, there's all that inspiration, too, which I still maintain is the most important part of exploration.

So would I go?  In a heartbeat. After all, they're going to need somebody who knows from poetry and fiction. Besides, I figure it's my best chance of losing weight. Sign me up. I'm gone.

Comments

[aguy109]

We are already on Mars. Slip into marsdaily.com put on a pair of red/green stereo specs, and see the wonderful views from the Mars Rovers, from breath taking sunsets and double moonsets (a JQ weakness) down to those beautiful blueberries that spill out of the sedimentary rocks, and movies of dust devils swirling across the Martian plain. Not forgetting glorious orbital pictures from Mars Explorer and Express, etc.
Hundreds of thousands of people have followed, via the Net, the exploits of the 2 Rovers over the past 3 years, and have experienced as much enjoyment and excitement as they would have if a few living humans had actually been there. Robots are extensions of our senses and faculties and their investigatory and scientific capabilities are expanding all the time. Moreover, there is a major scientific objection to a Manned Mars Mission (MMM): Contamination. It would be virtually impossible to prevent some of the biological waste products produced by the crew from escaping into the Martian atmosphere, and this would probably mask any faint signature that might be present from actual Martian life forms. And determining whether there is or ever was life on Mars is THE major scientific, cultural and cosmological reason for studying Mars in the first place. An example of this concern is the fact that tiny levels of methane have been detected in the Martian atmosphere. Is the methane produced biologically or volcanically? If astronauts go there and let off a few farts, we may never know the answer.
A recent NASA study actually concluded that any future MMM would involve a mixed team of humans and robots. In other words, humans would be there for obscure political reasons, while robots would do the serious scientific work.
Even the political/publicity benefits of MMM (the ‘Gee Whiz factor’) are highly dubious. I was 12 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and I remember how quickly the mass public excitement subsided afterwards, in less then a week. Enthusiasts like me continued to follow the exploits of Apollo 12-17, but mass public interest disappeared, except for the rescue of Apollo 13.
Which brings us to the issue of risk. The great length of a and the very serious radiation hazards would make such involve an irreducible high risk. Losing the crew of an MMM would not be like having a few sailors from the Marie Celeste drown, it would be a huge political and cultural trauma, because of the vast effort and huge sums of money involved. As an Israeli, I can never forget how awful and dispiriting it was to watch Ilan Ramon disappear with Colombia.
The cost of an MMM has been tentatively estimated at $ 200 billion. Compare this with $ 800 million for both Rover missions. Even if this is spread amongst several countries, this is a vast amount of money that would inevitably draw funds away from other space and scientific research. And all this at a time of Global Warming, when there are much more urgent scientific and industrial projects that could improve energy use. The public backlash against a full-blown MMM project and against science as a whole would far outweigh any short term mass ‘Gee Whiz’ effect.
The issue of indirect technological benefits from space research (spin off) is not a good argument for MMM either. Firstly, no one suggesting scrapping sophisticated robot missions and earth satellites, which have helped to develop important technologies ( e g image enhancement software ) Secondly, whereas during the 1940’s 50’s and 60’s most technological advances were made in the military, missile and space fields and then transferred to civilian uses, today’s technology flow is often in the reverse direction, with military and space products using technologies and components developed by the huge civilian IT industry that has grown up. As I indicated earlier, one of the most sophisticated devices that any MMM would require would be a leak-proof, closed cycle Martian toilet. There must be cheaper ways of improving sewage treatment technology!

[JanieBelle]

Heinlein rocks. Going to Mars rocks.

Oh how I long to long
For the green hills of earth.

[Tim Foreman]

I just got to your blog via a link from PZ, and I have to say I like it here.

I'm a huge Heinlein fan and have started reading him again with my 13 year old daughter.

Would I go to Mars? Hell yeah! Sign me up!

[Fred Ross]

Heinlein's various stories on Mars are what spring to mind for me as well. It's Double Star that jumps to my mind first, though.

But sending people is a waste. I definitely want humans to have a presence on Mars, but we can either send a couple people to plant a flag like they did on the moon, or we can send a bunch more robots, really find out what's going on, and discover the origin of the universe at the same time (remember, it's things like the Planck satellite that get slashed by manned missions).

[Monte Davis]

One thing to keep in mind during the perennial debate over manned programs vs. space science within the NASA budget: the latter's share is roughly the same size as the entire NSF budget.

It's not at all clear that space science would do that well if it were hived off and competing on an equal footing with all earth sciences, biology, terrestrial astronomy, etc. In fact, over the years three proposals to do that have died, in part because many space scientists expressed just that doubt.

So keep a doubled perspective: it's quite true that space science is the abused Cinderella of NASA -- and, simultaneously, quite true that it's highly privileged w/r/t other natural sciences.

[Stephen]

My main misgiving about going to the Moon or Mars is the ISS. The International Space station has cost about $100,000,000,000. And what did we get for it? If it was about going to Mars, then where is the research into artificial gravity? Where is the cosmic ray shielding? Where is the coronal mass ejection shielding? Where are the self contained recycled food/water systems? Where are the light weight structures (such as inflatables)? Where are the methods to fight the buildup of fungus, etc.?

Exploration or science - i still want to get my money's worth.