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By Guest columnist John Paschal is a writer who lives in Memphis.
January 23, 2004
The recent news that NASA's Spirit rover had landed safely on Mars provoked inevitable grumbling from Earthlings who doubt the value of space exploration.
NASA spends too much money for too little return, say the doubters.
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For centuries, humankind traveled to Mars only in myth, speculation and fiction. For the Greeks and the Romans, the Red Planet embodied the bloody god of war. In the Middle Ages, it was part of a Ptolemaic universe that had Earth as the center of creation. For 20th Century fantasists, Mars was home to brainy E.T.s who had built canals on the planet's surface. In popular culture, Mars became home to Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," TV's "My Favorite Martian," Looney Tunes' Marvin the Martian and, for generations of Americans, Little Green Men.
Now we're getting there the right way: with science, not science fiction; in fact, not fantasy. It's easy to be cynical about a far-out space buggy looking for water on Mars when we have bottled water right here at home. It's also easy to condemn science we don't quite understand. Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei learned that the hard way in the 17th Century, when the Church burned Bruno at the stake and exiled Galileo for advocating a Copernican theory of the universe in which the Earth orbits the sun. This is the same universe we explore today, and it is expanding.
A tradition of discovery that includes the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan now has taken us deep into the solar system. But while the current Mars mission has similar nationalistic overtones, it lacks the brutality and human cost of those 15th and 16th Century missions. Our ends on Mars are purely scientific. The Spirit rover's tasks point toward a more soluble cosmos. What better end could there be?
Even as NASA engineers worked Thursday to resolve communications problems with the Spirit rover, we should recall the failures and the unintended benefits of history's explorations. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark failed in their attempts to find a fully navigable Northwest Passage to the Pacific, but they succeeded in charting new territory and scientific data. And when Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle, he couldn't have predicted that the journey would inspire his theory of evolution.
Likewise, we can't always foresee the dividends of our exploration. Effort and epiphany often take place concurrently. But if mankind needs proof of the space program's practical benefits, he can turn to some of its latest spinoff technologies: nano-capsules that destroy cancerous cells; bionic eyes; an infrared photometer that can detect breast cancer.
It seems ironic to criticize the Mars mission as a waste of money. Ordinarily, Americans love to decry the modern world as money-mad and profit-driven, and yet when NASA launches an expedition devoid of profiteering motives, some of us complain about that as well. For my part, I consider it refreshing to turn our attention from a planet that boasts McDonald's franchises in 119 countries to one that has zero Golden Arches. It's especially nice to see Mars rovers - named Spirit and Opportunity, not Assets and Commodities - absent of Pepsi ads.
More important, our exploration of the war god's planetary namesake is especially timely because mankind remains at war with itself: reason vs. superstition, rationality vs. irrationality. In the end, it is science that protects us from the fundamentalist cosmologies of theocratic states. Science marks the reliance on data rather than dogma. Scientists, while leaving plenty of room for the imagination, push humankind further from fiction and closer to fact.
Postmodernism might suggest that the Red Planet as home to Little Green Men is an equally valid claim as the one that confirms Mars as the fourth rock from the sun. But are we, in the name of cultural relativism, to allow tabloid photos of mysterious faces on Mars to coexist with scientific research? Are we to let myth supersede observation?
In Spirit and in Opportunity, humankind justifies both the means and the ends of Mars exploration. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.
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