What to do next after we reach Mars?

Mars. I keep hearing about Mars. All the billionaire internet princelings seem to want to go there.

One’s instinct, of course, is to urge them on. But it makes me think of the moon.

I was 12 when they went to the moon. I remember the gray and white images.

I remember Armstrong hopping down the ladder. And I remember him getting the words wrong.

A small step for man, he said, a giant leap for mankind.

What he meant to say, or more likely what he’d been told to say, was ‘‘a small step for a man,’’ contrasting one little astronaut with the species as a whole.

But he blew it. And when speaking the first words on a planet you don’t get a second go.

The astronauts hopped around in their fish bowl helmets, showed us footprints in the moon dust, dropped a hammer and feather to prove Newton right, and did some big bounces to show how gravity held us back, all of which was good fun.

And I remember going out in the dark and staring at the moon, an orb of silver brilliance, and thinking of men aiming a rocket at it and landing softly and bouncing around in the dust and then taking off and coming all the way back again.

And I was impressed. Not thrilled for the species, not feeling credit by association, not scientifically or technologically excited, and not wanting to go myself, just impressed.

Bravo, I thought. That’s gutsy and that’s clever. But that was that. The moon had been done.

When the next lot went, and the lot after that, I lost interest, stopped watching.

Cricket was more interesting. And fishing. And the first hint of pubic hair.

For what more was there to learn from the moon?

Why bother to pull the same stunt twice?

To the novelty-craving layman there was nothing new. And the layman, I suspect, was bang right.

Illustrative of the whole event was the excitement at the rocks brought back from the moon.

They were held in sealed canisters - who knew what extraterrestrial evils they might harbour? - and were distributed with maximal caution in tiny quantities to laboratories around the world.

We then waited for the boffins to unlock the secrets of the universe. Well, if they did, I never heard about it.

Indeed I never knowingly heard another word about the moon rocks.

I presume they turned out to be just rocks.

As for the giant leap for mankind, well, was it? Was it really? What did going to the moon give us beyond Teflon and a brief sense of wonder?

The Americans got patriotic prestige from planting their flag, and they gave the Soviets one in the eye, but that’s it, and it’s not much.

Hello cosmos, said the flag, we bring you the hallmark of our species, planet-buggering, warinducing petty tribal rivalry.

Going to the moon proved no different to climbing Everest.

It was just king-of-the-castle stuff. Bragging rights. Bravo to the first man up. It had to be done because that’s the nature of our nature. But having been done it was done, and there was nothing more to do but come back

As Hillary well knew. ‘‘We knocked the bastard off,’’ he said and spent the rest of his life near sea-level doing good and useful things.

Of course people keep climbing Everest in the hope that it will validate a life of investment banking.

They pay dollar-a-day sherpas to lug their sleeping bags and oxygen to the highest point on the planet and then onto the wall of the office goes the photo with the sherpas carefully cropped.

Does it work? Is meaning gained? Is the rest of the world impressed?

Forget it. Everest can only be climbed once. The moon will be the next Everest.

The same investment bankers will pay their millions to grinning Branson to fire them out of Cape Canaveral and plant their feet on a bit of rock spinning in nowhere.

And their deed will be of no more virtue or significance than buying a souvenir t-shirt in Greymouth.

There’s nothing on top of Everest, and nothing on the moon.

And there’s less than nothing on Mars. It’s impossibly remote and spectacularly uninhabitable.

There’s no reason to go there other than the one given for climbing Everest – because it’s there.

So of course the princelings will go and one will get there first and we will gasp and clap. But then what?

If he wants to build a colony out there where there is nothing, good luck to him.

But he won’t. He’ll head straight back to the planet we evolved to live on.

And on the long journey home he’ll have time to wonder what it was that he failed to find.