San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Mankind’s earthly flaws cloud promise of Mars
With our own world in such distress, it seems reasonable to yearn for another world millions of miles away.
Mars is a planet shrouded in lore and mystery, but it is becoming more and more real, the fog dissipating as our knowledge increases.
Science shrinks the universe, makes it more accessible and attainable, and we see that phenomenon with the red planet.
With technology that would have seemed unfathomable decades ago, the NASA rover has provided us a fascinating glimpse of a fascinating planet — photos that capture the awe and wonder of a strange universe.
The photos reveal a world that seems calm and serene, undisturbed by the chaos on Earth.
“Wispy puffs filled with ice crystals that scattered light from the setting sun, some of them shimmering with colors,” NASA reported in a blog post from the Curiosity rover.
Soft colors smudge the atmosphere, the hues as transparent as bunting, and the images seem both prosaic and breathtaking; they are simple in their elegance, unadorned in their grandeur. We are a community on Earth, but we are a community in the heavens, too, our home a pinprick among pinpricks. We should be honored to live here, among all the floating orbs, but are we?
“In a complete reversal of the ‘we are cosmically insignificant’ discourse, the more we learn about the universe, the more precious we — and all of life — become,” Marcelo Gleiser, a physics and astronomy professor at Dartmouth College, once told NPR.
Inspired by science-fiction novels such as “The War of the Worlds,” in popular culture we have come to view Mars as a menace, distant but fearsome. Do we need an enemy? Are we defined by those who hate us?
“Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets, emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines.”
This lament comes from a character in the Ray Bradbury classic “The Martian Chronicles.” It seems strikingly similar to the regrets we express today — in real life. We are destroying the planet, the chorus goes, and the fear is we will destroy the greatest gift we have ever received — our home.
“Earth’s changing climate is a critical issue and poses the risk of significant environmental, social and economic disruptions around the globe,” according to the American Physical Society. “The potential consequences of climate change are great and the actions taken over the next few decades will determine human influences on the climate for centuries.”
The main enemy may be climate change, but beyond the dangers to our home, there are other threats. COVID-19 is one, but U.S. scientists have been smart and dedicated and resilient. Cases are declining, and life is returning to normal.
One of the biggest threats seems to come from us, from the way we treat each other. Hate is a powerful and ugly emotion — an emotion which, if unchecked, can morph into a tsunami of self-destruction. It does not endanger the planet, but it endangers the people on the planet.
Mass shootings are rampant, and hate crimes are rising, with people conflating what they see as the transgressions of one group with the culpability of another. We witnessed this dynamic after the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. American Jews had nothing to do with the attacks, but antisemitic attacks arose almost immediately afterward.
“I will not allow our fellow Americans to be intimidated or attacked because of who they are or the faith they practice,” President Joe Biden said. “We cannot allow the toxic combination of hatred, dangerous lies and conspiracy theories to put our fellow Americans at risk.”
In his classic science fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “the greatest danger to man in space was man himself.”
We can yearn for a new life on Mars, a planet unspoiled by the hostility of an invasive species. But we can never escape ourselves, and until we learn how to live together, replacing hate with love, a new home would be the same as the old home.