We’ll soon drill a hole in another planet

We, the people of the planet Earth, have sent an astonishingly complicated mechanical busybody to another planet that whizzes around the same sun ours does.

The nosy contraption is on Mars and already taking pictures, which show wide expanses of nothing. When it gets settled, it will dig a 16-foot-deep hole in Mars to see what it’s made of.

If a machine from scientists on Mars flopped down someplace on Earth and started drilling holes, there would be outraged complaints, and the president would probably build a wall around it.

Fortunately, the number of scientists on Mars, or any other living creatures of any consequence, seems to be zero.

Mars was named for the ancient Roman god of war. All of our solar system’s nine planets (or eight, but that’s an argument for another day) are named for Roman gods except Uranus, which is Greek, and Earth, which is Old English.

The official names of the planets and moons and any other objects in space and also landscape features on those bodies, such as craters and hills, are governed by the International Astronomical Union, established 100 years ago by a bunch of astronomers from all over the world.

The idea of going to Mars has been fascinating people for a long while. Thoughts of traveling to the moon have been around even longer. A Greek named Lucan wrote a fantasy about going to the moon in 79 A.D.

Famous writers produced tales about trips to the moon, including Dante, Cyrano, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Hans Christian Anderson, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, all between the 14th century and 1901.

Stories of travel to Mars mostly came later, and I don’t think any was done by famous writers until 1898, when H.G. Wells wrote “The War of the Worlds,” which told of Martians attacking England.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, who in 1912 created his first “Tarzan of the Apes” novel, in the same year wrote “A Princess of Mars,” starring an Earth man named John Carter visiting that planet. He turned out nine sequels over the next 30 years.

Science fiction about Mars took some strange forms through the years. Aleksey Tolstoy (not Leo) in 1922 wrote about a Russian expedition to Mars trying to organize a communist revolution against the Martian rulers. Great Britain’s C.S. Lewis in the ‘30s and ‘40s wrote “Out of the Silent Planet” and two sequels, which were essentially religious science fiction.

Mars was seriously overworked in science fiction through the 20th century by well-known writers and lesser-known ones by the dozen.

The idea of an inhabited Mars got rammed into American culture in 1938, when actor Orson Welles turned his usual Sunday evening radio drama into a series of simulated emergency news broadcasts describing giant creatures from Mars arriving in New Jersey and causing death and destruction. Many listeners took it seriously, causing some riotous behavior as people fled or prepared to fight the monsters.

Ray Bradbury, a major science fiction writer, produced “The Martian Chronicles” in 1950, presenting many aspects of Earthlings interacting with Martians.

One Bradbury story describes the first Earth astronauts landing on Mars being ignored by Martians they meet and finally tossed into an insane asylum, where they find that being from another planet was a common delusion.

I hope the Martians let our machine drill a hole in their ground.