A month ago the NASA’s Phoenix Lander touched down perfectly on the surface of Mars. I sat at my desk, eyes glued to NASA’s live stream of the event on their website. I was excited and mass-texted family and friends when the signal came back that all was well.
While there it’ll look for ice which it may have already discovered to be a very true possibility. The importance of the ice is the frozen water. The importance of the frozen water is the potential life within. It’s got a mobile arm with a shovel-like tool at the end for collecting samples and is set up with an atomic force microscope, high-tech cameras and mass spectrometer–along with a few more bells and whistles including large solar panels to power it all up.
This blog entry isn’t about relating all the coolness of the Phoenix Lander’s onsite tech and how it all works and such. It’s about something I believe is the greatest and most earth-moving potential of NASA’s efforts: Finding life. ANY life!
Even if the most basic of organism is found within Mars’ H2O it could shift the fundamentals of human philosophy, social behaviour, political relationships–one puny little thing could help unite us as ONE race–help us come to the awareness of a greater commonality between us all. Any sign of life is enough to reinforce the theory that life DOES exist out in space, somewhere, just too far for us to see and interact with still.
My brain was flooded with possibilities, but one stood out as the most important one of all: We need to get a group of people on Mars ASAP! We need to get a human perspective of the whole thing, like Neil Armstrong gave us when he touched his feet on the moon for the first time. We need that kind of drama once again to get the world moving with excitement about working together to get the heck off this planet and finding new places to explore and–hell, I’ll go there–LIVE!
I mean why not? If the right pieces are in place then new technologies pushing the boundaries of terraforming opportunity could be developed. Imagine a new home planet where energy WOULD be natural and self sustainable? Solar panels and even wind mills would be the norm in energy collection. No coal. No nuclear. Clean start.
I’m siding with the whole Total Recall scenario of biodome-like structures that produce oxygen for those inside… connected with tunnels to other biodomes. I actually found the term to all this by accident while reading the Wikipedia entry on terraforming. These habitable domes are a form of “paraterraforming”. Oh, and as a side note, if women start growing a third breast as per the movie, I’ll still love them the same. Perhaps 33.3% more actually.
I love the Count; he taught me all about numbers.
I’d move to Mars instantly! If it’s affordable of course. I mean, losing my life trying to get up there should be the bigger of concerns, right? But imagine if you did get up there? The vastness of emotional and psychological impact it would have on your way of thinking about “the world” and being able to leave everything you disagree with behind on Earth–for the Earthling to deal with. I’d be a Martian now, living under a new set of rules and laws, preferably democratic, but I’d take military ruler any day just to be there. Martial law, heh, on Martian soil–how fitting. For those of you who don’t get it: Mars is a Roman god of war, and thus where our etymology for both these words came from. Hey, anyone else start thinking “marital” also sounds close?
This leads me to my next point: Sending soldiers. The very day I thought it I found news in my RSS aggregator confirming I wasn’t the only one thinking it. It excited me further when the article I was reading was about a Sergeant who would be willing to take the trip to Mars with his men–ONE WAY if need be!
This guy became one of my personal heroes immediately! Sergeant First Class William H. Ruth III states:
While reading Jim McLane and Nancy Atkinson’s thoughts on Space Colonization, I started to realize that we ‘ALL’ have lost our way. We have become so consumed by petty differences and dislikes of others that we all have forgotten our pre destiny of something better.
He takes it all a step further though by suggesting that not only one nation be responsible for sending their troops to Mars, but instead, have heroes of multiple countries join together as a human race out to make the ultimate sacrifice of something greater than one man’s idea.
3rd Platoon at Fire Base Ter-Wa, April 2008. SFC Ruth is first on the left. (Source)
Soldiers represent a group of highly trained individuals with the ability to survive in hostile environments. Of course, it makes sense to train them further with what’s necessary to push their REAL limits in an environment unlike anything they could ever encounter on Earth.
I want to clarify that when I type “soldier” here I only support high level units, not cold-hearted, insensitive individuals who throw puppies off cliffs. If you DO take soldiers like that up to Mars, be sure to treat him like a kobold in a dungeon crawl, make him walk 15 feet ahead, if something goes wrong, stop moving or back up if he hits the ground limp. Kinda like the good old days of sending a canary down a mine to test if the oxygen levels were sufficient to proceed. If the canary passed out, you left the mine shaft. No point in going on and on about this, I hope my point is now clear if it wasn’t before.
Unfortunately just the trip to Mars could take 2 years. Two years in incredibly uncomfortable conditions. It’s my opinion that a Mars trips isn’t just a physical one for a human being; it’s an extreme mental one. Aka: No quack-jobs on site please!
There’s a group out there called Mars Society, composed of 7000 multinational members determined to reach the red planet. They test these very limits by trekking out into the barren Arctic or Utah deserts with teams of volunteers. The European Space Agency and the Russian Institute of Biomedial Problems are testing these human limits as well by locking away 12 volunteers for 520 days with contact limited to 44-minute delay calls with mission control.
Whatever way organizations can begin testing the human psyche the better. I’d like to see an attempt at mini-colonization–even if it’s just 12 people–within my life time.
And I want a person, not a machine, to tell me there are no mosquitoes there.
Twitter Updates for 2008-06-28
I can’t even express how much I respect this guy. How often can I say, “Wow this whole album frigging rocks my clean socks off!” to a pro-released album nowadays? It’s rare as unicorn poop. (OK maybe not that rare: aka IMPOSSIBLE… since unicorns don’t exist and all… 
