I stood in the below-zero wind, my dog circling — quickly — to find the right spot. High above the blue glow of moon on snow, far Jupiter shone. It went crisply about its business of marching at barely perceptible speed, of turning its eye upon us.
Someone trundled by on the street, their high-beams making it suddenly impossible to see Jupiter’s cold cousins, those starry points made of light that took ages to cross the sky and shine on the retina. I wondered — did that driver notice or care that Jupiter was shining?
Me, I’ve always noticed what goes on in the night sky. I had a game when I was a kid — I’d lie down and stare at the stars until I felt like I was on the side of the planet, barely gripping its surface, ready to slide into space. Around those stars, I knew, planets had to circle. And on those planets? Maybe just a chaos of rock, blasted by winds no ear would ever hear. But maybe someone looking back at our ho-hum sun, wondering what’s here. With a near-infinite number of stars, the odds say that’s pretty much got to be true somewhere.
There’s always a churn of news below the distant galaxies — tragedies, performances, war, politics, human trafficking, advertising campaigns, on and on. It’s easy to get caught up in all of it, even to care that there’s a new iPhone and the Republicans have blocked the Democrats again. The last week or two have seen their share of the usual stuff.
But I can’t help but think the biggest news has nothing to do with any of that: Mars One has chosen its final 100 candidates to take a one-way trip to Mars. The finalists will be winnowed down to a smaller group during training and additional testing. The plan is to send teams of four people to Mars every two years starting in 2025. Scoff if you must. Say it doesn’t matter in light of earthbound miseries. Say they’re all crazy — they might be. Put aside the private company’s optimistic timeframe for developing and employing the requisite technology to reach our neighbor planet. Put aside the tenuous and dangerous nature of the undertaking, and it’s hard to avoid a central fact: those 100, and probably most of the 202,000 initial applicants, are embracing a grander-scale vision than the rest of us.
I get it. I aspire to it, even. Though, if you want me to go to Mars (and really, just let me know — it’s no problem), I’m gonna need a return ticket.
The UK’s The Guardian recently produced a video in which the newspaper speaks to four of the candidates (only one of whom made it into the final 100). It’s called “If I Die on Mars,” and it’s not comfortable viewing. I have no idea if these four are representative of the 100 finalists, but if so, we’ve got a strange problem on our hands. That short film, whether it’s a matter of intent or not, creates a portrait of misfits, of our fellow humans who just don’t quite seem comfortable with this whole human gig and its communal necessities.
One of the finalists is a young man who knows his way around a chalkboard full of equations. He tells the interviewer that he’s never had sex, and that he doesn’t really care about such things. He even says that self-pleasure is only a necessity because it protects against prostate cancer. That’s handy, considering that the Martian colonists are expected to be entirely chaste. Though it’s got to eventually occur to the participants that even if they embark on a Caligulan grope-fest, nobody back on Earth can do anything except send a sternly worded radio missive.
In order to undertake Martian colonization, you have to be ready for some pretty severe conditions. It’s very cold on Mars. You can’t breathe the air. There’s nothing to eat, nothing to drink. The only building materials are what little can be stuffed onto a spaceship. The initial colonists have to be able to live in unbelievably tight quarters, in which they’ll grow and produce everything they need to stay alive. It’s easy to imagine that staying alive on Mars will be a full-time job. Once the glamour and romance of standing on another planet wears off, the next few decades for the colonists will be like a relentless form of indoor subsistence farming in Antarctica. And then they’ll die alone but for each other.
Someone who’s good at extreme wilderness survival, not to mention willing never to see friends, family, or Earth again is going to be — will have to be — someone who’s not at all typical of the rest of us. Someone who might well be considered imbalanced or even unwell. That extreme kind of personality will be common to everyone who’s sent to that cold place for a long time. Will we create an outpost of one rather weirdly oriented, unrepresentative subset of human being? It could be worse than Congress. Will Martian culture, if such there eventually is, lack a lot of the emotional qualities that make us the vulnerable, irrational, and artistic creatures we are? It’s not something my science fiction-soaked young mind could have anticipated.
Even so, how wonderful. This Mars thing — this other-planet future is really happening. It’s something worth caring about, something truly grand. No matter how weird our potential Martians are, I’ll cheer them the whole way.•
James Heflin can be contacted at jheflin@valleyadvocate.com.
