Mars and the Mind of Man

"It captures a unique moment in the history of human discovery. It’s a combination of the transcript of that panel discussion – which took place the day before the Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit Mars in 1971 – and essays that the panel participants wrote roughly one year later. The transcript and the essays book-end one of the most spectacular unveilings we’ve had in the history of solar system exploration. Before Mariner 9 got to Mars, we thought it might be another pockmarked ball like the moon, probably not a place that could have ever harboured life or even had interesting geological phenomena. Once Mariner 9 arrived and the dust cleared, what was revealed to its cameras was nothing less than a geological wonderland. We saw enormous volcanoes towering above surrounding plains, one of which was three times the height of Mt Everest. We saw a giant canyon, as wide as the United States. We saw ancient river valleys that were once carved by flowing water, even though today liquid water cannot exist on Mars because the atmosphere is so thin and the pressure is too low. And we found a kind of climatic time capsule – interbedded layers of dust and ice at the polar caps that reveal thousands of years of Martian climate history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book combines the scientific with the poetic. It includes a couple of poems by Ray Bradbury , whom I think of as the poet laureate of space. To hear him, Arthur C Clarke, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan and Walter Sullivan all discussing Mars, its relationship to humanity and its claim on our imaginations, is like listening to the tribal elders debate the meaning of the universe. Mars has been a Rorschach test for us over the centuries, as I wrote in my own Mars book. Mars is the most compelling destination we have in space, in that it is potentially an abode for life, past or present, and it may even someday become a second home for humanity. For those reasons Mars is a very compelling target but it’s also a tremendously difficult target. The atmosphere is extremely thin and there is a lot of deadly radiation from the sun. We aren’t ready to go yet. We’d learn a tremendous amount by going back to our moon and we’d learn a tremendous amount by going to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which could also serve as a base for astronauts to tele-operate robots on the surface of Mars. But ultimately, Mars is the place to reach for because it is a world with a story to tell. It’s a place where life might once have existed and might still exist, if you drill down past the deadly radiation on the surface. It’s the best place we have to try to homestead. It’s a resource-rich place. It has ice, which you could melt for water or break down into hydrogen and oxygen to make fuel for the trip back. Over decades of work we could figure out how to live there and establish another foothold for humanity. As I detail in A Passion for Mars , I consider it to be humanity’s Mt Everest. It’s going to take all of the ingenuity, perseverance and hard work that we can muster to climb that mountain. There are so many technical, medical and psychological challenges that stand in the way. Not to mention costs. But it is within reach. I’m very optimistic because I see the ingenuity at companies like SpaceX in California and Blue Origin, which is run by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. There are many companies committed to finding ways to get humans into space without breaking the bank and in a way that’s sustainable – two things NASA has never been able to achieve. We’re witnessing the beginning of a new era. Over the last several decades, NASA has had diminishing resources and very expensive projects to maintain, like the space station and the space shuttle. We’re entering a new era of invention in which NASA has the freedom to devote resources to develop new technologies, to allow us to leave the vicinity of earth and venture out, as we did with Apollo. Show him the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle on the SpaceX website . It will be powerful enough to send people back to the moon. There is a lot that’s coming up. Right now we’re at a point where people are holding on to what’s come before and saying it can’t be any other way. But others are moving full-speed ahead. When your son is able to have his honeymoon in low earth orbit, that’s going to be tremendously exciting. When we start looking up at the moon and seeing it as a place where people are living, making discoveries, and working make us a multi-planet species, that’s going to be tremendously exciting. And someday, maybe in your son’s lifetime, we will be able to look up at Mars and hear human voices transmitted from it. Then it will definitely be the stuff of story books as well as science books."