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 A Deep Breathby Stuart Atkinson Page 2 of 2 There will be those who will laugh at the tragedy - we must ignore them.
There will be those who will mock us for feeling and expressing such
disappointment- we must walk away from them. There will be those who will
despair - we must comfort them. There will be those who will be enraged -
we must make them smile again.
Most important of all, there will be those who will want to stop it all, and retreat from Mars, from the future. We must take their hands and lead them on. And if they won't follow, we must leave them behind and carry on without them. There is much to think about. As we stubbornly continue to strain to hear chirps or cheeps in the crackling static coming from Mars, we need to think very carefully about our reliance on machines and software. Robot probes are cheap, fairly. Reliable, usually. Versatile, generally. But they are cold, soul-less. They can have an identity, but can never have a heart. The photographs they send back are taken without thinking, as a result of programming. They take photos because their software tells them to, not because they are moved to. There's something missing. We open our hands and set free our precious metal butterlies, watch them flutter away, carried on the solar wind towards a blood-red orchid of a world, and can do nothing except cross our fingers. And all too often Mars devours them, leaving nothing behind but lost dreams and broken promises. We curse, and sigh, then pick up our tools and start to build another butterfly. But each time something inside us is lost. Enough. We need to make Mars a real place, a real world, to give it an identity in the minds of 21st century humanity. At the moment it is just an elaborate rock-strewn film set, photographed and roamed by robots; Capricorn One without the limited budget. We need more. We need to stop people thinking of it an an alien world and make it a real one. And the only way we can do that is to go there in person, to actually see it, actually hear it, actually touch the rocks and the dust on which they lay. We need people on Mars. Because as scientifically valuable as they are, robot photos of rocks are just that. We need descriptions of the surface of Mars written by people who have been there. We need to look at photos taken by men and women with real, hand-held cameras. We need a martian Mary Chapin Carpenter to write us haunting ballads describing what it's like to lie in bed and hear the desert winds whispering in the night. We need an Albert Bierstadt to capture in paint the glory of dawn breaking through the canyons of Valles Marineris. We need a 21st century John Muir to capture in words the heart-aching beauty of watching Earth rise up from behind the slopes of Olympus Mons. We need to hear the beating of human hearts on Mars, not the hissing of hydraulics and gears. Then, and *only* then, will it be Real. The Mars Polar Lander - my "Butterfly" - may be lost to us, along with its discoveries and potential rewards, but we should take comfort in the knowledge that it will not be lost forever. In some unknown future year an explorer, colonist or Settler will stumble upon the landing site, and whatever she finds - a craterful of rusted debris, a turned-turtle husk or an erect, wind-eroded monument - she'll kneel down beside it in the orange dust and shake her head in wonder at how such a frail, fragile-looking thing could reach Mars at all. And as she radios in her discovery, to the delight of the members of Mars Heritage back at the Settlement, she'll touch its metal skeleton with her gloved hand, and feel pride, and joy... and immense gratitude. Gratitude that, in spite of heart-wounding failures and crushing disappointments, the very first martians, back in the closing years of the most bloody century in human history, held on to their dream and tried again. And again. And again. Until they triumphed. That triumph will come when the first man or woman on Mars stamps their bootprint into the icy duricrust, but there is much work to do before then. So, when you think about what we've lost, shout by all means. Punch the wall if you want to, if it'll make you feel better. Do whatever you have to do to vent your frustrations and disappointment. And when you're done, pull on a coat, go outside and look for Mars, and when you find it tell it this: Nothing Ends here. You want to test us, make us prove ourselves worthy? Fine, go ahead. Take your best shot. But we'll beat you. One day, we'll beat you. Then take a deep breath, turn away from that red flame, go home, and do what you can to Make It Happen. Stuart Atkinson Copyright© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Stuart Atkinson, sffworld.com. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author. |
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