| Re: Mars to Earth: Stay home, by David Bright, Viewpoints, January 22 — January 28, 2003.
Regarding the logic of School B a warm wet planet is really all you need for life to begin and thrive. Life doesn’t require a comfortable room-temperature environment to evolve and survive, although certain complex life forms do require air conditioning and cooked hamburger (i.e. humans.) The pervasiveness of life is aptly demonstrated by the life forms found in the harshest extremes on this planet – deserts, polar caps, deep dark oceans, etc. You couldn’t stop life from flourishing here even if you tried, short of blowing the planet to smithereens. Life evolving from the condensation of a hot new planet elsewhere seems highly probable.
Be that as it may, the true alternative is that it is possible, and not identified in Mr. Bright’s column, that even in an infinite space-time universe, an instance could pass where only one planet of life existed at one time, others already dead and others not yet born. Highly unlikely but logically plausible. Our greatest problem in that respect is travelling across incredibly vast distances of space to look for ourselves. I personally have faith that the speed of light is surpassable.
But even given all that, Mr. Bright misses out on the most important attribute of Mars exploration – oil. It’s all about oil, isn’t it? After all, the president of the United States malevolently attacks innocent men, women and children in order to feed the American people the oil they so desperately need, while shamelessly lying about the alleged hostility, weapons threats and human-rights abuses perped by the innocent and honourable leaders of other oil-producing nations. So why wouldn’t el Presidente be looking for oil on other planets? Fuck the Martians; if there was water, and if there was life, then the remains of that life are now underground and coalesced into oil and gas. Terraform for colonization? Movin’ on up to a better place? Humans can’t live on Mars because the gravity difference would turn their bones into a cancerous pulp. Exploration for romantic reasons? Bullshit. It’s for oil, perhaps gold and other materials.
Of course, humans gotta do what humans gotta do, and two of the most conspicuous of human activities are a) exploration of life, and b) seeking justice and payment for serving said justice, say for example, with oil revenues or whatever else the liberated have, aside from carrots and tomatoes, etc.
Neither exploration nor justice come cheap, but if we’re to reduce our activities in either of those areas, could Mr. Bright or anyone else suggest what we should do in the meantime, other than watch Carl Sagan in Cosmos reruns on our rumpus-room HDTVs while the world goes to hell in a handbasket?
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