In this short essay, I share some thoughts about tourism on Mars and an internet-famous photo of a human-like figure on the surface of the red planet.
Mars is an unspoiled natural area, protected somewhat by a C02-based atmosphere and a fairly long distance from earth. It also receives a fair amount of UV radiation, due to its lack of a strong magnetic field and resulting thin atmosphere. Oxygen and sunscreen will be big sellers, and entertainment will be crucial in the early days of our settlement there.
Mars has a reddish appearance because of hematitic (iron oxide) dust. In other words, it is rusty; there is rust dust in the atmosphere and on the ground. This rust makes Mars a strange and beautiful place for those of us who have been studying old corrugated metal roofs and the abandoned leavings of industry. It is probably dead tectonically, like a ship in a ship graveyard or an old coal breaker in eastern PA. Beyond the rust, Mars, it seems, is made up primarily of Basalt, a common rock that forms when lava cools rapidly on the surface of a planet. Basalt that hasn’t been exposed to the elements is usually black or gray in color.
As I write this, Mars is not an outpost of human civilization but is home to some of our best seeing and sensing robots. Best if only because they had to travel through treacherous conditions previously insurmountable to our prosthesis. It is amazing that we are driving around by remote control on this rusty marble, however slowly and blindly, and it seems that we learn a lot by the poking, scraping, and snapshotting of these mechanical insects.
One of main products that these robots have exported from the red planet is desire. You can download a program and spin the entire planet around like a basketball in your virtual hands, surveying every detail as if looking for a vacation spot or witness panoramas so sharp that they make you believe that you could just walk up over the hill to see what is on the other side. As relevant as these images are to science what I suspect they engender in most of us is a desire to tour the rubbled surface. It isn’t hard to imagine a dome tent and a campfire out there with maybe a dog, a guy with his baby in a K’tan, his wife further off in the shot, gathering more wood or doing something weekend semi-primitive.
Sometimes I think that we should just leave the whole thing alone, like some kind of no-access bird preserve. There are indications, even now, of what is to come for this little Basalt, rusty gem. Mars Rover Driver, Scott Maxwell, said in an interview for Universe Today that “it makes us happy to just put the petal to the metal and drive.” Watch out Mars! And whenever Opportunity stops long enough at a rock to make all of the fans impatient, I have to wonder what the rover’s little drill has found there. Maybe it sees signs of water, life, or some interesting geologic property, but, maybe, also, it found something in abundance that is required to make cell phone batteries. This is our nature as well as our funding model for such explorations. Always has been.
In fact, the whole endeavor sometimes, and self-consciously so, takes on the tone of much earlier, Earthly voyages. You can write the sentence, “Spirit climbed Husband Hill,” and be transported straight back there with all of the old entrepreneurs, like Lewis & Clarke, deep in the comfort of empire and expansion. Really, how else is there to look at it?
There is a very internet-famous cropping of a Mars panorama that shows what appears to be a humanoid figure, either sitting on a rock or walking down a hill. This is, of course, the virgin Mary in the milk spill of our interplanetary voyaging. Still, I like to imagine this tiny man, all blackened and weathered from the radiation, long hair, able to breathe in the unbreathable, as part of a truly advanced civilization that has learned through one catastrophe after another, not to fuck with things so much and to enjoy wandering around for its own sake in whatever happens.
