Photo by Alireza Teimoury, used under a Creative Commons Licensehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/teimoury/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I keep thinking that I ought to feel more today, on the fortieth anniversary of the first steps on the moon, but it's also a reminder of how brief the period of rapid developments in the space program really were. Megan laments the failure of will that kept that period so short, and I think Tom Wolfe's Times piece about the fact that NASA always lacked a corps of intellectuals to keep the rationale for space travel going beyond rivalry with the Soviet Union is probably correct. But I think both of them underestimate that the prospect of of serious, extended space travel and the possible colonization of other planets is simultaneously incredibly exciting and absolutely terrifying. And it's for that reason that I'm so glad Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is making something of a comeback.
One of the key points Robinson makes in Red Mars, the first book in the series, which follows the first 100 settlers as they arrive on Mars and begin to set up an infrastructure to support life--and ultimately set off the processes that will change Mars' atmosphere and geology--is that you have to be slightly insane to commit to leaving Earth forever if you were born there. That insanity isn't a bad thing, from the novels' perspective: it's a necessary condition to get people to commit to leave, and to do the extremely hard work of settlement. What makes Robinson's work so compelling is that this insanity takes a lot of different forms: geologists who are in love with Mars' essential emptiness and vastness, people committed to social revolution that they live out through architecture, scientists who want to take biology further than it can be taken on Earth and view Mars as a clean slate, engineers who love jazz and relish the chance to build something habitable, functional, and beautiful under the most challenging possible conditions, linguists who find homes among different Muslim sects, botanists who come to worship Mars itself. He creates a gorgeous set of characters, and isn't afraid to have them be selfish, murderous, drug-addicted, hopelessly naive in addition to kind, artistic, thoughtful, intelligent: in other words, completely human, up and down the scale.
But the Mars trilogy is highly readable, and increasingly relevant today, not just because it has a terrific cast, but because Robinson takes his hard sci-fi approach and applies it not only to the science of climate change, but to the political questions of how people with various baggage, be it religion, work for vast multi-national corporations, citizenship in countries on opposite sides of the Cold War divide attempt to build a society that avoids the pitfalls of the past, ranging from widespread disease to cataclysmic climate change to vast gaps between the rich and the poor. Reading the books (Blue Mars is by far the weakest in the triology) feels like watching an experiment running in fast-forward. And the problems are eerily relevant. The First 100, for example, come up with a vaccine that reverses many of the effects of aging, leading to a race on Earth for people who want the treatment, even though the people who have access to it tend to be exceedingly wealthy. Earth is literally falling apart, making Mars both a badly-needed escape venue for a crushed planet, and something to be preserved from similar wreckage. Robinson's use of the problems of how to treat Mars as a way to get at the difference between Muslim sects was ahead of its time when it was written, but at the core of issues we discuss in foreign policy today.
Megan and Tom Wolfe are probably correct that we haven't had the leadership to make space travel and exploration possible. But I think we also haven't reached the tipping point on Earth to make it seem urgent, either. When we get there, if we all survive, we will need space, and the ability to make a home on other planets. It'll be terrifying that we've gotten to that point, but hugely exciting if we manage to make it happen.