New Mars

The Standing Room Only event of the Mars Society’s 2nd Annual Convention was without a doubt filmmaker James Cameron’s address to an audience of 700+. How do you top Titanic? What’s the king of the world aiming for next? Mars.

While Cameron talked at length about his two current Mars projects, he also spoke of his own feelings toward human Mars exploration. This article includes a few excerpts from his speech.

Going to Mars is not a luxury we can’t afford - it is a necessity we can’t afford to be without.

Okay, you people are all out of your minds, you know that. You do understand that Mars is really, really far away, and its really, really cold. And you can’t breathe the air, which is so thin it would make your blood boil, so you’re sort of freezing and boiling at the same time. And if you did go there, you couldn’t come back for years. And it would cost millions of dollars per pound to get you there. And there’s nothing there, anyway. We’re talking about the same Mars, right? The Mars Society Mars?

Pardon me for being rude, but have you considered starting up, say - The Fiji Society? You might get more members.

Why the hell do you whackos want to go to Mars?

Well, see that’s the problem isn’t it?

Trying to explain it to people.

Trying to explain to them that going to Mars is in your blood for reasons that are so deeply ingrained and so unquestioned that the logical and rational arguments for going, no matter how compelling, are secondary.

Most people can imagine going - but we, here today, can’t imagine not going.

See, I’m one of the whackos too.

John F. Kennedy inspired Americans to do the impossible - to go from untried sub-orbital rockets in 1961 to landing men on the Moon and returning them safely by 1969.

To go to Mars you have to travel a thousand times further than the Apollo astronauts did. You have to spend two and a half years in space before you can set foot on Earth again.

The task is hugely daunting, in both technical and human terms, and to me at least - and probably most of you here - vastly exciting because of those challenges.

Like many of you, I grew up on a diet of science fiction. We now live in a science fiction world where many of the wonders predicted in those books and bad TV shows are now a reality. We now are on the threshold of achieving the greatest dream of those juvenile science fantasies - to set foot on another planet.

But we are stalled at the threshold.

We are going to have to build this thing up from the grass roots - by infecting the public with Mars fever.

The recent thirty-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing was for me a bittersweet moment. While it reminded me of our greatest dream, it also set into sharp relief how little has been done since then to further that dream.

People of all cultures were stunned by the greatest gift the Apollo program gave us: no - not Tang - it was that indelible image of the whole Earth, seen from beyond low Earth orbit for the first time - an oasis of life in a vast, black void. It sobered and united us all, if only for one brief moment.

But no human has made the journey beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972. With all our technological prowess, we have not sent a man or woman further than 250 miles from the surface of our planet - less than the distance from LA to Modesto - in almost three decades.

No man has seen that whole Earth since then, and no woman has ever seen it.

It’s time to go back out there, not just beyond low-Earth orbit, but to Mars and beyond.

We all want it, but how do we make it happen? You will hear a lot of theories about that here at the convention, and many of them are good.

Involving and incenting the commercial sector is critical, but the quickest and strongest way to do it, short term, is still probably with government funding, which means getting the public on board in a big way.

Building a 100 ton Earth-to-orbit launch system is the work of a nation, or of nations. It is the type of thing we are supposed to have a government for. But the money will only be committed to do it if the politicians believe it’s what people want.

Well, we - in this room - think people want it. Maybe a lot of people.

You’ve all heard the statistic - 700 million hits on the Pathfinder website. in the month after the landing. Now that could be seven people 100 million times each, and if it was, Bob Zubrin was four of them, but I feel pretty confident that what it indicates is a vast groundswell of interest which the political system has yet to understand and acknowledge.

Mars is a place we can just reach, standing on tiptoe.

And I think a lot more people are going to want it when they can get a sense that it is a near term attainable goal, and that the cost is not exorbitant, and when they can appreciate and understand the meaning and the importance of the accomplishment.

So I see the biggest challenge as a marketing challenge, not a technological one. We can figure out the hardware. We can conquer the human factors hurdles. But to do it we have to galvanize the public, make it tangible for them, ignite their passion. Then the next time a Congressman is tempted to make political hay by ripping into the NASA budget, he or she may have to think twice.

If we get the groundswell going, the politicians will lose the courage to be negative, which is probably the best we can hope for.

Times are different. We can’t wait hopefully for a John F. Kennedy to come along and whip congress into a lather.

We are going to have to build this thing up from the grass roots - by infecting the public with Mars fever.

So why spend billions of dollars and risk human lives to send men and women to this bleak and terrible place?

People are always saying - we need to solve our problems right here on Earth before we go spending money out in space. It makes me want to vomit frankly.

Check back in five hundred or a thousand years. People will still be talking about all the problems that need to be solved.

We are never going to reach some utopian plateau where everything is solved so we can then, with lordly confidence, look around us for worlds to conquer as some kind of hobby.

Not spreading ourselves outward into the solar system now, when we have the capability to do so, is one of the problems we have to be solving right here on Earth.

We are really at a turning point. Go forward, or go back. By stopping, by stagnating, we go back.

It will be our collective vision quest, by which we will know ourselves and find the next clue to our destiny.

I look around at the turn of the millennium and see a prosperous, powerful, technologically unparalleled society which, collectively, has no purpose but to feather its own nest.

It is a goal-less, rudderless society, dedicated to increasing security and creature comforts.

Our children are raised in a world without heroes. They are led to believe that heroism consists of throwing a football the furthest, getting the most hangtime during a slam dunk, or selling the most movie tickets with your looks and boyish charm.

This is not heroism, and these are not valid tests of our mettle as an intelligent race.

Young kids need something to dream about, something to measure their value system against. They live in a sea of mind-numbing inputs, a point-and-shoot videogame world where it is hip to not care, where death and violence have no meaning, where leaders are morally bankrupt, and where the scientific quest for understanding is sooo not cool.

Going to Mars is not a luxury we can’t afford - it is a necessity we can’t afford to be without.

We need this, or a challenge like it, to bring us together, to all feel a part of something, to have heroes again.

And there is no challenge on our horizon like Mars,

If we rise to its challenge, we will redefine ourselves and ratchet ourselves another notch up the evolutionary ladder.

In return Mars will reward us with answers to profound questions, and with a renewed sense self-worth as a species.

Survival on the Red Planet will not be easy, but neither will it be impossible. Rather it will be just difficult enough.

Mars is a place we can just reach, standing on tiptoe. To live there will be an awesome task, but one which we can meet

Mars will be the next great test of ourselves. It will test our intelligence, our bravery, our endurance, our questing spirit, our ability to cooperate, and indeed every noble and worthy aspect of human potential.

Just as an Indian boy on the cusp of manhood walks alone in the wasteland on his vision quest, confronting Mars will be a rite of passage for our adolescent civilization.

It will be the mirror in which we face our own emotional, moral and spiritual selves. In its vast sterility we will come to cherish our own bountiful water planet - in its emptiness we will learn to cherish the miracle which is a human life.

It will be our collective vision quest, by which we will know ourselves and find the next clue to our destiny.

When the first man or woman to set foot on Mars creates those historic footprints, every human being on Earth will stand vicariously in those boots at that moment. We will all as one be uplifted and ennobled. We will be energized by the exhilaration of accomplishment, of being a part of the greatest adventure of all.

In an age when the horizons have grown near, when the lands of mystery are as close as the Travel Channel, when everything seems known and tired, with all the wilderness conquered, the human soul is starved for challenge. Only our outbound quest can satisfy this hunger, which is a very real hunger that is at once spiritual, psychological, and emotional, as well as intellectual.

We do this for knowledge, and to hone our technical capabilities. But most of all, we do it for our deepest hearts, which yearn outward.

Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001