New Mars

The Mars Society’s annual convention represents the high point of the year for a worldwide community of members, meeting to discuss the latest developments in Mars-related science, public and political outreach, education and the arts. Patrick Banks writes a retrospective of the Mars Society after it returned once again to Boulder, Colorado for its fifth convention in August.

Each August since 1998, The Mars Society’s annual convention has brought together hundreds of would-be Martians for four exciting days of Mars, Mars and more Mars. This fifth such gathering, held August 8 through 11 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, offered up the usual eclectic blend of topics for attendees to choose, from the latest findings from NASA’s robot probes to how Mars ought to be governed, as well as outreach activities, mission architecture, and so on.

All the rushing around from session to session, the much needed rests on the patio, the Saturday night banquet and catching up with old friends, for me, at least, has given each convention a similar feel, even to the point where one convention seems much like the next. The return of the convention to Boulder this year certainly heightened that sensation.

Yet it also had the opposite effect. The return to Boulder brought back fond memories of the founding convention – memories that served to remind me how far we’ve come these past four years. Four years ago, The Mars Society was basically a collection of people who had either read Case for Mars or were veterans of the old Mars Underground. Four years ago, 800 of us came to Boulder armed with an idea, and in many cases, technical expertise.

In just four years, The Mars Society has been able use the enthusiasm and talent of its members to build two analog research stations, with two more on the way. If all goes well, The Mars Gravity Biosatellite, a.k.a. Translife, will in a few years time send mice into space to determine how well they and their offspring fare in Mars equivalent gravity for extended periods of time. The German chapter of the Mars Society hopes to send a balloon mission to Mars. Other chapters are working on various projects ranging from designing a pressurize rover to getting congressmen to mention Mars on the House floor.

In short, it would seem The Mars Society is living up to its statement of purpose, quoted in part below:

By starting small, with hitchhiker payloads on government funded missions, we intend to mobilize public support for allocating resources that will enable stand-alone private robotic missions and ultimately human exploration and colonization of Mars.

Admittedly, we haven’t had any hitchhiker payloads go to Mars with any NASA probes, but you get the idea. The Jacques Cousteau method, as Robert Zubrin calls it, of building credibility with progressively more ambitious projects seems to be working for The Mars Society. FMARS (Arctic Station) and MDRS (Desert Station) have been huge successes. Hell, MDRS was even featured in a Zippy the Pinhead cartoon strip! If the Translife mission is similarly successful, who knows what we will be able to do next.

Of course, we’ll need more than Zippy’s support if we ever want to get to Mars. To do that, we need the support of the pinheads in the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament and the Russian Duma. So where do we stand in that regard? Let’s look back again, this time to Robert Zubrin’s opening address at the founding convention in 1998.

At the time, Zubrin said he believed the best time to initiate a humans to Mars program would be in 2001, when a new administration would take control of the White House. When I re-read that, I almost had to chuckle. Obviously, the man who made it to the top of the greasy pole, one George W. Bush, didn’t quite have the vision we were hoping for. But further up in that same paragraph Zubrin said something that seems quite chilling when read today.

We live in a unique time… Starting with World War II and going through the Cold War, literally trillions of dollars have been spent to build up masses of military industrial capabilities, largely for defense purposes. Those capabilities have now been liberated from that purpose and are now available to undertake a major new set of objectives for humanity. I believe that this juncture won’t last forever. For one of two reasons: either the peace will hold, in which case, if there is no other use for these capabilities they will tend to wither away and not be available; or peace will not hold, and they will have to be rededicated for military purposes.

It’s fair to say the peace didn’t hold. It’s been nearly a year since nineteen box-cutter wielding fanatics crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, murdering 3000 people and plunging us into war. It’s true the U.S. and its allies have destroyed significant parts of al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that gave them shelter. Even so, the war is most likely still in its early stages. The Bush Administration seems to be slowly but surely making plans to invade Iraq, and if the newly formulated Bush Doctrine of preemption is carried out, we may find ourselves at war with other countries and organizations that threaten our national security years after Saddam Hussein has been forced into retirement.

What does this new geopolitical reality bode for the prospects of human exploration and colonization of Mars? Did the post-Cold War window opportunity Zubrin spoke of close permanently on September 11? I don’t think so. The ‘war on terrorism’ is going to be expensive, but I doubt it will consume all or most of the resources of our economy. It will certainly be tough to convince our elected officials to support such a mission, but it would still be tough to get their support even if we were still at peace.

We need to remember the job of actually colonizing Mars, of giving birth to a new civilization is a long term project – more long-term than any war. A lot of people in The Mars Society compare such a project to building cathedrals. Zubrin used exactly that example in the same address quoted above.

At the end of the first millennium, Europe had just emerged numerous of barbarian invasions and apocalyptic delusions. To celebrate, they built churches. Churches, nay, cathedrals of stone, not those glorified barns that had a bad habit of burning down. Magnificent cathedrals to celebrate a new era of peace!

Except it wasn’t a new era of piece. It was the Middle Ages. There were all the usual crusades, blood feuds between princes and kings and emperors and popes and anti-popes going on that made the Middle Ages such a miserable time to be alive, at least by our standards. Even so, those first centuries after the turn of the millennium were a vast improvement over the centuries preceding it. And it wasn’t just all those new cathedrals that were an improvement. The first universities were established. Classical philosophy began to make its way back into European thought. Marco Polo visited and wrote of the wonders of the Orient. Sure, it was still the medieval era, but the Dark Ages were over.

So, fellow Martians, let’s build some cathedrals. Let’s go to Mars. There may be some dark times ahead, but the ravaged 20th century is over.

Filed under: Articles on August 20th, 2002