WTF MARS?
Let's ask Abraham Lincoln.
In October of 1818, nine-year old Abraham Lincoln lost his mother, Nancy, most likely due to the milk she had consumed from cows that had eaten the white snakeroot perennial, which contains the toxin tremetol. Four years later, and with the support of his stepmother, Sarah, Lincoln set out alone on a long journey from the tiny farm cabin the family called home, to begin the 2nd short bit of his only formal education. Estimates suggest the 4 mile journey could have taken up to 3 hours each way, depending on weather conditions. Just try to imagine that day's circumstances of poverty, when local resources were very limited. What good reasons would have allowed the Lincoln family to spend that much expensive time and energy for Abe to cross a relative wilderness, just so he could spend a few hours between journeys discovering new information not likely to reap any obvious rewards at home? Each hour he walked would have required at least 120 calories of food, and that's just for starters in terms of costs and risks, with no obvious payback.
No one back then knew what would happen some 40 years later, when Lincoln's brain was challenged beyond reasonable expectations to problem solve the very survival of the United States of America to free the African American slaves. And he succeeded, on both counts. Imagine the state of the Union today, had Lincoln not made those risky and expensive journeys of learning in his youth, and had instead listened those who suggested he should stay at home, and status-quo produce by working the land?
Again...
Why The Fuck MARS?
Let's now ask the rocket scientists, well, after this short preamble.
Could it be that to go there inspires forth the absolutely best stuff in humanity, in terms of our evolution into the future, and despite all good arguments that we ought to first get our act together here at home, on this planet? This thought captures a fundamental concept in both human history and evolutionary biology, of just how unique to adaptation the human brain can be. It's often been postulated that human beings thrive on challenges, and decay without them. And the very journey itself, including all its risks and stress factors, does interesting things to the brain and the many scales of environments, including social, it interacts with.
"The Mars Underground" video, first produced in 2007 but now with updates from this decade's knowledge base, hosted by Dr. Robert Zubrin, a NASA aerospace engineer and founder of the Mars Society, is a powerfully informative 1-hour documentary that deeply explores, well, Mars of course. But perhaps more significantly, it explores the human potential, relevant to our here and now highly endangered world. At your leisure you will be richly rewarded by spending quality time with the whole hour and ten minutes of it, absorbing and critically thinking the information, including the historic. For it critically engages, with simple terminology and visually stunning graphics, all the right scientific, philosophical and political/socioeconomic questions. And it looks to a future where humanity could diverge from many of the historic inertias that continuously bind us to a vestigial world view, including the oligarchic and religious, which keeps leading us to repeating, in increasingly global-scale impacts, so much of our present-day irrational inhumanity.
Remember, every historic – and, from all evidence, prehistoric – human step of going where none have gone before towards whatever knowledge, comforts and lack of stressors many of us might enjoy today, relative to even some decades ago, has always occurred from the platform of that contemporaneous society's often violently self-destructive narcissistic politics (as judged by contemporary humanistic and scientific standards). Think of the horrific American slave world of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and certainly that of Europe's Christian genocital empire building of Columbus' time, never mind the more modern contemporaneous hells of battling for civil/equal rights, ongoing racism, religious/nationalistic fundamentalism (to wit, the double standard employed by FBI's J. Edgar Hoover), Vietnam War/Cold War etc of Neil Armstrong's historic moment of glory. And we learn... perhaps not as fast as we truly should in too many cases. But we learn.
Our ability to ever better model complex systems, from the human brain to the interactive sum total of all the planet's ecosystems -- the biosphere -- and the anthropogenic factors in climate change , including its social impacts, are largely due to scientific seeds necessarily nurtured forth by the 1960's projects that led to Neil Armstrong putting a human footprint on the moon in less than a decade of imaginative and rational work. This is also the decade, during which the co-founder of Intel, Gordon E. Moore, noticed that the number of data-crunching components per area of integrated circuitry appeared to double every year or two, leading to what's commonly referenced as Moore's (exponential growth of microcircuitry) Law. Well, computing is currently reaching towards platform scales and speeds better defined by quantum mechanics, which theoretically makes Moore's Law virtually irrelevant from various scientific POV's. And from this multidisciplinary work's cutting edge, mostly by having been technologically better able to define the anthropogenic problem via a world community on the same page, solutions are emerging to help solve humanity's worst self-wrought nightmares... as well as those theoretically threatening us from space or from beneath the ground we walk on, or from the micro-organic world of diseases.
In fact, everything that we've learned which is thermodynamically irrational about present-day anthropogenic greenhouse discharges, leading to global warming, actually can be utilized to theoretically evoke an atmosphere on Mars within a century, according to studies, which sets the stage for realistic Terraforming.
"Many people think the universe has a big sign on it that says, 'Do not touch,'" states NASA astro-geophysicist, Chris McKay, at minute 1:08:33. "...I can respect that view, although I disagree with it. I think the universe has a big sign on it that says, 'Go forth and spread life.' Because when I look around at the universe, I think life is the most amazing thing we see. It is just incredible. We human beings are uniquely positioned to help spread life... Earth's gift to the universe, I think, is the gift of life..." In terms of purely thermodynamic principles, systems that intelligently spread life make rational sense.
Among the many others you will meet in the documentary is former shuttle astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz. He eloquently begins a discussion on some psychological issues, including that most basic one which can evoke all sorts of behaviors and decision making, for good or for bad: fear.
The overall socioeconomic, historic and scientific insights featured here, articulated and graphically illustrated by a world community of scientists, engineers, critical thinkers and students, comes very close to the cooperative international community of a world without borders, as philosophically envisioned by Gene Roddenberry via Star Trek.
It is not coincidental that Roddenberry's vision, which developed out of seeing the world for what it is through an adolescence and early adulthood that included observations of deep racism, poverty and empire building, and World War II... and then McCarthyism, Korea, a Cold War fought violently hot by proxy via banana republics in the Americas, Vietnam etc... grew into a weekly fictional plot-line on television during the Apollo years of humans factually crossing the most dangerous boundary ever.
If we get down to it, including looking at how the Ebola Epidemic was fought once the world listened to the international scientific community, there really is a cooperative world without borders on this planet. It's always just a keyboard or touchscreen away. And as I think this, John Lennon's, "Imagine," resonates in my brain yet again.
We began this IFZ journey to Mars by asking Abraham Lincoln why. So now let's ask John F. Kennedy. He responds quite directly and dramatically in 2 minutes here, or just read two more sentences below for the sound-bite
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things (accomplishments and aspirations), not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
--President John F Kennedy, September 12, 1962
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