The hem and the haw of the planet of war
We — the royal we, because I personally did not do shit — landed an SUV on a planet that, at its closest, is about 34 million miles away. We did it with a giant sky crane, a feat of engineering that’s staggering, and the whole thing had to be programmed beforehand because Mars is so far away that one way messages are four to 24 minutes to get there, depending on how close it is to us at any given moment.
And NASA took a video of the descent, to come Monday, and here it is:
It’s been on my mind this week after starting a new job and getting thrust into editing news, and space news. Some of you who have seen my typos here may think what business does he have being an editor. And to you I say … I don’t like reading my own writing. Someone else’s is fine.
Mars is a weird place to get captivated by, and an even weirder place to think of humans going to. Cold. Unrelentingly harsh. Toxic soil. Drrrrrrrrrry. Radiation battered. Only the most tenuous of atmospheres. People like Elon Musk think we will simply waltz there and do fine, with a little hard work and a can do attitude.
There isn’t really another Earth. And there’s not really another world. Much in the same way that some strains of religion have the thought that caring for and nurturing for Earth isn’t important because the kingdom of Heaven is around the corner, there’s some romantic notion of an afterlife for humans on Mars, all of which tends to avoid the idea of taking care of things here first.
We need to flip Pascal’s wager on its head.
Pascal’s wager is the idea that we will never know on Earth if there is a god, but we should act as if there is in order to prepare for the best possible outcome when we die. But if you couple that with apocalyptic strains of evangelicalism, you have the sorts of people for whom this world is superfluous.
And you have supposedly rational thinkers who seem to believe that an easier solution than addressing problems on Earth is to simply yeet ourselves to inhospitable other worlds or place ourselves in a space tube run by a shell-less billionaire turtle.
We should instead wager that this is all there is, and we live for so little of a time in the scheme of things, that we should treat this as the only place we’ll ever be, and that there’s no kingdom of Heaven to be ours, nor another Earth waiting for us. At the very least, perhaps, we shouldn't believe in biblical endtimes and assume the idea that, if there is a divine, we should ensure its worlds should be preserved until a more natural end occurs.
Let’s nurture what we have. Let’s nurture each other. If there is a kingdom to be found after this, and we’ve proven ourselves worthy by being good caretakers for our planet, then it’s all the better.
But listen, even if we don’t move to Mars, we can still drop new robots there now and then. As a treat.