The odds against your being are enormous, while the odds for your being are infinitely small. It is one of the great wonders of the universe that you breathe the air here, living on Earth.
So it is with the stars, the planets – with everything in the universe: the odds are always with nothing and destruction, and always against existence. It is remarkable and extremely unlikely that our planet survived the intense violence of the early solar system, although not without its consequences: after all, there is a prominent theory that it was a collision with a body the size of Mars that created the piece of real estate. the moon cried to our sky.
Miraculously, Earth survived, allowing life – and ultimately our species – to evolve. And as long as there are people around, we’re fascinated by Mars, and we’re more than a little scared of it too.
Much of our popular literature and movies about Mars, such as ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘Invaders from Mars’ and ‘Mars Attacks !,’ assume that there is life on the red planet – but life that is clearly hostile to us and out to get us.
Martian fantasies
Popular culture soon caught up with that science, especially through the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter novels envisioned a time portal connecting Earth and “ Barsoom, ” or Mars, allowing for easy movement between the two. When Carter traveled there in the second part, ‘The Gods of Mars’ (1914), he came across this watery scene:’ To my left the sea stretched out as far as the eye could see, to me only a faint, vague line her up. farther shore, while to my right a mighty river, wide, calm and majestic, flowed between the scarlet banks, and flowed out into the still sea before me. “
Burroughs’ March was very much like our Earth, with all its struggles for power and wealth, and Burroughs had a good explanation for why the planet had no clear water on the surface: the inhabitants had diverted it into underground waterways to prevent it from evaporation. protect and hide it from each other.
Most of Barsoom, he wrote, was instead covered with moss that grew in the dead sea beds that stretched across the planet. A few hidden valleys harbored forests and swamps, as well as warring kingdoms that were once rich in agricultural and mineral treasures foolish enough to rake in each other – and kill their planet at a bargain price.
A home away from home
That is the march that Mark Watney finds in Andy Weir’s brilliant 2011 “The Martian”. Aside from the plants he grows – he’s an accomplished botanist – he’s the only life form on the red planet, lost in a howling sandstorm and left behind by his fellow explorers. Eminently resourceful, he manages to keep himself alive, but not without a lot of scratches.
The odds are emphatically against him, he knows, “If the oxygenator breaks, I will choke,” he says. “If the water reclaimer breaks, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab (the Mars Lander Habitat) breaks, I’ll just explode. If none of these things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve.”
Even with such risks, it is increasingly about the colonization of Mars, now a very real prospect that was once the domain of fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Mars Trilogy’ from the 1990s, consisting of the novels ‘Red Mars’, ‘Green Mars’ and ‘Blue Mars’, states that soon – in 2026, to be precise – we will see that colonization. begin and bring Mars back to life by terraforming and creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere.
The trilogy is also refreshingly utopian, in contrast to the usual bleak attitude of much Mars fiction, in that Robinson envisions how by re-creating the planet we become better, more just people, welcoming strangers into our midst and a true Eden. erect on high.
For his part, Elon Musk, the inventor and entrepreneur, has announced tentative plans to fund a colony of at least 80,000 settlers, placing us directly in the territory of Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer whose 1950 novel ‘The Martian Chronicles’ envisions. a kind of suburban Earth transposed to Mars.
The only problem is that there are Martians already, and when humans land on the red planet in the then distant year 1999, it won’t be long before the Martians hunt them. The Earthlings have their revenge when Bradbury envisions a pandemic that wipes out the Martians and leaves the planet to a new breed of settlers who, as Bradbury suggests, may have been a distant cousin to the vanished Martians.
Musk’s settlers will fly one-way, unlike Weir’s Mark Watney. And even if they did have a return flight, whether or not they would have a planet worth coming home is another matter. Bradbury’s book ends with the people at home turning themselves into oblivion just as surely as the Barsoomians of Burroughs.
His novel is far from the only novel to envision a ruined home planet, a trope that is becoming more common, because indeed we are the only nest we have now. As science fiction vehicles such as “Elysium” and “Blade Runner” have instructed us, Earth is a place we will leave with luck.
Gregory McNamee writes about science, food, geography and many other topics from his home in Arizona. Visit him at www.gregorymcnamee.com.