Planet Light, Planet Bright

posted at 11:01 am
on Sep. 11, 2003

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Did you go look at Mars?  I didn’t.  I’m a big space geek, but not big enough, apparently, to get off my backside and look at our solar neighbor.

But I did see Mars as I was taking a walk several days ago, and let me tell you, it is an astounding sight.  There are stars in Los Angeles at night.  They look like airplanes frozen in place, only they don’t blink red and green.

There’s a lot of light pollution, and heavy pollution, and I bet on a bad night you can only see 6 or 8 stars.  So I expected Mars to be just like that, but it wasn’t.  Mars was bright, huge, and red.  We’re talking as bright as that white flash spot that appears in the middle of a monitor when you turn it off.  It stands out in the black sky like the little girl in the red dress in the movie Schindler’s List.

And it beckoned.  It glowed, not coyly, but with an internal fire that said, “Hey you.  Yeah, you.  Come over here.”

There are those who say, why should we spend money on space when there are people starving right in our own backyard?

And I say, there have been people starving since before civilization, but civilization is not measured by our individual quotidian lives, but by what we can accomplish working together as a species.  Gophers can keep all members of a colony fed (until times are rough), but they can’t ever create art, pass knowledge on to their young, or push the boundaries of their territory.

We will go to Mars, as surely as we sailed the Atlantic, climbed Everest, set foot on the Moon.  So why not go now? What are we waiting for?

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