The chances of you being you are huge, while the chances of you being you are infinitesimal. It is one of the great wonders of the universe that you are here, living on Earth, breathing the air.
So it is with the stars, the planets – with everything in the universe: the odds are always with nothingness and annihilation, 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 marks: After all, a prominent theory holds, it was a collision with a Mars-sized body that knocked over the piece of real estate called the Moon in our sky.
Miraculously, the Earth survived, allowing life – and, eventually, our species – to evolve. And, since humans exist, we are fascinated by Mars, and we are very afraid of it too.
Much of our popular literature and films on 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 markedly hostile to ours and out to catch us.
Martian costumes
Popular culture soon caught up with this science, especially through the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter novels imagined that a time portal connected Earth and “Barsoom”, or Mars, allowing for easy movement between the two. When Carter traveled there in the second volume, “The Gods of Mars” (1914), he found this watery scene: “To my left, the sea stretched as far as the eye could see, just a vague, faint line before me. it indicated its other bank, while to my right a powerful, wide, placid and majestic river ran between the scarlet banks to flow into the tranquil sea before me. “
Burroughs’ Mars was very similar to our Earth, with all its struggles for power and wealth, and Burroughs had a good explanation for why the planet had no water evident on the surface: its inhabitants diverted it to underground channels, to protect it from evaporation and hide it from each other.
Most of Barsoom, he wrote, was covered with moss that grew on the bottom of the dead sea that stretched across the planet. Some hidden valleys housed forests and swamps, as well as warrior kingdoms once rich in agricultural and mineral treasures that are foolish enough to kill each other – and kill their planet in the bargain.
A home away from home
This is the Mars that Mark Watney finds in Andy Weir’s brilliant 2011 “The Martian”. In addition to the plants he grows – he is a talented botanist – he is the only life form on the red planet, having been lost in a howling sandstorm and abandoned by his fellow explorers. Eminently ingenious, he manages to stay alive, but not without many scratches.
The odds are emphatically against him, he knows: “If the oxygenator breaks down, I will suffocate,” he says. “If the water reclaimer breaks down, I will die of thirst. If the Hab (the Habitat on the Mars landing module) breaks down, I will explode. If none of these things happen, I will end up running out of food and starving.”
Even with such risks, the conversation is increasingly turning to the colonization of Mars, now a very real perspective that was once the territory of fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy”, from the 1990s, composed by the novels “Red Mars”, “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars”, postulates that soon – in 2026, to be exact – we will begin this colonization, bringing Mars back to life by terraforming and creating an oxygenated atmosphere.
The trilogy is also refreshingly utopian, in contrast to the usual dark posture of much of the fiction created on Mars, in which Robinson imagines how, in remaking the planet, we will become better and more just people, welcoming strangers into our environment and founding a true Eden High.
In turn, Elon Musk, the inventor and entrepreneur, announced preliminary plans to finance a colony of at least 80,000 settlers, which puts us directly in the territory of Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer whose 1950s novel “The Martian Chronicles” predicts a kind of suburban Earth transposed to Mars.
The only problem is that the Martians are already there, and when humans land on the red planet in the then distant year of 1999, it didn’t take long for the Martians to hunt them down. Earthlings take revenge when Bradbury imagines a pandemic that annihilates Martians, leaving the planet for a new generation of settlers who may, Bradbury suggests, have been a distant cousin to missing Martians.
Musk settlers will be flying with one-way tickets, unlike Mark Watney de Weir. And even if they had a return ticket, whether they would have a planet worth going home to is another matter. Bradbury’s book ends with people coming home bombing themselves into oblivion as surely as the Burroughs Barsoomians did.
His romance is far from the only one to imagine a ruined home planet, a trope that is becoming more and more common as, in fact, we soil the only nest we have now. As sci-fi vehicles like “Elysium” and “Blade Runner” instructed us, Earth is a place we will be lucky to leave.
Gregory McNamee writes about science, food, geography and many other topics from his home in Arizona. Visit him at www.gregorymcnamee.com.