Silicon Insider: Mars Discovery
March 4, 2004 -- Watching the news about the discovery of water on Mars Tuesday, I was reminded of Auden's great poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts."
It's the one in which Auden, standing before Breughel's Fall of Icarus in the Brussels museum, is reminded of one of the stunning truths about human nature:
… In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Great events, which loom so large in history books, often go by nearly unnoticed at the time by witnesses as they hurry past on their busy schedules. I've long been haunted by that thought.
How many times, rushing to get a cup of coffee, or too lazy to read the newspaper that morning, or just to stupid too understand the implications of an offhand comment, have I missed the birth of some great historical change — that first pebble being kicked that starts an avalanche two centuries from now?
Will my descendents look back at me and think: Jeez, great-grandpa must have been an idiot — I mean, how did he miss noticing that?
That's one reason I became a newspaper reporter — and then, when that didn't give me time to contemplate the events I was reporting, why I gravitated to magazine stories and books. I didn't want to miss my chance to look at the far side of history through a briefly unshuttered window.
Still, I can't help wondering: If I had been strolling on the dock as the Santa Maria tied up and the crew members had started shouting out what they'd seen — would I have dropped to my knees in stunned amazement at perhaps the greatest turning point in human history — or would I have shaken my head at the wretched state of the ship and walked on? Would I have cheered the Wright Flyer as it lifted off Kill Devil Hill — or just gone back to my fishing pole?
If I'm honest with myself, I don't like the answer.
Are the Gods at Work Around Us?
And that brings us to Tuesday's news: a family murdered in the South; hundreds killed in a bombing in Iraq; the latest updates on the Kobe and Martha trials; Bernie Ebbers does the perp walk; The Passion of the Christ is boffo box office; Barry Bonds may have bought steroids, … oh, and they found evidence of water on Mars.
All riveting stuff, just like the news every day. But it was that last one that drew me up straight in my office chair. Did I just hear the doors of history creak open again? Or am I just too sensitized about this stuff?
Certainly the newscasters didn't think it that big of a deal. They covered the NASA press conference for a couple of minutes, then quickly cut to Super Tuesday coverage and Peyton Manning's new Colts contract.
And, in terms of its impact on our lives today, next week or even next year, Martian water seems mighty low on the personal priority list.
And yet, could this be our Musée des Beaux Arts moment? Are we the ploughman so focused (in his case literally, in ours figuratively) on the rear end of horse, that we ignore the gods at work around us?
Was it some great cosmic sign (or cruel cosmic joke) that, just the day before the Martian water announcement, we learned that mankind was almost alerted to an impending asteroid impact that luckily proved a near-miss? Were we supposed to get the message: "Get a back-up plan, because the next one's for real"?
Who knows? And that's the problem. Every day, here in Silicon Valley, I get a half-dozen announcements of new products that are supposed to change the world. Most just manage to turn their companies' bottom lines from black to red. But every once in a while there is that bombshell new product that turns everything upside down — and if you blink, you can miss it. And I've missed my share.
Why We Must Put People on Mars
But water on Mars? Is it really the world-historic event it feels like? Is this the one thing that history will remember us for between the moon landing and the first human step on the Red Planet?
Well, here's what we do know: NASA says strong evidence points to the fact the surface of Mars around the rover Opportunity was at one time "drenched" in water — maybe a puddle, maybe a lake, maybe an ocean. We don't know when this was, how long it lasted, whether there is any subsurface water left, and whether it managed to produce life.
Nevertheless, it now seems likely that there is water, perhaps huge quantities of it, beneath the Martian surface. And if that is the case — and here's that jumpy historian in me talking — it has now become inevitable that we will put men and women on Mars within a generation.
Why? A bunch of reasons:
Because water means life. If it's not on Mars now, we'll put it there. Terraforming, the creation of a thriving, living environment on another planet, may prove (as much as genetic engineering) the great scientific crusade of the 21st century.
Because water means power. With water on Mars, if we can get to it, we can crack the hydrogen and oxygen to run colonies and power rockets home.
Because this is what human beings do — we light out for the territories, be it Oklahoma in 1895, cyberspace in 2004 or another planet in 2020.
Because this is what politicians do. Name a single ruler of Portugal besides Prince Henry the Navigator. Name a single Viking besides Eric the Red and Leif Ericsson. Philip II may have been the most powerful Spanish ruler who ever lived, but you and I can only remember Ferdinand and Isabella. Politicians are always obsessed with how history will treat them — and Mars is the biggest chapter heading of them all.
Because for all our technical brilliance, there is one thing we will never overcome, at least in this corner of the universe: time. Those minutes it takes light to travel from Mars to Earth are devastating to the idea of exploring space with probes. Just imagine driving your car by looking ahead down the road, choosing a path, then driving for five minutes with your eyes closed. How fast do you think you'd go — all the while praying nothing unexpected jumped out at you? That's what the NASA guys are dealing with — and it's going to get worse on the Jovian moons.
And then there's the matter of adaptive intelligence — something years off with computers. Don't you think NASA wishes it had an astronaut with a post-hole digger on Mars right now?
Finally, there's that damn asteroid. When a rock the size of Switzerland is coming right at you, there's no elbowing to the back of the crowd. If we stay only on Earth, humanity will die someday — in a flash. Mars can be our back up memory — the last surviving outpost of a very, very bad day — and that fact is going to start eating at us until we do something about it.
That's what water on Mars means. That's why we're going there now. And that's why maybe we should remember Tuesday, March 2, 2004.
"Look! Did you see that kid fall out of the sky? It seemed like he was wearing wings. … "
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised.