Going to Mars Any Way You Can

We Didn’t Need Spacesuits, Just Cardboard

AS you might imagine after reading the past few posts, I’ve got Mars on the brain. It’s almost genetic, but not quite. Back when I was a kid, living on a farm in Boulder, Colorado, we had a game we played. I don’t remember the name of the game, but let’s call it “Going to Mars.” This was back before we’d landed folks on the Moon. I’d read somewhere about Mars and since the solar system was in the news, I’m guessing we decided to make a game of it.

We got a big cardboard box and put it out in a field. That was our rocket. We stood in it and made lots of rocket noises like we’d heard on TV during launches. And, after a while, we somehow landed on Mars. Never mind that Mars was basically an alfalfa field. To us, it was Mars. And we explored our Mars and found all kinds of cool things.

When I was a few years old, I read the first of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars and found out that John Carter basically got to Mars by standing in a cave and teleporting himself there. Very cool… we both got there by imagination, which is great.

Well, about a decade ago, I shared that childhood game with the world in the form of a planetarium show called SkyQuest. It’s about a little girl who grows up to be an astronomer and how she played astronaut games as a child. There’s a short sequence in the show where she builds her rocket and goes to Mars, but most of SkyQuest is about her interest in the stars and planets.

In a way, the show parallels some of my life story, and I’ve had many planetarium folk tell me that it reminded them of cardboard rockets and space exploration games they played as kids, too. What this tells ME is that we need both science education AND imagination to make future astronomers and astronauts

Frozen Water on Mars: So What?

It’s a Question Somebody’s Bound to Ask

They’ve found frozen water on Mars. This is a BIG deal, even though people have known for years that Mars has water locked away in permafrost and as a huge component of one of the polar caps. So, why is the Phoenix Lander’s confirmation of water ice such big news? Because we can reach that ice and study it. As Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the mission told the press a couple of days ago, “The truth we’re looking for is is not just looking at ice. It’s in finding out the mineral, chemicals, and hopefully the organic materials associated with these discoveries.”

Finding out what’s dissolved in the water that made the ice Phoenix is studying will tell Smith and his gang of scientists a great deal about whether Mars has (or ever did have) conditions where life might thrive. You could do the same thing with frozen water here on Earth, and figure out from various dissolved minerals and their abundances (how much of them is in the water) a lot about the life that exists here on our planet and its effect on the environment. Every living thing changes its environment a little (or sometimes a lot), and those changes show up as chemical abundance shifts and (in the case of fossils) in geologic layers, or as organic compounds mixed with soil and rock. Water is part of the equation of life, so confirming its existence with a lander that has an onboard chemical analysis lab is a great leap forward. Now we can melt that ice and study it. I can’t wait to find out what it’s telling us!

Science Fiction

It Takes You There… and Then

I’m a science fiction reader, one with hundreds of back issues of Analog and Asimov’s magazines and a library full of science fiction dating back to Hugo Gernsback. Back when I was in Catholic school, the nuns made it pretty clear that SF wasn’t for girls (heck, they weren’t wild about it for boys either, but they allowed guys to read it). When I’d try to take SF books out of the school library, there’d be this little raised eyebrow and a gentle shake of the head. So, I learned early on that I’d have to read it in my brother’s Boy’s Life magazines or get them out of the public library. Which I did.

What worlds they opened up to me! Over the years I’ve sailed to distant lands, faraway planets, sampled alien cultures, and learned science along the way. Oh, and read about different ways of thinking about things. It has opened my eyes to things the way travel does, only in this case, the traveling is across space and throughout time.

So, what are my favorites? Where to start? I began with Edgar Rice Burroughs and some of his Barsoom adventures. Then, I moved on to Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles. I think the first one was Red Planet, about a couple of boys growing up on Mars. I quickly worked my way through Heinlein’s easier books. By the time I was in high school, I’d graduated to some more mature ones (with politics and everything in ‘em). In college I started reading his Stranger in a Strange Land. That led me to read Isaac Asimov’s works, and then I was off to the races. Today I’m reading a lot of Bujold’s work in the Vorkosigan universe, and not too long ago, I spent several months on Dune, reading the books and watching the Sci-Fi channel miniseries (Dune and Children of Dune) on DVD.

Lately I’ve been trying my hand at writing some of my own SF, but so far haven’t sent anything out for publication. I will sometime, but for now, I’m still having fun exploring. and, not for the first time have I noticed (and appreciated) that good storytelling is essential to SF. It’s not just scientists in white lab coats rubbing their hands together in stereotypical geek fashion. As with science, SF talks about LIFE.