Two Reasons to Expedite Travel to Mars (Or Stop the World I Want to Get Off!)

Donald Trump at New York Military Academy (Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library)

Elon Musk, the billionaire known for PayPal, Tesla and most recently SpaceX hopes to provide service to Mars by 2024 (“Elon Musk’s Plan: Get Human’s to Mars and Beyond,” NYT, 9/27/16).There are two reasons to flee for Mars. The first is, of course, Donald Trump. It’s not just that he might get elected. It’s that you're living on a planet where this could happen. He is one of a long line of illustrious demagogues (Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un) who have made the earth what is today, a sputtering anachronism that's going to drown in its own hot air. Who wants to live in a place where you're surrounded by “deplorables?” The second reason to flee for Mars is the millennials. George Romero should make Night of the Living Millennials in which a race of zombies with lifeless eyes speak a modern version of Orwell’s Newspeak, campus agitators posing as victims who have been triggered by the slang word for the female genitalia that begins with c, ends with t and contain the letters u and n. “Will the Left Survive the Millennials” (NYT, 9/23/16) was the title of a recent Op-Ed piece by Lionel Shriver in which she asks the following question: “How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with?” The only problem is that the grass is always greener. Science fiction is rife with depictions of invasions of earth by invidious Martian attackers. There is no guarantee that the red planet will be a blue state.

A War of the Worlds

"Mars Show Signs of Having Flowing Water, Possible Niches for Life, NASA, Says” was the headline (NYT, 9/29/15) On October 30, l938, Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air presented an adaptation of H.G. Welles' The War of the Worlds. It was a Halloween Hoax in the form of a series of fabricated news alerts warning that the Martians were coming. Welles apparently was so successful in willingly suspending the disbelief of his audience that he caused panic in the streets.  You may remember a movie directed by Elia Kazan entitled Panic in the Streets and starring Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas as a public health official and police captain trying to avert an epidemic. The latest announcement from NASA created little panic. There was some concern expressed in a subsequent Times editorial (“A Catch-22 for Mars,” NYT, 9/29/15) about the prospect of contamination. But the generalized glee over the finding barely concealed its imperialist motivations. If Mars is suitable to life, it's a prime piece of nearby celestial real estate. A previous Times story “Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” (NYT 4/18/13) described a pair of planets orbiting a star, Kepler 62, “in the 'Goldilocks' zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” But Mars is a helluva a lot closer and within the the realm of our capacity to reach. No wormholes are required to get there. In fact, the Soyuz capsule which just brought astronaut Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts, Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, to the International Space Station, where they will set a record by remaining for a year, anticipates conditions that astronauts will have to face on a long voyage to Mars. However, it’s remarkable, that in spite of the Copernican revolution we still are so earth centered that we're only concerned about what we could do to the planet either from a destructive (contamination) or constructive (condos) point of view. Couldn’t water be a sign that there are superior beings on Mars, a race of wraiths who have simply left their water running? “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was a famous Twilight Zone that showed the paranoia deriving from the power of suggestion. Could we be taking a lackadaisical attitude to the discovery of water? What if these invisible Martians have their own space program with one of its objects being the subjugation of the earth. There was another famous Twilight Zone where the aliens possess a seemingly benign manifesto, "To Serve Man", which turns out to be a cookbook. What if these invisible Martians become the ISIS of tomorrow? What in fact if they’re a branch of ISIS? Imagine ISM, the Islamic State on Mars, conquering the planet. In fact, isn’t a war of the worlds, what the current conflict with Islamic militants is all about?

Call My Friends at InventHelp!

photo of Thomas Edison by Louis Bachrach

Have you seen George Foreman’s commercial for InventHelp? “People ask me all time, George, how do I get my idea in front of companies…call my friends at InventHelp.” It would be fun to find out how much George Foreman earns for these outbursts. But what's even more interesting is the question of how many people there are out there to justify the existence of a company like Invent Help? Hundreds, thousands, millions? How many undiscovered Thomas Edisons are there? How many Alexander Graham Bells are iterating the latter day equivalent of “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” OK not everyone is going to invent the light bulb or the telephone. Not everyone is going to experiment with electricity like Ben Franklin did in his famous kite experiment. Many of the big discoveries--for example, quanta and the Higgs boson--either have been or are in the process of being made. NASA is already planning for a journey to Mars. What type of ideas is George talking about and what are the kinds of things that his friends at InventHelp ending up having to vet. For instance has anyone come up with a gadget that will enable you to unravel a new roll of toilet paper in the middle of the night? You know how irritating it is when your hand circles round and round and can’t find that first piece and finally how badly you feel when you decide to simply rip through several layers to start the ball rolling, as it were? How about an alarm which goes off when you don’t put your keys where they belong--so you don’t have to be late for work when you’re trying to find them? How about a “restaurant mediator” that takes the decision making out of restaurant going? Does your Saturday night on the town become a test of wills between you and your wife, with someone always getting the bottom end of the stick? This new patent will improve your marriage and enable you to blame a bad meal on a device rather than a person. OK and digging down deep what about some modern inventions that have the global implications of electricity or the telephone? How about a pocket nuclear Armageddon detector? Or a peace monger, an innocuous little antenna like device that’s already brought about peace between seemingly intractable adversaries. What about the polar ice cap capper? Or the 3-D crapper? If you have any ideas like this, call George Foreman’s friends at InventHelp.

The Stars Our Destination I

Someday the earth will be like one of those towns on the South Shore of Long Island, like Long Beach or like Broad Channel in the Rockaways which have been hit one time too many. It will be the result either of some external force like the asteroids which caused the ice age or the problems will emanate because of the way carbon emissions in the upper atmosphere and the consequent Green House effect have caused a catastrophic shift in our weather profiles. Someday the inhabitants of the earth will be in the position of the German Jews at the time of Hitler. There were those who couldn’t believe in the prospect of annihilation and those who escaped with a few possessions just before the gauntlet was lowered. But how will the migration take place and what will be the latter day vessel, the Noah’s Ark, into which people and animals will escape? And where will civilization go? The only mildly hospitable planet in the solar system is Mars. The others are either too hot or too cold and even Mars is a trek. If we talk about going further out into our galaxy of the Milky Way, we are talking about some kind of migration taking place over generations. It would be biblical in scope. But the forty days and nights would probably be changed to light years and many life times would be spent in travel to the new found land. The science fiction writer Alfred Bester’s famous tome is The Stars My Destination. The question is: when it’s time to move, which one will we shoot for?