Posthuman Blues

America's new media-darling

OK, I know I recently promised to lay off the subject of Mars. But that was before I realized what a mainstream subject it had become. Evidently there's quite a bit of public enthusiasm for the Spirit rover mission. Today the Kansas City Star and USA Today both have big front-page stories on "Mars Mania." And there's increasingly serious speculation that Bush's Moon-Mars initiative is more than just wishful thinking on behalf of space advocates. (Of course, when I say "Bush's Moon-Mars initiative" I'm not really attributing anything to Bush, who I doubt could locate the Red Planet on a map of the Solar System to save his life, but that's neither here nor there . . .)

Have you noticed how JPL and the mainstream press have turned the Spirit rover into something of a personality? Space journalism is suddenly filled with rather desperate attempts to transmogrify a six-wheeled, solar-powered, remote-controlled dune-buggy into an interplanetary showman (or show-woman -- I don't think they've given it a gender yet, although this issue was raised in the Posthuman Blues forum). When Spirit stands up on its wheels, it's not performing a basic requirement; it's giving a stand-up performance a la Jerry Seinfeld. It "sleeps," it "wakes up," it sends "postcards" from its new "neighborhood"! It's alive!

Can we expect Spirit to "do Letterman" anytime soon? Perhaps the JPL geeks (I use that term respectfully) can make it "wave its hand" to television viewers worldwide during the next big halftime show? Will Spirit run for president?

As much as I'm savoring the Spirit mission, I find attempts to humanize the rover weirdly disturbing -- like guys who name their cars (or, worse, their computers) sexy female names. There's definitely a Freudian understratum to the public's infatuation with Spirit and its cybernetic derring-do. NASA has done more than transplant a bug-like machine to the Red Planet; it's sent a spark of our collective desire to get off this poisoned, treacherous globe we call "home." Spirit is nothing less than an avatar of silicon and wire, spared the neuroses and anxieties that plague Earth. Physically distant yet impressively intimate in its media-savvy, it (she?) joins the ranks of Max Headroom and Lara Croft -- postmodern superstars that straddle the dissolving barrier between the real and the unreal.

It's no mistake there's a CD with hundreds of thousands of names on board Spirit -- and yes, mine's there too, basking in Mars' ultraviolet flux, waiting for some future collector to pop it in his antique CD-ROM drive. It's like some sort of cosmic lottery, or a bid for ersatz immortality.

Ultimately, Spirit might have less to do with Mars than it does with the way we identify with our machinery. Perhaps instead of including a plaque commemorating the crew of Columbia, JPL should have attached a few choice quotes from J.G. Ballard's "Crash."