Posthuman Blues

Personal mission to Mars

"Already, the society's founder and president, Robert Zurbin [sic], has created Mars Direct, a plan that includes a transportation system - known as the Earth Return Vehicle - that will take humans to Mars and back, a trip he says will take six months each way."

I'm learning to tolerate horribly written pop-science articles. This is one of them.

Zubrin doesn't exactly help matters by his whiny insistence that Mars Society members don't "believe" in UFOs. The dreary fact remains that groups like the Mars Society are treated with a fair degree of scorn in the mainstream media, and pundits like Zubrin, for all of their intellectual assets, are possessed by the need to ridicule others in order to appear relatively acceptable. (I find it downright hilarious that Zubrin evidently believed W.'s so-called Moon-Mars "Initiative"; I personally find televangelists more convincing.)

But the ultimate irony is hidden in plain view: Zubrin and pal Frederik Pohl (a decent science fiction writer, by the way) want to colonize other planets. But they're quick to point out that anyone intrigued by the notion that beings from other planets are visiting us (in the form of UFOs) is inherently ridiculous. Evidently the galaxy is our own personal playground with no room for anyone else.

But of course the person who wrote the story never considered taking Zubrin to task on his anthropomorphic chauvinism.