"Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Dan Quayle (former Vice-President of the United States)
Sadly -- and perhaps fatally -- we marginalize outer space. There's an omnipresent "giggle factor" at work that keeps us from dealing with space as the vast, portentous reality that it is; references to spaceships and distant planets inevitably conjure adolescent comparisons to lame science fiction. We suffer from a profound need to keep our reality tidy and anthropomorphic: nothing less than a terminal addiction to a collectively mandated "normality." If experience can't be framed by a TV screen, we grow uneasy. So we spend our lives marinated in a vapid brew of professional sports, predigested "news" and trite "issues."
The media plays along, as usual. Perhaps if we took space seriously, as both a frontier and a potential threat (specifically, in the form of near-Earth asteroids), NASA wouldn't be the malformed, ineffectual entity witnessed by the Columbia crash.
There is another reason we marginalize space: exposure to outer space broadens consciousness. So long as conventional political regimes control access to launch facilities, there will be no manned Mars missions. Seeing the Earth from space shatters the timeless "us v. them" mentality that control systems on this planet rely on. Perhaps the Moon missions were abandoned, in part, because the astronauts who returned from the gray lunar desert returned irrevocably changed, unable to see Earth as anything but a seamless biocosm, unperturbed by humanity's petty agendas.
Right now, Mars is as close to Earth as it's been in 60,000 years. Go outside at night and look at it; imagine looking back at Earth, glowing a faint blue-green in a darkening salmon sky as shadows swallow the Martian surface and all is dark.
As William Burroughs said, "We are here to go."
Onward. Ad astra. Breakthrough in gray room . . .
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