Going where no one has gone before

My friend Joey was asking me what I thought of the space program. Was I for it, or did I think it was a waste of money that could be put to better use here on planet Earth. I told him I was very much for it, but I have to say, I'm not that enthusiastic about all this exploration of the planet Mars.

Curiosity has now been deposited safely on the planet's surface -- certainly no mean accomplish-ment. Imagine: the NASA folk were able to build and direct by remote control a space ship that would travel over 100 million miles and then gently deposit the latest rover on the surface of another planet. Very impressive indeed.

But...for what purpose? To see if they can find more and better evidence that there may have been life on that planet at one time. But I can't see the point in that. If there was any form of life in some distant past, it was certainly in the microbial category. Finding evidence of that is hardly going to answer the question that they keep mentioning in the newscasts these days: are we alone? We already know we are alone in our own solar system, as far as life forms in any way approaching our own go. We have to look way, way beyond our own backyard, so to speak, to find the answer to that big, looming question. And I personally think that is what we should be spending those billions of dollars, and all that scientific know-how, on: developing ways to get beyond our solar system. That and figuring out ways to colonize those foreign bodies within our solar system where humans could possibly live, in a controlled environment, since our own planet is rapidly becoming too crowded.

After all, humans have always moved on when the area where they were became too crowded -- not enough resources to support their numbers -- have always explored what was over that rise, beyond those mountains, across that sea. I feel space exploration is just an extension of that, though it is far more difficult, and expensive, than crossing those mountains or that sea. But I don't think we should be wasting our time trying to figure out if there was some primitive form of life on Mars -- or anywhere else -- once upon a time. What is the place like now? What would it take for humans to be able to land on these places, and spend any time on them?

President Obama's space exploration policy, which he outlined in 2008, includes the statement that he "endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars." So do I. Let's get on with it.

While looking at "The Collections of the British Museum"

One of the interesting things about humankind is that we are interested in our past. We build large, imposing buildings in which we collect, store and display items from the past. There are people whose jobs are to, sometimes quite literally, unearth, these items that have survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and bring them back to the imposing buildings for display. There are other people who do research on them, give little talks on them, write up the informational signs that go with the displays, so that people can read the known or presumed facts about the things they're looking at.

Amazing. Other animals certainly don't do this. Why do we do this? Why are we interested in how our ancestors lived, decades, centuries, millennia in the past? Of course, many people aren't, in the least, but there are enough people who are, to support all those imposing buildings. I suppose a big part of it is just the natural human curiosity about the unknown, the same curiosity that made some people explore our world, and now makes others want to explore space. But I think some of it may also be a desire to see connections to those who came before us. I've said elsewhere that seeing relics of the past helps make the past more real to me, the people of the past more real. And this is especially true when there are unexpected similarities. For example, when visiting the little museum in the Agora, in Athens, I remember being especially delighted by such mundane articles as a child's potty chair, and some pottery shards which had been used to write quick notes ("Bring the saw that is under the bench"), others that were part of a child's practice session on his ABCs. Ha! Those people were just like us! They set their toddlers on little toilets and tried to induce them to do their business in the proper way, they scribbled notes to one another, children pains-takingly tried to master the art of writing.

Why should such connections give us a sense of satisfaction? It shows that the past isn't just words in a history book that we were forced to read in school; it was real people like us, even if, given the times and the culture, they were also, in many ways, very different from us. But still, I don't seem to have answered my own question: why would feeling a connection to the people of the past give a sense of satisfaction?

Perhaps it is the same thing that makes genealogists spend hours on the computer doing research, sends them on trips to small towns in distant states where there ancestors came from, to pour over hard-to-read probate and land records: we want to know where we came from! Who the people were, what they were like, who led to us.

The ancient Egyptians with their pyramids and mummies and hieroglyphics didn't really lead to me, personally, but they were a part of the whole human story, that has ultimately led to me, to my world. How cool. How fascinating. People who aren't interested in history, who never visit those imposing buildings, don't know what they're missing.