Let’s Go to Mars Already 8 comments

By Santiago Ramos

Tom Wolfe recently raised the hopes of philosophy graduate students everywhere by suggesting that NASA needs philosophers working in the space program. In his op-ed commemorating the fortieth anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest triumphs, Wolfe recounts the ambition of those heady days in the late 1960s:

Why, putting a man on the Moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The Moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets...Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn’t stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that...the galaxies beyond.

And yet, Wolfe argues, the dream was dead on arrival, as soon as Neil Armstrong’s heel first lifted itself from the Lunar soil it had just historically touched. After that moment, we had the Soviets beat, and unless they wanted to start another race—say, to Mars—the space program did not serve any other world-historical purpose—at least, none that most people could think of.

Wolfe writes that “NASA had long since been all set to send men to Mars, starting with manned fly-bys of the planet in 1975. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who had come over to our side in 1945, had been designing a manned Mars project from the moment he arrived.” But after we reached the Moon, we curbed our ambitions for manned exploration of space.

This, however, is why Wolfe thinks that NASA needs to hire “corps of philosophers”: To give a reason for exploring, for risking, for justifying the innate drive within all of us that attracts us to the unknown.

But such tasks as mining for first principles and—gasp!—telescoping around for a teleology of space travel are things that make us blush, we in our pragmatic, technological, programmatic republic of the 21st century. We have better, more important things, to do.

I don’t know if Tom Wolfe realizes that perhaps the biggest resisters to his ideas will be policy wonks. Take, for example this article titled, “NASA, We Have A Problem,” by Dayo Olopade. While conceding that “It is, of course, dangerous to engage in these zero-sum hypothetical scenarios,” Olopade argues against manned space travel and against, more specifically, Buzz Aldrin’s plan for a mission to Mars, by formulating what we might call a humanitarian case against space exploration: instead of spending money on space ships that would take us to Mars, we can spend it on, among other things, “light rail lines in Albuquerque, Charlotte, and Washington.”

But the humanitarian argument is easily debunked. Forty years ago, many Americans also suffered from low incomes, poverty, and disease, and yet we still pooled our resources for a moon launch. One could imagine a different scenario, where we diverted those resources to various peace-making initiatives with the Soviet Union—maybe through athletic ambassadors, or by sending Glenn Gould over there one more time.

But one could also imagine a shady conservative ecclesiastic whispering into Queen Isabella’s ears, advising her not to fund this Mr. Columbus’ crazy project, to redirect the funds toward more pious initiatives. Perhaps Isabella overruled him because of the material allure of Eastern spices—and yet, the Moon also has mineable minerals.

There will never be an ideal time to justify exploration, if justification requires that we have nothing better to spend our money on (“better” being a relative term here—I agree with Olopade that these zero-sum games aren’t very useful). Anyway, self-satisfied utopias don’t need astronauts. We explore, we create, we reach out, precisely as a result of the contradictions of life, out of the dissatisfaction with our current state.

So, why fly to Mars in 2030? I don’t know—why leave the suburbs at 18? I stand with Tom Wolfe in summoning the philosophers to answer the question. But I also think that the fact that we are asking it already exposes a certain imaginative fatigue on the part of the asker.

I don’t want to be a part of a civilization which does not want to go to Mars. I don’t want to be among the last generation of Americans who, as children, dreamed of becoming astronauts. I think it is scandalous that more people do not freak out about the fact that we have photographs from the surface of Titan.

The drive that propelled us to the moon and would propel us to Mars is the same drive behind art and mysticism and the Everest climbers and the Pyramid builders. It is a spiritual drive that is as proper to humanity as its own flesh.

When the Psalmist makes this prayer, he points out a central truth to exploration: the more we know of the universe, the more we learn to appreciate the uniqueness of the human person:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

Perhaps as we trek into space, we will learn to appreciate the human person, too. We will learn to love the “human”—something useful to know for humanitarians who defend human rights. What better counter to the humanitarian argument?