LONDON — When President Bush announces the resumption of the American manned space program this week, committing the United States to reaching Mars and establishing a base on the moon, some will be delighted, others will be hostile and a few will see it as nothing more than an election ploy. His father proposed these things in 1989, but the trillion-dollar price tag was too high for the United States.
Mr. Bush’s presidency — whether it lasts one term or two — also will be just a memory by the time another president has to decide whether to carry on with the space program or to stop it dead. President Clinton (remember him?) finessed the decision rather well, and by that stage, America was in a less-expansive mood anyway.
At some point in the near future, though, the people of this planet finally will get it together and establish colonies on the moon, and no doubt on Mars as well. It’s what we do as a species: We break out. There’s no point in complaining that Mars is too boring to be worth going to or that we should spend the money on poverty at home, because those won’t be the arguments that count.
Mr. Bush will not be announcing the return to space exploration on behalf of the human race. It will be done for and by the 4 percent of human beings who happen to be American. It’s about American power and wealth and standing in the world, and the Europeans, if they carry through on their Mars program — Aurora — will do it in order to establish Europe’s place in the world. All very petty, but that’s how we are.
Which of us [in Britain] didn’t wake up on Christmas morning longing to hear that the British Mars lander — cut-price, last-minute and controlled by an archetypical British [research scientist] with a habit of using footballing analogies — had sneaked in ahead of the Americans?
Alas, Beagle 2 lies broken and silent on the empty, red, windswept plain of Isidis. With luck, Colin Pillinger, Mark Sims, Jim Clemmet and their teams now will get some decent funding and some proper government support, and will be able to create a fitting successor to Beagle 2. But it was a splendid undertaking, magnificent and modest in a way that a long line of British explorers and inventors would appreciate.
If we had any sense as a species, of course, we would look at what we have done to our tiny, vulnerable planet, forget our silly nationalisms, and decide to sort it out together. Two weeks ago, in the journal Science, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, warned that global warming is a greater danger than the threat of terrorism.
But because we don’t have much sense, we will ignore the problem until it becomes much more dangerous and much harder to deal with. Above all, we will continue to see it in small-town, national terms. Mr. Bush refuses to do anything serious about the 20 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions for which the United States is responsible because he believes that it would give America’s international competitors an unfair advantage if Americans were obliged to clean up their act.
We humans can, of course, afford to heal our own planet and pay for a scaled-down, more modest, Pillinger-style voyage to Mars at the same time. We don’t have to lay waste to everything; and space travel does not have to be wasteful or brash. There is something in us that wants to see more than just the end of the street. We often are embarrassed by this instinct and dress it up as self-interest: If we colonize Mars, we will create jobs, discover useful things like Teflon saucepans and maybe create a new home for the species after we have trashed the Earth.
In fact, it is the act of exploration that really counts for us.
Shortly before he was executed, Sir Walter Raleigh tried to convince James I that there had been a serious financial purpose behind his last voyage to Guyana, rather than just the desire to get away. Would he, he said, have wanted “to be removed out of this steddy tower [of London, where he was a prisoner] into a rowling ship and to disorder an aged, worne and weak bodie with watching, travel and the distempered heat of the Indies,” merely for its own sake?
As you read his words, you know the answer: Of course he would.
Taking risks and breaking out is as much a part of the human psyche as pulling the blankets over our heads. One day, human beings certainly will walk on the surface of Mars. It just would be nice if they did it in the modest style of Mr. Pillinger, instead of spouting the old nationalistic bombast.
• John Simpson is world-affairs editor of the British Broadcasting Corp.
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