IS There Life On Mars?

 

 IS there life on Mars?

Sometimes when I watch the Mars Rover videos I wonder that if you lived in a colony there, and were looking out the window across a rocky landscape--perhaps with a low mountain range on the horizon--whether it would always be a numinous experience. I would imagine that would fade over time where you'd lose the appreciation for the strangeness of the environment and would start to see it as routine: same old rock, same old mountain range, and you'd be feeling homesick. I don't think everyone would experience it in the same way. There would have to be a very cohesive community in which you would collectively find it more transcendent, as opposed to on an individual level. Say you were a photographer and you went around every day and took photographs. The variety of subjects would diminish over time: same old rocks, perhaps some interesting formations that you found. In any event, Mars missions may be informed by adaptations on Earth to its own harsh conditions. By the time people are living there in 100 or 200 years they will know how to adapt and cope with both boredom and anxiety.

A warning glimpse of what life will be like in a space colony can already be seen around us—in run-down motorway cafes, in vandalized municipal high-rises, in the once ultra-modern elevators and miles of scuffed circular corridor at the BBC Television Centre. Will we find, when we at last leave our planet, not a series of Corbusier radiant cities in the sky, but seedy housing estates and third-rate airports? More important, are we right to become nervous whenever governments begin to move into the area of fantasy? It's not only those greasy handrails that I fear. The new frontiersmen are likely to be, not Armstrong and Lovell and Borman, homespun types only a racoonskin cap away from Davy Crockett, but an army of ambitious PhDs, government planners and aerospace bureaucrats. How efficiently will these space colonies function, and what are the long-term effects likely to be on the psyches of the millions of people penned inside these orbiting Heathrows and Gatwicks? Will we see the creation of a set of unique space-age neuroses, bom of that vague "airplane fear," a half-conscious dread that will surge through the nervous system of our 35-year-old space-wife whenever the gravity system fluctuates and the soup floats out of the tureen? [From THE DIARY OF A MAD SPACE WIFE Vogue (1979), JG Ballard] 

The Illuminated Riff: