By Ingrid Berger
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 1, 1997

Earth invades Mars

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ingrid Berger

Where were you the morning of July 5, 1997? Did you see a newspaper that day? In every city across the country, the image of a vast, rocky landscape floated over the front page. It looked like it could have been taken in any barren part of Arizona, or New Mexico, or Greece or the Sahara. But no. That day, we Earthlings got our first good glimpse of the surface of Mars.

I've never been very interested in the exploration of space. I like to gaze at starry skies and harvest moons as much as the next person, but beyond that, the quest to gather data about other planets always seemed superfluous. There's too much life to live, work to do, problems to solve and things to wonder about right here on Earth. Why spend so much time and money on something which seems so distant from our own experience?

Yet, that picture of the Martian surface grabbed me. I was mesmerized by the crisp image taken from a planet thousands of miles away which looked so similar to the landscape of my own home. I caught Mars fever, and clipped all of the pictures which the robot Sojourner sent back. I was even more excited to read of the University of Arizona's involvement with the Mars Pathfinder mission. The imager on the Sojourner which took all those pretty pictures was developed over the past few years by scientists in UA's Lunar and Planetary Lab.

I waited eagerly for the results of the first rock analysis, thinking of all the exotic, mysterious things we might find in the Martian soil. And it was soon announced that one of the rocks on Mars - had more quartz than geologists had expected. Hmm. I know that I lack the geology background to fully appreciate the implications of this finding, but that is when my interest in the Mars exploration began to wane. The Mars Pathfinder mission is all about understanding the geology and development of Mars, in hopes of being able to better predict climate changes and weather systems on Earth. While this goal seems interesting and somewhat useful, it is not worth the time, energy and millions of dollars which we are pouring into it.

After my Mars fever broke, I was left with one fundamental question: What are we doing in space? Are we looking for new life, new planets, new elements, clues to our origins, predictions of our demise? Space is a huge landscape for scientific and human curiosity. And while curiosity and pure knowledge are beautiful things, the scarce resources and tight budgets on Earth demand that we focus on the application of science to improve the quality of life on our own planet. At this point, information from space seems to lack this immediate application. Even if the data gathered on Mars eventually helps us to predict the fate of Earth, will we then be more able to stop the forces of time and nature from creating undesirable changes? Will prior knowledge of detrimental climate shifts bring us a peace of mind? It seems unlikely.

I realize that useful scientific research is often begun without an understanding of the information or new benefits it will bring. Scientific progress would cease without perseverance in the face of uncertainty. However, the expansion of the space program seems like a luxury we cannot afford right now. New missions to survey Mars are currently scheduled to launch every two years through the year 2000. I can't help but think of the more pressing problems we are putting on the back burner while we forge ahead into mounds of red dirt.

Is taking the temperature of the Martian atmosphere more important than providing health care for the 10 percent of American children who are currently uninsured? Certainly, the technological feat of building machines which can travel thousands of miles away and send back news from strange lands is something to be proud of. And one of the main assets of the Mars Pathfinder is that it was relatively cheap to build and has been highly successful. But pictures of Mars become trivial next to pictures of AIDS patients who are being denied funding for medication, or farmers who have lost limbs to leftover landmines, or hopeless faces of Israelis and Palestinians dealing with unpredictable terrorist attacks.

My reservations about the exploration of Mars also probably come from reading too many science fiction books. Ever read "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury? It's a collection of short stories about human settlers who travel to Mars and encounter bizarre life forms. After a series of surreal experiences, most of them either return home or end up dead. Readers are left with the feeling that humans have pushed the borders of curiosity, and crossed some moral line into a cold, lonely, foreign existence. While this is all science fiction, I believe that behind the fantasy lie very real human emotions and concerns. As we eat from the space-tree of knowledge, we naturally wonder about what we are getting ourselves into, and whether or not we should be ever-expanding and peering into worlds outside our own. There is so much "out there" that we don't understand. Our fundamental ignorance about the universe leads to an apprehensiveness and caution which we tend to ignore in pursuit of being the first country to put a man on the moon, or a robot on Mars or a camera on Saturn.

There's always the option of believing that this space exploration stuff is a big government hoax. A particularly clever web site depicting the Sojourner's image of the Martian landscape, littered with Coke cans and beer caps in the foreground, comes to mind. People will believe what they want about the reality of space travel. In the end, it's all a little wacky. But if you believe they put a robot on Mars, remember that in our rush to survey what's "out there," we're sacrificing the improvement of more important things "down here."

Ingrid Burger is a senior majoring in molecular and cellular biology.