The
United States spent 24 billion dollars (the equivalent of 180 billion
in today's dollars) on several trips to the moon to perform the very
boring job of collecting rocks. Why was so much money spent on such a
boring task? History books say that national prestige was one of the
main reasons for the Apollo project. But there's another reason that
is rather harder to explain. The Apollo project was funded largely
because during its prime funding years people were still in the grips
of an enthusiastic “space fever” that gripped the country in the
late 1950's and the early 1960's.
To
understand this space fever, we should imagine ourselves in the
boring white-bread world of the late 1950's. In those years
magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements started to proclaim the
coming of an exciting new Space Age. To a public which had never seen
a space flight, this seemed like almost the most exciting thing
imaginable. When the Mercury program started putting astronauts into
space, in very dangerous manned missions, it was for quite some time
“the greatest show on Earth.” Each time a Mercury astronaut got
on the launchpad, TV viewers really had no idea whether the whole
thing was going to blow up in a fiery explosion.
In about the middle of this “space fever,” the Apollo program was
announced. People were still in the grip of a great enthusiasm for
space travel, and were willing to fund the program to the hilt. But
by the time of the second moon landing, space fever started to wear
off. People got quickly tired of the Apollo missions, and started
asking: why are we spending such astronomical funds on missions that
do little but gather rocks?
NASA
would like the public to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a
mission to Mars. But it seems unlikely that the public will ever get
Mars fever quite the way they once got space fever back around
1960. The public has now been exposed to so many space movies, space
TV shows, and space video games that our attitude is now almost kind
of:
Travel to another
planet? Been there, done that.
Well,
not really, but it sure feels that way, once CGI has treated you to a
hundred different versions of astronauts on another planet, all in
vivid detail.
So how
can NASA generate the type of interest and enthusiasm that might be
needed to fund a manned Mars mission? They won't be able to do it by
highlighting the opportunities for rock collection on Mars. People
have figured out from the Apollo missions that rock collection is as
dull as dishwater.
But
there's a way in which NASA might be able to brew up some serious
interest for a manned Mars mission: leverage the paranormal.
The
Mars rovers such as Opportunity and Curiosity have photographed an
astonishing variety of anomalous-looking things on Mars. They are
discussed in this series of blog posts. You can find more examples
by doing a Google image search for “Mars anomaly.”
Two recent examples are the "Mars mouse" shown at the top of this original NASA photo, and the Mars dome shown at the top of this original NASA photo. The composite photo below shows the "mouse" and "dome."
Two of the many Mars anomalies (credit: NASA)
I showed a
closeup of this “mouse” to my wife and one of my daughters,
without telling them it was from Mars, and asked: “What does this
look like?” They both instantly answered: a mouse. Then there's the recently discovered anomaly discussed here, which looks like some ancient Assyrian face.
NASA's
approach to these anomalies has been very standoffish. But what if
these anomalies (and similar anomalies that may be discovered in
future years) were to be made the centerpiece of a new Mars mission?
That just might generate the kind of enthusiasm needed to fund a new
mission.
Here
is how NASA might pitch a future Mars mission to the public:
It's time to wake up
and smell the coffee. How many Martian domes and Martian “traffic
lights” and Martian mouses and Martian sculptures and ridiculously
long “levitating” Martian spoons can we photograph before it is
obvious that some type of higher power is at work here, or was at
work? We don't know what that higher power is, or whether it still
exists; and we don't know whether it was extraterrestrial,
spiritual, extra-dimensional or supernatural. But we want to send
our guys to go investigate these incredibly strange things our rovers
have photographed, and hopefully bring some of them back and put them
in a museum for the whole world to look at. While doing this, we just
might discover the secret of the universe.
That's
a sales pitch that probably beats this one:
Please give us 500
billion dollars to send people to Mars, because rocks and boulders
are incredibly interesting. Why on Mars there are some fascinating
sedimentary striations, and all kinds of very interesting metamorphic
mineral concentrations.
We can
imagine a Mars mission specifically centered around investigating
anomalies. It would require some rover vehicle that would be capable
of driving many miles so that astronauts could investigate many
different previously photographed anomalies. But this would probably
be feasible. Most of the Mars anomalies are concentrated in
particular areas of Mars that were traversed by the Opportunity and
Curiosity rovers. The anomalies are not randomly scattered across the
planet.
The
issue of making anomaly investigations a central part of a future
Mars mission is relevant to an important upcoming decision: the
decision about where the next Mars rover should land. To keep in
play the possibility of a manned mission centered around anomaly
investigation, the next rover should land not all that far from
either the Curiosity landing site or the Opportunity rover landing
site. In that case you would (after about the year 2025) have two
thirds of the discovered anomalies in a relatively small area of Mars
that could be conveniently checked out by a landing team equipped
with a rover vehicle.
I can
imagine a way to describe astronauts on a mission centered around
anomaly investigation. Recalling the ancient tale of “Jason and
the Argonauts,” the astronauts could be described as Anomaly
Argonauts. When you think of it, the story of “Jason and the
Argonauts” was a tale of investigating and retrieving a paranormal
object. The paranormal object was the Golden Fleece, which presumably
was paranormal, because the fleece of a regular animal isn't made of
precious gold. NASA could make use of this famous tale, kind of
recasting it in modern garb. The sales pitch might go a little like
this:
Long,
long ago they told the tale of how brave voyagers risked great
dangers to travel far away, so that they could bring back a strange
eerie object more wondrous than any a man had ever seen. Now our
brave astronauts will embark on a similar voyage, hoping to bring
back not just one such object, but several of them.
I
could imagine how such an approach might generate more interest than
one in which astronauts are depicted mainly as just rock collectors.
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