What is it about Mars?

Our Fascination Dates Back through History

This Friday, November 28th, about 90,000 messages sent from the people of Earth will make their way to the planet Mars. They’re part of the “Beam Me to Mars” effort put together by Uwingu.com to celebrate the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Mariner 4 mission in 1964. This spacecraft was the first successful one to reach Mars safely and send back up-close and personal images of another planet.

The crowd of humans reaching out via radioed message to Mars on this anniversary is diverse and world-wide. It includes a number of well-known Mars enthusiasts and scientists, including actors Seth Green, Clare Grant, George Takei and his husband Brad Takei, authors Dava Sobel and Homer Hickam,  astronauts Chris Hadfield and Richard Garriott, former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, and many others, including me. I thought the idea was so compelling and profound that I had to participate the moment I heard about the project. The messages range from short greetings to space organization logos, videos, and sound recordings.

After the messages are beamed to Mars at a million bits per second shortly after 3 p.m. on Friday (transmitted by Universal Space Network), copies will also be sent to NASA headquarter, Congress, and the United Nations. They are the first messages sent intentionally by citizens of Earth, and they comprise an outlook of hope, friendliness, and outreach. My hope is that they somehow also reach the decision-makers in the halls of power, to show them that humanity’s future lies on not just one, but two planets.

The proceeds of “Beam Me to Mars” (raised by sales of the messages to the participants) will go to the Uwingu Fund, which help pay for grants to researchers and science educators. In these days of tough funding for science, efforts such as Uwingu help keep science moving forward, and the group has other projects (such as the “Name the Craters of Mars” effort) that help raise money for the betterment of science and science education.

Why did I send a message to Mars? I’ve been interested in Mars since I was a young child, and have written about it extensively over the years. I wrote a best-selling planetarium show/fulldome video about Mars that remains an audience favorite. When I was doing the research for that show, I found historical treatises about the Red Planet showing that many cultures on Earth, stretching back thousands of years, had an interest in this ruddy wanderer of the skies. In one paper, I found references to 27 different names for the planet from various cultures throughout time. Many refer to it in some form of a “war god” or an ominous omen in the sky.  Over time, that viewpoint changed, particularly as we began to explore it with telescopes from Earth and then with spacecraft.

Today, we know that Mars has no indigenous life of its own (or if it did, it’s now gone or hidden deep underground in the form of microbial life).  Yet, we still explore it. I would have loved to become a Mars explorer, but that doesn’t look to be in the cards just yet. So, I did the next best thing, I sent a message. (And, over the years, some portion of my taxes have gone to fund Mars exploration, something which I’m pleased to do.)

Why?  Why do we care about it? Why do we send orbiters and landers …. and messages?

It’s there.

I know that sounds like a flippant reason, but it’s there and it beckons to us. Those are the reasons humans have always explored, learned, and thrived. Just as frontiers and unknown lands have called to humans throughout history. We didn’t start out on THIS planet being spread out all over the place. We began in Africa and spread out from there. Something had to call to the early explorers of our own planet — whether it was need for more territory, or a need to find out what’s over the next hill, or a need to escape a changing environment. People simply moved out from the homeland and found new places to explore and live. Along the way, our cultures learned to adapt to new environments, they learned to navigate by the stars, they figured out how to sustain themselves by experimenting with new ways of growing food (or hunting), and eventually, we learned to create technology.

We’re a technological civilization now, but we still have the urge to explore. We’ve looked at the stars for a long time, using everything from Mark I eyeballs to powerful telescopes. We’ve gone to the Moon, and will likely go back. And, there’s Mars — looking quite Earthlike despite some major differences (lack of water, CO2 atmosphere) — calling out to us to come for a visit. And visit we have done, with an armada of mappers, landers, rovers, and orbiters; not just from NASA, but from the former Soviet Union (now Russia), Europe and India, as well.

What do we learn from such visits? Of course, we learn about Mars itself, and that’s important because it also helps us understand more about our own planet and its place in the hierarchy of worlds. When and if we do actually send humans to Mars, we would learn to live on other worlds not quite like our own. And, looking back toward home, we might learn to live better on Earth. A fond hope, and an optimistic one, considering our current circumstances.

What I like about the “Beam Me to Mars” project is that we’re using our technology to send our messages to the Red Planet. Our messages are extensions of ourselves, so in a sense, we’re sending ourselves. And, that’s something we’ve been doing ever since the first person looked up at Mars and imagined what it might be like to BE there. Not just worshipping a “god” but actually recognizing that this red dot was another world… a world people could explore. Hopefully soon, perhaps in a decade, the first humans will do MORE than send a radio message containing our hopes and fears for the future of Mars exploration. When the time comes, the first Mars explorers will set foot on the rusty red plains of Mars and walk where once only our robot explorers once rolled. That’s a powerful message in itself!