![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've recently borrowed Brian O'Leary's Mars 1999 from the Toronto public library system. This slim 1987 volume advances a plan for Mars exploration that's visibly an ancestor of Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct program, suggesting the establishment of manned bases on the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos as a precursor to both the manned exploration of the Martian surface and the industrialization of the Solar System using the moons' water supplies, and not incidentally as a way to overcome Cold War Soviet-American rivalries.
While I can't speak for the viability of much of the plan, by the standards and knowledge of the late 1980s it at least sounds reasonably plausible. But then, in the fictional scenario used by O'Leary used to illustrate the plan, he goes off the rails completely. This is him, speaking from the perspective of his Mars-astronaut future self in 2020.
Not included in this passage are the facts that the United States is recruiting crew for the fusion-drive starships that it will launch the 2020s, and that the world government created by the industrialization of space is a fait accompli.
What is it about proponents of manned space exploration and colonization that tends to make them talk like this, write like this, argue like this? Why did they opt to pick such wildly impossible scenarios as the likely, or even possible, consequences of their goals' fulfillment? Space exploration is firstly a scientific endeavour, secondly a commercial. It's not an eschatological religious experience. This, I think, weighed heavily against its proponents when the time came to decide what to do after the Apollo moon missions.
While I can't speak for the viability of much of the plan, by the standards and knowledge of the late 1980s it at least sounds reasonably plausible. But then, in the fictional scenario used by O'Leary used to illustrate the plan, he goes off the rails completely. This is him, speaking from the perspective of his Mars-astronaut future self in 2020.
[T]here is the red planet Mars to the east, winking at us from between the satellites. My daughter, son-in-law, and their family became colonists on Mars. Their community in the Cydonia pyramid complex is an extraordinary experiment in living. The inhabitants communicate telepathically, and their consciousnesses can travel out of their bodies at any time. They are learning the mysteries of the universe from their extraterrestrial partners and from inside themselves. The information coming through is extraordinary. now that Earth has calmed down from its twentieth-century crises, many of us here are also becoming privy to realms beyond our wildest imaginations.
My daughter talks with Marla and me telepathically and instantaneously. The speed of light is no longer a limit. We can now see her in our minds' eyes sitting on a reclining couch inside a huge plastic bubble on Mars. Lush green plants surround her. Outside the bubble we can see a dust storm raging with hundred mile-per-hour winds.
"Dad," she said to me, "when you were here, you said you felt strangely connected with everything and everyone, but you haven't said much about it since then. I feel that way all the time!"
"That's good, my dear, because sometimes I forget. I forget that nothing is impossible except what my mind tells me." (138-139)
Not included in this passage are the facts that the United States is recruiting crew for the fusion-drive starships that it will launch the 2020s, and that the world government created by the industrialization of space is a fait accompli.
What is it about proponents of manned space exploration and colonization that tends to make them talk like this, write like this, argue like this? Why did they opt to pick such wildly impossible scenarios as the likely, or even possible, consequences of their goals' fulfillment? Space exploration is firstly a scientific endeavour, secondly a commercial. It's not an eschatological religious experience. This, I think, weighed heavily against its proponents when the time came to decide what to do after the Apollo moon missions.
