Life on Mars?

Water Vapor Discovered on Tiny Moon of Saturn

Stories like this give me a boner. I don't know why; they just do.

I love space stuff to no end. Lots of people ask why we should spend all this money on the space program when people are starving, etc, down here on Earth. A common answer is that society in general benefits from the technology developed via the space program. I buy that. Imagine if we didn't have satellites to check out the weather, not to mention take surface data about the planet. The weather benefit alone is priceless. Then there's the telecommunications stuff (e.g. the internet). That seems valid to me.

There's also the argument that humans have always been explorers. Columbus is usually cited, but I'd urge one and all to peruse his diaries (link to excerpt), the opening pages of A People's History of the United States, or, best of all, the amazing accounts (excerpt) of Bartolome de Las Casas, an early arrivant in the New World, and an acquaintance of CC.

Now, Columbus was a fine sailor, but while he happened upon the New World while trying to find a Western route to China (which he died thinking he had done), he stuck around for the gold. And that's generally what explorers did. They weren't going for the gratification of seeing virgin land; they were trying to hit the jackpot.

When Columbus got to Haiti (Hispanola), he wrote back to Ferdinand and Isabella that the island was effing silly with gold, and he urged them to send him supplies to help get at it. The problem was, he was lying his ass off. There was roughly zero gold there. He enslaved most of the Arawak natives of the island in a savage bid to find some of the yellow metal, but to no avail. Most of the Arawaks died in one of history's many genocides.

Here's Las Casas a few decades after CC's arrival:

We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.

The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors. With these infernal methods of tyranny they debase and weaken countless numbers of those pitiful Indian nations.

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies. And also, those lands are so rich and felicitous, the native peoples so meek and patient, so easy to subject, that our Spaniards have no more consideration for them than beasts. And I say this from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed. But I should not say "than beasts" for, thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement on the public squares.

I don't mean to slam Columbus, since he was acting perfectly normal according to the standards of his day. And for all of de Las Casas's denouncing of the Spaniards' treatment of Indians, his solution was to get a ton of black Africans to be slaves instead. Incidentally, he was also the first priest to be ordained in the New World. It's odd when we think about it now, but in his day Las Casas would have been (and was duly denounced as) a flaming liberal and a Spain-hating Injun-lover.

Anyway, tying the whole thing back into space exploration, there are plenty who point to commercial and military motives pursuant to out presence in the heavens, and scorn it. All that may be valid in a way, but what really sells me on the whole thing is the pure discovery aspect.

I love it when they find frozen methane cliffs on Titan, or slam a satellite into a comet just to see what would happen. To me, it's the grand continuation of kids' backyard exploration: what happens if you launch a toad 900ft in the air in an Estes model rocket? (The G-forces get him.) If you hose down a plush Odie doll with bugspray, light him on fire, and use a water balloon slingshot to fire him into the night sky, will he leave a trail of flames? (Yes.)

Anyway, I will leave you with a false color image of Saturn's moon Mimas. The crater that lends Mimas its trademark Death Star look is 88 miles wide.

BTW, for a good time, check out the NASA video link on the sidebar of this page. It's great. Also, on the subject of C. Columbus, check out the true circumnavigation chronicle "Sailing Alone Around the World" by Joshua Slocum, and /or see my second post. When the narrator gets violently sick in the middle of the Atlantic, the ghost of the captain of the Santa Maria takes the helm for him. It's awesome.

PS Song of the Week: "Life on Mars" by David Bowie. Check out the Seu Jorge version, too.