Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [120]
If we wanted to set up housekeeping on Mars, it’s easy to see that, in principle at least, we could do it: There’s abundant sunlight. There’s plentiful water in the rocks and in underground and polar ice. The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. It seems likely that in self-contained habitats—perhaps domed enclosures—we could grow crops, manufacture oxygen from water, recycle wastes.
At first we’d be dependent on commodities resupplied from Earth, but in time we’d manufacture more and more of them ourselves. We’d become increasingly self-sufficient. The domed enclosures, even if made of ordinary glass, would let in the visible sunlight and screen out the Sun’s ultraviolet rays. With oxygen masks and protective garments—but nothing as bulky and cumbersome as a spacesuit—we could leave these enclosures to go exploring, or to build another domed village and farms.
It seems very evocative of the American pioneering experience, but with at least one major difference: In the early stages, large subsidies are essential. The technology required is too expensive for some poor family, like my grandparents a century ago, to pay their own passage to Mars. The early Martian poineers will be sent by governments and will have highly specialized skills. But in a generation or two, when children and grandchildren are born there—and especially when self-sufficiency is within reach—that will begin to change. Youngsters born on Mars will be given specialized training in the technology essential for survival in this new environment. The settlers will become less heroic and less exceptional. The full range of human strengths and deficiencies will begin to assert themselves. Gradually, precisely because of the difficulty of getting from Earth to Mars, a unique Martian culture will begin to emerge—distinct aspirations and fears tied to the environment they live in, distinct technologies, distinct social problems, distinct solutions—and, as has occurred in every similar circumstance throughout human history, a gradual sense of cultural and political estrangement from the mother world.
Great ships will arrive carrying essential technology from Earth, new families of settlers, scarce resources. It is hard to know, on the basis of our limited knowledge of Mars, whether they will go home empty—or whether they will carry with them something found only on Mars, something considered very valuable on Earth. Initially much of the scientific investigation of samples of the Martian surface will be done on Earth. But in time the scientific study of Mars (and its moons Phobos and Deimos) will be done from Mars.
Eventually—as has happened with virtually every other form of human transportation—interplanetary travel will become accessible to people of ordinary means: to scientists pursuing their own research projects, to settlers fed up with Earth, even to venturesome tourists. And of course there will be explorers.
If the time ever came when it was possible to make the Martian evironment much more Earth-like—so protective garments, oxygen masks, and domed farmlands and cities could be dispensed with—the attraction and accessibility of Mars would be increased many-fold. The same, of course, would be true for any other world which could be engineered so that humans could live there without elaborate contrivances to keep the planetary environment out. We would feel much more comfortable in our adopted home if an intact dome or spacesuit weren’t all that stood between us and death. (But perhaps I exaggerate the dangers. People who live in the Netherlands seem at least as well adjusted and carefree as other inhabitants of Northern Europe; yet their dikes