A Cosmic Chuckle

Perserverance's first picture
looks strikingly like 
the first Moon landing
picture below

So, you can't be blamed if you missed it. Yesterday at 1:44 P.M. Denver time Mars saw the arrival of America's latest rover Perseverance. Along with the earlier arrivals of a Chinese probe and the first-ever mission from the United Arab Emirates Perseverance joins a list of nearly fifty spacecraft that have been sent to the red planet since the 1960's. With "Percy" (as some are already anthropomorphizing it) successfully touching down in the Jezero Crater and China's Tianwen scheduled to drop out of orbit to the surface in May or June there will have been a total of six rovers (5 from NASA) to roam the hills and valleys of Earth's most storied neighbor. The UAE's Hope spacecraft will remain in orbit and not land on the surface.

The first picture from
the UAE's Hope spacecraft

It will likely be years, decades even, before humans venture to Mars but I caught myself thinking, what if I had hitched a ride, piggybacked if you will, on this long journey with Percy. Right now I could be looking up into the Martian sky and if conditions were right pick out a little dot in the firmament that is the home from whence Percy and I had come. We'd get a better view of Earth sitting on Mars than those of you who have gazed up at Mars from Earth because Earth is roughly twice the size of the fourth planet from the sun. NASA has actually taken pictures looking home. The picture below was taken in 2016 by the HIRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/earth-and-its-moon-as-seen-from-mars

Percy blasted off on its seven month trip last July (2020) covering 300 million miles. Back at home on terra firma we've now traveled much farther in terms of the number of people who can never again gaze up in wonder at the stars overhead (the U.S. equaled Perserverance's 300 million in terms of deaths back in December). 

Tranquility Base photo
from Apollo 11 -
the Eagle had landed

I remember watching the moon landings way, way back in the last century. Some of those trips brought back moon rocks and rocks and astronauts alike were quarantined upon their return to Earth out of caution that they might bring back nasty microorganisms from the Moon that might be harmful to humans - a potential Moon Plague if you will. With Percy's lift-off in the midst of our own earthly pandemic, here's hoping the clean-room guys and gals who built Perserverance were dutiful in NOT sending up any of the COVID Virus to infect another planet who's inhabitants, if there are any to be found, are oblivious to the potential risk of getting acquainted with our species. I can see you now, chuckling at the idea of little green men (and I'm assuming little green women) poking their head from behind a Martian rock and pointing wonderingly at the latest artifact from Earth to fall from the sky. Yet finding evidence of life having existed in Mar's past is one of the main reasons America spent more than two billion dollars getting Percy off our ground and onto Martian soil. 

I'd guess, if I had been able to tag along for the ride, most of the seven month trip would have been rather boring and uneventful which is probably just how NASA would have liked it). While Percy and I would have been bored to tears trundling through the starry darkness at roughly 12,000 mph, looking back at Earth we could have only guessed at all that would transpire from July until today. If there is a sentient being out there controlling the cosmic strings, I'd hazard a guess that they might be having a cosmic chuckle at our expense. In the intervening seven months they might look at what astronomer Carl Sagan called our "pale blue dot" and scratch their head in amazement as to how we could have collectively screwed up so much, so quickly. And yet we can journey to the stars.

I hope there's life out there somewhere so I wish Percy well as she wanders the western edge of a flat plain called Isidis Planitia. I'd love to live long enough to know that we are not alone. As Carl Sagan knew better than most, the cosmos is a very large place indeed so I'll leave it to him to close out this blog. Here's what Carl wrote in his 1994 book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space":

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. 

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

The 1990 Voyage 1 photo
looking back at our home from
a distance of nearly
4,000,000,000 (4 billion) miles away