I’m not working on Mars for the foreseeable future

Rover. Photo by Karl Palutke.

Something I was looking at the possibility of was a quick project on the colonisation process of Mars. Next month NASA plans to launch the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It’s another probe, but this one has a twist. It’s going to become the first intentional infrastructure around Mars. Later around 2009, it’s NASA plan to launch the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (since starting to write this, it’s been cancelled), which will be the first extraterrestrial satellelite whose primary mission is to provide infrastructure. There are interesting archaeological and anthropological questions which we could research, even if the first colonists of Mars are robotic. As part of looking into this I’ve got my hands on the NASA reports and a few other things written on the subject. I did seriously consider putting together something for the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory [pdf]) conference on the subject but now I’ve decided not to. One of the things that really impressed me about CHAT last year is that it was an extremely good conference. There were one or two duff papers, but by and large the talks were by people who were extremely knowledgeable on their subject. It was just what they said in the talk, but the depth suggested that there was a whole load of information they were familiar with that they had to omit and they drew on this when answering the questions. I think I could prepare a good talk on the archaeology of Mars in time for the conference, but there’s so much background information that I wouldn’t be confident I had a strong grip on the material – at least there’s not time to do that properly and continue working on the PhD. I suppose it’s possible to do it badly, but that seems disrespectful to the many people there who will have spent so much work on their talks.

This is not to say that I’m ignoring it. I’m trying to wean myself of magazines, so I’m reviving my plan to take an interesting book with me on the train. Paperback for preference as space can be cramped. At the moment I’m reading Mapping Mars by Oliver Morton. It’s a book that I’ll no doubt enthuse effervescently about soon because it shows how much depth there is in the subject. There are lots of quotable passages in the book. I particularly liked:

Look at the pictures of Mars on book covers, or movie posters, and you’ll see little that you couldn’t find on tourist brochures from the Flagstaff chamber of commerce. Steep-sided canyons in sedimentary rock, isolated slabs of the same rock in Monument Valley-style mesas, flat deserts painted red. The pictures of Mars in Kim Poor’s Novagraphics gallery, the only commercial gallery in the world to specialise in realistic depictions of outer space – and located, far from coincidentally, in Tucson – are often remarkably similar to the Arizona landscapes commemorated in tourist art all over the rest of the city. Only the skies, with their multiple moons and unearthly colouring, show the difference.

There’s some truth in these portrayals. While the features of Mars are very unlike those of the American West in scale and history, the planet undoubtedly looks more like Arizona than it does Arkansas or the Ardennes. But physical resemblance is not the whole story; this representation of Mars is ideological, as well. Since the 1960s, America has ceaselessly talked about space as a new frontier, a continuation of the nineteenth century’s expansion – and one result of this rhetoric has been an eagerness to see the landscapes of the solar system in terms of the landscapes of the American West. When Neil Armstrong told the watching world that the ‘stark beauty’ surrounding Tranquillity Base looked ‘like the high desert of the United States’, he wasn’t just speaking on the basis of personal experience or of the training with which the Survey had equipped him. He was expressing the rhetorical continuity between the pioneers of the space age and the pioneers of the West on which his adventure was founded. One of Kim Poor’s own images, painted long ago for a rock album cover and reproduced on T-shirts and postcards ever since, makes the point beautifully. In a desert landscape, saguaro cacti are lifting off on tongues of flame like misshapen rockets. A cliche of the old frontier is transformed into the icon of the new.

It’s an excellent book, or at least the first half is because Morton has expertly weaved the human story with the scientific story. It also helps that he’s literate. I’ll be ranting about that tomorrow. In the meantime you could do much worse than visit his weblog. —–