A Theatre For Denial?

This blog was for a long time about what it would take to live on Mars, to explore deep space, to live outside of this ecosphere and bring a little piece of it with us. I could imagine setting up in a self-contained habitat on a distant dusty plain with a small crew, tending the greenhouse, maintaining the life support system and sending back optimistic reports to Earth while feeling lonely or existentially fragile. There's a sense of making history while barely holding it together as a human being. That's part of what I wanted to get across when I wrote 'Building Mars'. In so doing, perhaps I was churning through my own thoughts about existing here in northwest Ontario, stuck firmly on this one world, not especially making history, gazing up wistfully at the stars and planets occasionally.

One good part of owning a house is that you often end up doing some land management. In my case it's on a micro scale – little more than cutting bushes down to size and mending drain pipes. Then there's the occasional rise of flood water and how to prevent it from inviting itself in through the basement windows, but that's another story.

A few weeks ago when I had some hours free on Saturday, I went to war with the back hedge and chainsawed it down to just above waist height. You must understand that this is a prolific and villainous lilac hedge, probably mutated by strong doses of radiation of the type used by Lex Luther, and its goal in life is to vertically outgrow every other living thing and I think it longs to wrap its leafy tentacles around the electrical and phone cables coming to our house about fifteen feet above the ground. My mission: to thwart the forces of chaos and restore order to our little universe in the back yard. It wasn't too difficult, but the clear-up and hauling the brush to the dump was another whole Saturday. Now just looking out the back window gives me a strong sense of calm and satisfaction.

Today was Saturday again, with no outdoor jobs looming, and after a cooked breakfast Robin and I went out to hear two people we know dialogue in front of an audience about their lives and what they've learned from their mistakes and hard times. They have worked as youth pastors in churches, one was a pastor of the church of which we are now members, and the other has lectured in comparative religion. They had some reflections on the ups and downs of the road they've been on, together with some pointers on where the church stands at present.

I found it helpful because their experiences echo some of my own, since returning from the Middle East eight years ago rather unexpectedly and trying to find my way. These days I have a steady job, Robin is teaching, our sons are doing well, but I often find myself wondering what my purpose here should be. I've been able to write a few novels of speculative fiction, and even try my hand at writing rock songs, but what bigger picture do those fit into?

The growing world crisis that we appear to be living through demands a response from us all, world citizens that we are. And I've known for most of my life that the Creator, the Higher Power, the Person who gave us each our personhood, beckons us into partnership with him. He is intent on bringing his new life into all the dark places of the world, and I can be a part of that. But what part exactly? Conscience is a great alarm bell, but that vague feeling of 'I ought to be doing more to help people' isn't a very reliable road map. I'm glad whenever I read about a project that shows some hope, like engineering bacteria which could eat up PET plastic waste inside bio-reactors. There was a great article in the Guardian Weekly estimating that if we planted about a trillion trees, repurposing unused land and so on, together with serious action to cut carbon emissions, the worst of the coming catastrophe might be averted. That's only about 150 trees per person on Earth! Is that doable?

What might be the place of space exploration in all of this? How will it contribute to carbon emissions that dozens more launches of kerosene-powered rockets are being scheduled to bring satellite internet on a global scale? Is liquid hydrogen a cleaner fuel, with water as its combustion product? What about SpaceX's upcoming methane-fueled Raptor engines? Are these commercial space projects actually being globally responsible and thinking these things through or just putting on a show? It's not a subject I've researched much until now, but I intend to. There's the whole little-understood subject of upper-atmosphere ozone depletion from an increasing number of rocket launches that leave trails of alumina and soot.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Vandenberg Air Force Base 

 Image: SpaceX

The wider picture I'm seeing might be this: is space mainly a theatre for denial? Is it an impressive method for not thinking about the tragedy that's picking up speed every day down here? It's a sharp-edged question, because some of us invest ourselves in space science, science fiction, the Curiosity rover and so on, and I believe that for many it's a way of escape – not just some light relief but an avoidance of this painful reality. If there were no existential threat to humanity right now, it would all be a worthy pursuit. In a nutshell: how can it be right for people to spend billions on these efforts while we haven't even remotely solved the problems plaguing twenty-first century Earth? Or is Elon Musk correct in his priority to make humanity a multi-planetary species in order to save us from possible extinction?

I think I have some answers to all that - for one thing, it would take an unimaginably violent and unlikely catastrophe to make Earth less habitable than Mars is now - but it is good to at least be asking some of the right questions and stir up thought and healthy debate.