Cumbrian Sky

Welcome to Carnival of Space readers! :-)

All my life I’ve steadfastly refused to believe in Fate, or coincidence, or… ( pause for dramatic effect) … Destiny, but sometimes the Universe throws a set of things at me at the same time, in just the right order, exactly when I need them, and I have to wonder…

The other night I was online gathering information about today’s Rosetta fly-by of Earth, ready to write it up on my blog, yes, this one you’re reading now. As a space picture junkie I have to be honest and say that as exciting and useful as the science returned from the fly-by will be, I was just impatient to see the pretty pictures of Earth, and the ones released so far haven’t disappointed. If that makes me shallow, well, guilty as charged; nothing wrong in my book with wanting to see images of my beautiful Homeworld, complete with azure blue oceans, and green and brown landmasses showing through the tears and rips in its fluffy white candyfloss clouds.

As I write this the fly-by seems to have been a great success, and the first images are already on the excellent Rosetta Earth fly-past Blog, which is a great relief, because I’m still mad at ESA for keeping back some of the images they took of a crescent Mars, taken during the probe’s close encounter with Mars earlier this year. Being both a lifelong Mars nut and a financial contributor to ESA through my taxes I think it’s wrong they continue to keep those images hidden away on a hard drive somewhere, but all my email enquiries and pleas for their release have come to nothing, so I guess they’re destined to remain in the shadows forever –

But anyway, I digress. I was talking about fate, and coincidences. So there I was, researching the Rosetta fly-by, and when I had finished I had a few minutes to kill before a TV program I wanted to watch came on, so I just wandered over to Google and started casually Image Searching for “Mars”, further feeding my obsession with Barsoom. Nothing new seemed to be appearing even after reaching page 12, so I decided to play Devil’s Advocate and see if any new images of a terraformed Mars had hit the net. Why Devil’s Advocate? Because when it comes to the issue of terraforming I’m very much against it. If I was a character in “Red Mars” I’d be up there on the summit of Olympus Mons with Ann Clayborne, hurling abuse at anyone who wanted to ruin and deface my beautiful, beautiful planet. If I’d been sitting Ann when she had that famous debate with Sax Russell in the canteen at Underhill I’d have knocked him on his backside, the smug, pompous, planet-wrecking geek, for daring to talk down to her like that and for dismissing the barren beauty of Barsoom so casually…

But last night, as I sat here, clicking through Google’s Image Search for “Terraformed Mars” one page at a time, a thumbnail image appeared on my screen that literally made my breath catch in my throat and made me question my commitment to Keeping Mars Red -

That's an image of a terraformed Mars, created for the popular program “Celestia”, by a programmer and obvious Mars fellow fan called Don Edwards, and when it appeared on my monitor I thought it was nothing less than the most beautiful, most hypnotising image of a terraformed Mars I’d ever seen. Most terraformed Mars pictures are crude and teeth-grindingly artificial. They just colour in the low-lying regions blue, fill Valles Marineris with poster paint blue water, dab on a few clouds here and there, and call it a day. Oh, not this one. This image showed a Mars I could actually imagine being home to millions if not billions of people in the far, far future. Hellas had a jagged coastline, with lines of white, surging surf; the Tharsis volcanoes wereproud, tall and snow-capped, as were the Argyre mountains; filgree rivers and streams meandered and wound their way across the vast plains of Meridiani and Elysium. And the whole world was painted with whirls and swirls of cloud, spiral galaxies wheeling above theplanet’s surface, teased and ripped out into delicate, lacy streamers that cast feathered shadows on the ancient craters far beneath them…

I hated myself for liking it, but I couldn’t help it. I felt guilty for staring at the screen, drinking in the view, but I was powerless. That Mars was the Mars of my nightmares – its noble landscapes drowned, its towering peaks smothered with snow, its mighty valleys filled with unnatural, evil, water – but I had fallen for it, true love at first sight, and I had to see it again, I had to get to know it better. So I went to the web page to see if there were any more like it…

There were. And they were even better. They showed not just the glowing natural blues and greens of a Mars colonised and transformed by the forces of Nature, but the glowing whites and silvers of a Mars colonised by human beings – the sparkling lights of towns and cities, twinkling on the nightside of Mars, proof that Man had come to Mars and made it his home.

One image literally made me succumb to the ultimate cliché and say “Oh my god!” to myself:

There, on my screen, was an image of Mars, showing the Mariner Valley stretching around the curving globe, running from top to bottom. But this was a Mariner Valley of the Deep Future, a Mariner Valley on a Mars not just conquered but totally tamed by Man. The image showed the Valley stretching across the nightside of Mars, but its silhouette and contours were still clearly visible because they were marked outwith countless dots and spots and pinpricks of  yellow and white – the lights of villages, towns and cities along its jagged edge, an edge turned into the coastline of a long, long sea after the terraforming had floodedmighty Marineris.

Part of me screamed “NO!!!!!!” looking at that image. It was wrong! Just wrong! For that to happen my beloved Mars would have had to have been almost literally ripped apart, its beautiful rocky landscapes torn apart, eroded and shattered by ferocious floods and landslides and Arkady knows what else. It’s all academic anyway; terraforming is, and will probably always remain, science fantasy. Too long a timescale, too expensive, impractical… the reasons why It Will Never Happen go on and on and on. So Reds like me comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the terraformation of Mars is about as likely as Keira Knightley moving in to the flat next door to mine, or Elvis Presley landing a UFO on the head of the Loch NessMonster, with Lord Lucan as his co-pilot and a yeti as his engineer.

But oh, that terraformed Mars was beautiful, there was no denying it. What a glorious, Ansell Adams of a homeworld that would be –

But wait! If I could imagine living there very happily, on that worLd of Olympian, snow-capped volcanoes and countless craters filled with slowly lapping, lapping, lapping seas, what right had I to deny the martians of the future such a beautiful home..?

Eventually I had seen every image of Mars on the site, so I went back to my work, trying to force the images of a mutilated Mars out of my head.

And then I got home from work today, went online, and there, on UMSF, was a link to the latest images of the Moon as seen by the Japanese space agency’s “Kaguya” orbiter – and there was Earth, shining like a blue and white snow-globe above the barren, charcoal black and cold ash grey lunar landscape. It took my breath away.

Am I supposed to believe all this is a coincidence? The Rosetta images of Earth, images of a terraformed, Earth-like Mars, and now images of Earth seen from the Moon? Is someone trying to tell me something?

Well, no, I don’t believe that, but it has resulted in something of an epiphany for me. It’s made me realise that we’ve overlooked the power of something that surrounds us all the time, and shamefully taken it for granted. What?

Blue. The colour, blue.

Why do we love seeing images of Earth from space, as seen by Apollo astronauts, shuttle crews, or departing/passing space probes? Because of their beautiful blue hues, which shine all the brighter and richer when surrounded by all that black. Why do we find computer generated images of a terraformed Mars or a terrestrial exo-planet so beguiling and hypnotising? Because we equate their swathes and streamers and ribbons of blue with life, with water. Calling Earth “an oasis in space” is one of the most exhausted of tired clichés, but it is absolutely true. What those photos show is the One Absolute Truth that the exploration of space has revealed to us: space is so dark, so cold, so deep, that it terrifies even the most optimistic of us with its empty enormity. The universe is a vast open ocean, as black and as dead and as soulless as a shark’s eye, and all we have done in 50 years of rocket-launching and plan-making is fearfully dip a shaking toe into the surf that foams on its shore, yet even that hesitant paddle has shown us that Earth is a heart-breakingly lovely, fragile, brittle Christmas tree ornament shining in the void, and for that revelation alone the expense and tragedies suffered in the last half century have been a small price to pay.

I’ve always thought – and told people in my Outreach talks – that water is the most precious thing in the universe, simply because it supports life, and is essential to and for life. But now I’m wondering if the colour blue might be just as precious, just as invaluable. I know the two are intimately connected – the blue we see on spaceprobe and shuttle images is, after all,  the blue of the oceans and rivers of Earth – but there is something in us that reacts strongly and emotionally to the colour, I’m convinced of it now more than ever.

And it’s set me wondering what effect the absence of blue will have on the men and women sent by NASA to explore Mars in 20Whenever. Approaching and then orbiting it in their spacecraft, will they look down on Mars’ cratered ochre globe and pine for Earth’s shining blue seas? Standing on its surface finally, how long after they have made their speeches and raised their flag will they begin to ache for the blue skies of their Homeworld? Will “Blue Deprivation” affect their performance? Should NASA be thinking of painting the interior of Mars habitation modules blue? Decorating sections with murals of Yosemite Valley or a Californian beach? Or should they go even further and send VR headsets with the crew, to allow them to walk along the shore of an ocean, or stand on a hill and gaze up into a wide open, endless blue sky, just to keep them happy and sane?

Of course, there’s a silver lining to this gloomy cloud. Looking at these stunning images of Earth provides us with a glimpse into the future, when astronomers finally photograph an Earth-like world around another star. How beautiful and moving those pictures will be!

One last thought. Can you imagine what it would be like to be as astronaut reunited with Earth after being exiled from it during a long mission? What would an astronaut feel after years and years away from their home, surrounded only by endless black, when they were faced with the brilliant blue and white face of Earth – or a terraformed Mars - again?

Think about that when you look at those Kaguya “Earthrise” pictures, and the colour Rosetta flyby images too…

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• #1 Comment from memes121 
  11/14/07 9:54 AM | Permalink

  Blue is my favorite color. I don't think it will happen. I mean think of the therapy bills! We are afraid of Martians and then we would become the very thing we are afraid of.....Tammy