Landing On Mars

                Landing On Mars

              At approximately 11:30 A.M. (EST) on this Monday, the day of our Lord, November 26^th2018, The American Space Agency (NASA) successfully landed a space probe, on the planet Mars, near its equator. After the dust from the landing thrusters settles, solar electric panels will deploy. The craft will then sample the Martian temperature, by drilling sixteen feet beneath the planet’s surface. Other experiments will provide data for scientists to analyze  the composition of the planet.

          This ten-year space program, costing over a Billion dollars, propelled a space craft some 36 million miles into the cosmos, to land on the fourth planet in our solar system. To say that this feat is astounding is a mild understatement. The mysteries of the fourth planet will slowly become unveiled. The information from this probe may well lead one day to manned exploration of Mars. That seems almost unthinkable now, because of the distances involved and the technical expertise needed to carry out such a mission. But, had you asked anyone in the world, in the early 1960’s, whether it was possible to land a man on Earth’s moon and then return them home safely, they would have said that you have taken leave of your senses.

           My wife often relates a vignette that occurred during the late 1960’s, featuring two simple agricultural workers talking about landing a man on the moon. One simple worker looked at her fellow toiler and asked plaintively “How can they put a man on the moon, when sometimes it is there and sometimes it isn’t?” It is actually a fairly intelligent question, with respect to n Earth Moon or Mars probe. Mars has an elliptical orbit that carries it at times as far as 140 million miles away from Earth. At its closest point, our orbits are a mere 36 million miles apart. In that both planets are traveling through space at many thousands of miles per hour, you can only imagine the mathematic equations involve that are necessary in hitting one point in space, launched from one racing planet to another, at a given time and place over a ten-month period. Even the mammoth and highly sophisticated NASA computers had to be working overtime, to figure out that enormous, parabolic equation.

        I wonder if our ancestors were as awestruck when the Wright Brothers first lifted an airplane into the sky at Kitty Hawk North, Carolina? No one could have imagined the development of modern airlines back then. Now, we take it for granted when a twenty-ton monster, laden with people and cargo, lifts off into the sky to travel distances, hundreds of miles away, that it will reach in a few hours?

       The speed of technological development is exponential. We advance faster and faster in shorter periods of time. In my own brief sojourn on this planet, I can remember the amazing arrival of television. I am still in awe of how these little boxes could draw signals from the air and make pictures from them. And then when this magic box started to show the pictures in vivid color, we were astounded. Some people understood how to do this and created a new society. I can remember a 13 year old fellow student, in 1961,  trying to explain to me the theory of an electron gun, spraying three primary colors onto a cathode ray tube to create television. Then, as now, I could only mutter “HUH?”

We did a similar “wow” when the firsts small, personal  computers arrived on the scene. The first Texas calculators cost well over $ 300. Now they give them away as advertising promotions. And then the marvel of the world, the internet, entered our lives and changed the world forever.

      Artificial intelligence is the next stunner coming up. I have already watched the IBM computer “Watson” win a televised Jeopardy game show, besting human rivals. The little monster regularly drubs all challengers at the game of chess. How far can we take this? And as importantly, how far do we want to?

      There are scores of other fields in rapid development. Artificial hearts are pretty close to perfection. Voice activation of machinery is almost common. Exoskeletons in use for spinal injuries, improvements in artificial limbs and even thought activated implements are here already.

       I can remember the Dick Tracey cartoons from the 1950’s. They featured the famed detective watching images and talking into his wrist watch. That seemed like the wildest fantasy at the time. Now, it is all ho-hum technology.

       And then, there is the eerily foresighted television series of the 1960’s, Star Trek. It features many, many novel technologies. “Beam me up Scottie” became part of the vernacular. Will we ever perfect trans-teleportation? Some scientists think so. And the concept of warp speed, that velocity which exceeds the speed of light? That was thought an impossibility of physics. Now, we don’t know.

        Our future development is limited only by our imagination. Perhaps this new engineering will one day be applied to eradicate hunger and disease on our own planet. We can but hope and dream of better ways to do everything. And those who come after us will see things that we could never have even imagined.

                                             -30-

                                       (878 words)

                               Joseph Xavier Martin