Arizona & Mars

After our whirlwind stop in New York, we’ve made it to Arizona. I didn’t expect it to still be over 40 degrees (or triple digits at they say here). For the 15 years or so since I’ve left, I’ve made it a point visit in the winter. I naively packed a light sweatshirt thinking that October would be cooler.

As we were on an early-morning walk, the conversation turned to why so many Americans think the idea of colonizing Mars is self-evident. It’s easy to forget that pre-Twitter, Musk and Muskian ideas were widely respected across partisan lines. Much like a museum often tells more about the culture of the curators than culture that produced the collection, hence my thoughts on MoMA, literature is way to look at the culture which produced it rather than just the product itself.

Everything in Arizona is artificial. Everything. When it’s this hot people hide in the air-conditioned homes much of the day and only leave to air-conditioned offices and shopping centers in their air-conditioned cars. And thus the idea of living on Mars isn’t categorically different. You’re colonizing a completely inhospitable environment and building a type of civilization that simply doesn’t belong. Eventually the cheap energy and water will run out. It’s a civilization living on artificial life support.

Nearly the entire American West is clinging to this sort of life support in one form or another. If life on earth is essentially a technological enterprise in a hostile environment, what’s the difference between the earth, moon, mars, and further afield?

Azimov was famously fond of underground spaces, and this fascination of life going on despite an inhospitable environment permeates much of his work. The unmooring of life from its natural habitat is so engrained in American culture that that other science fiction writers and popular thinkers don’t question it. And there’s still this deep sense, albeit more hiddne these days, of winning the West: the ultimate victory and goodness of settler colonialism. There will be hitches and struggles, but the good guys will prevail and tame Mars. We’ve just replaced injuns with engineering problems and solar radiation.

Stanisław Lem is a stark contrast, and I would guess his view of technology comes from growing up in a society where people weren’t that far removed from living off of the land with rather little technological assistance. Instead technology was something dark. It was the killing machines of two world wars. The meeting of cultures was mostly non-understanding and killing.

I want to live in the world of American optimism and rocket ships, but it’s hard to see Lem’s view of humanity as flawed.