I was never a great fan of David Bowie. In the 1970s, I liked some of the songs – Rebel, Rebel for example – but not the glam rock clothes, the make-up, or the hair. And I never understood what that eye-patch he wore was all about. In the 1980s, he began wearing stylish suits which were more to my taste, but then his music was sounding too close to disco. In retrospect, I appreciate his status as a significant influence on modern musical culture rather more than I appreciate the music itself: I do not dislike it, but still, I am not a fan. My other favourite of his early songs is Life on Mars, and I recently discovered a wonderful cover version by Gail Ann Dorsey, who played bass guitar in Bowie’s band for many years. He wrote this song in 1971, two years after Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had become the first humans to walk on the lunar surface.
The year before the Apollo 11 mission, Stanley Kubrick released the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a futuristic space mission to Jupiter is disrupted by HAL, the on-board computer, leading to multiple deaths among the crew, both human and machine. One of the movie’s great themes is that technological advancement does not of itself suppress human violence, but merely allows it to manifest itself in more compelling ways. In the opening scene, among a group of early hominids, a large bone from a dead animal is transformed into a tool for killing, and this instrumentally violent act is replicated, millions of years later, by HAL’s calculated, digital murder. Weapons evolve, but if our moral code does not then the outcomes will remain the same. Kubrick seems to be reminding us that wherever we go in the universe we take our failings with us.
This idea was beautifully expressed in a poem written by Konstantinos Kavafis (known in English as C P Cavafy), the Greek poet who lived most of his life in Alexandria. In The City (1894), he describes a conversation in which someone tells him that they plan to leave their home for another country because, Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here, / where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally. This is a familiar thought, that when our life is not working out well, we should move to another place and start again: we tell ourselves that a change of scene will provide us with the opportunity to live a better, more successful, more fulfilling life. Kavafis dismisses this hope as illusory, and replies: You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you. / You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses. / You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. / Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
If Bowie’s song draws attention the to ineffectual escapism of the movies, so Kubrick and Kavafis draw attention the ineffectual nature of travel as a means of escape: we can go to another place, but unless we change ourselves we will repeat the same old errors. Don’t look for somewhere else to go, these poets tell us, but look within: for the problem is not where we are, it is who we are.
Now, just over fifty years after the first humans walked on the moon, a serious discussion has developed in the media about the possibility of sending astronauts in a spacecraft to Mars, not to check whether there is life there, but to begin preparations for the establishment of a human settlement. It is perhaps no surprise that the idea of colonising Mars has emerged from the most prosperous and technologically advanced country in the world, the United States of America. First, because the enormous wealth that will be needed for such an enterprise, is concentrated there. Second, and more subtly, because America is itself a former colony, a society founded by idealists in Europe who wanted to create a better society in ‘the New World’. The intention of many of the first settlers – who came by sailing ship rather than space ship – was to create an exemplary society, to build in the words of John Winthrop (1630), a city upon a hill.
(It is interesting to note that when the British decided to populate Australia in the late eighteenth century, shortly after they had lost control of America to the rebellious settlers, they opted this time for a penal colony: less a city on a hill, more a prison in the valley.)
I have a very limited understanding of the nature of the many engineering challenges involved in designing a human settlement on Mars, although I have a sense of their enormity. At a minimum there would need to be a stable provision of breathable air, drinkable water, nutritious food, and robust shelter to protect from the extremes of the local climate. I suppose this is somewhat similar to maintaining habitable settlements in Antarctica, except that Mars has a different atmosphere and a different gravitational force. But sending supplies to the South Pole, by ship or plane, from Australia or Chile, seems relatively easy compared to sending rockets from Earth to Mars, with cylinders of air, bags of porridge oats, bottles of water, and boxes of toilet paper. This seems to be one of those cases where a major difference of scale makes all the difference. Mao Zedong said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, which is certainly true, but there is a step change in complexity between making a journey of a 1,000 miles and a journey of 140 million miles.
Designing and supplying a settlement for humans to live permanently on Mars will be a challenge unlike anything we have successfully undertaken in our history. While this does not mean that it is not possible, it does suggest that it will take significant amounts of time and money and, I suspect, a few failures from which ‘lessons will be learned’. No doubt it will keep a small but talented subset of the engineering community busy in problem-solving for the next few decades. But, suppose they came up with a plausible plan and a generous budget, what then? I think that Kavafis would say to them, well done but only now does the hard work begin. For, despite the fact that maths, physics, astronomy, and engineering are all part of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘hard sciences’, the truth is that these are the easy problems. If there is one relevant conclusion we should draw from the European colonisation of America it is this: that getting the settlers to their destination was far less of a challenge than the settlers getting on with each other once they had arrived.
Learning to live together, in peaceful and contented communities, without falling back into divisive factions each of which seeks to privilege themselves at the expense of others, and without trashing the environment around them, would seem to a desirable goal for any extra-terrestrial human venture. What would be the point of exporting the class system and climate change to other planets, when they are already the source of so many or our problems here on earth. Simply replicating the mess that is the current global economic system elsewhere in space seems a dubiously unimaginative ambition. But that is almost certainly what we would do – intentionally or otherwise. As Kavafis reminds us, Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. Except that in our case, the final word in the poem should now read galaxy.
There is an old – and not very convincing – proverb, that says that ‘charity begins at home’. I suggest a modest redrafting of that thought, namely that ‘progress begins at home’. By this I mean that learning to build sustainable, peaceable, well-run, and just societies will be better done here on earth, where the running costs are relatively low, and we have plenty of accumulated historical experience about what works well, what works badly, and what does not work at all. I do not mean by this some form of utopianism in which all of us are blissfully happy all the time, but rather forms of community that provide a good way of life that allows most of its members to be satisfied, more or less, most of the time, with no obvious sources of oppression, injustice, or environmental destruction. If we could manage this, then at least we would have something approaching a blue-print of a human settlement that might work elsewhere. Social change – building good societies – is complex, demanding great amounts of ingenuity and patience; and is expensive too, not primarily in terms of the money to be spent, but of the ego that must be given up, that is, of our preparedness to abandon cherished beliefs about our own entitlements and privileges when we see the harm they do to others.
The hardest of the sciences is the process of discovery of how to build and maintain a just society. It is the hardest not because the theory is unduly complex but because the practice requires from all of us a consistent effort of willpower that very few of us are naturally disposed to make.
A year before David Bowie wrote Life on Mars, the American singer-songwriter Gil Scott Heron released a song that is a wonderful riposte to the Apollo space programme. While the engineers and their financial backers are sitting at their desks, tapping on their keyboards, programming their computers, and dreaming about the rockets that will take the first humans to Mars, I hope they find some time to listen to Whitey on the Moon.