SPAAAAAAAAACE!

Yes, yes, I appreciate that I’ve been neglecting this blog recently, and I’m afraid that right now I don’t have a new story for you (working on a big project, you may hear more about it later, but I’ve not really had much time/ideas for short stores at the moment).  But today I’m taking a little time to talk about something very recent that pushes my happy buttons today, but also pushes my sad buttons for the fact that it hasn’t received much attention.

What is this something? It’s quite simple; it’s the fact that we went to Mars today. And that’s awesome.

And I don’t just mean it’s awesome in a “Dude, that’s totally awesome, bro!” way to describe it as cool or so forth  (though it really is), but I mean in the definition of the word that means “inspires awe, admiration, a sense of amazement.” Because I was definitely amazed.

It’ll come as no surprise to anybody who knows me well that I frickin’ love space. Science fiction is my favourite genre both to read and write for, the only TV programme I’ve actually put time aside for this entire year has been a rerun of Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System and the only TV series I’ve ever bothered to actually follow aside from The Simpsons on Channel 4 was Doctor Who (until I accidentally missed two entire series and thus have no idea what the hell is going on with the continuity), Futurama is the funniest animated show I’ve ever watched and my favourite video game series is the grand, sweeping Space Opera, Mass Effect (shut up about the ending). I mean, seriously, I could get the old passing stars screensaver on Windows 98 and stare at that for hours.

I’m not sure quite why I love space so goddamn much, but I do. It’s exciting, it’s new, it’s unknown. There are worlds out there made of diamond and burning ice (I shit you not), stuff thatwe once thought were the reserve of pure fantasy. There’s the possibility that there is life out there that is nothing like life on earth, other sentient beings with cultures completely different to our own that, knowing our general approach to these things from various movies, we’ll probably end up declaring war on just so Hollywood can make some new blockbusters and then put ‘based on true events’ on the posters.

So yes, this is all tangentially related to the Curiosity probe that landed on Mars, and the simple fact that holy crapping Christ, we’ve sent a robot to another planet. That is why I am happy; we’ve once again pushed past our boundaries and acheived what was once thought impossible. We’ve defied the boundaries of our own planet and gone to a place one thought impossible to go to. That’s brilliant, that’s awesome, and that’s why I’m happy.

And I’m sad because I ultimately don’t think anybody is going to care.

Right now, this is news. As of the time of righting, this the first article on the website ofthe BBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and this is going to be seen. It’s going to be read about. Photos are already being shared around Facebook. People are going to be interested.

And the next thing is going to roll around, probably the Olympics, and it’s going to be forgotten about.

It seems that, aside from a select portion of society such as those wonderful geeks at NASA or pretty much any science or sci-fi fan, nobody will actually care about this in the long run. This is, in terms of news, a drop in the ocean. We have done one of the most amazing things I can imagine, short of getting a person Mars or breaking past the barriers of relativitiy to see entirely new solar systems and galaxies with our own eyes, but in the end a vast majority of people are going to treat it with nothing more than a passing comment of “Oh, that’s interesting.”

I can understand this, to an extent. There’s a lot of stuff going on down here on terra firma that should warrant our immediate attention, and even putting aside the problems of world hunger, disease and war, things like making sure the bills are paid and food is on the table are going to occupy people’s minds. A lot of people are probably even wondering why it would be important. They’d probably say that there’s no real benefit to going into space, that we have no real reason to and that there’s no point in it. My knee-jerk reaction of ‘fuck you’ aside, there is the much more obvious reason that science of science’s sake is one of the driving factors in pretty much all human progress; if it hadn’t been for our drive to better ourselves, to learn, observe and see what we could improve on, we’d still be living in cave. The wheel didn’t make itself, you know.

The problem with simply sitting on our arses and not caring about something as amazing as going to Mars is that it risks, well, everything. Stagnation, decadence, decline, boredom. History is testament to the fact that as soon as a civilisation becomes complacent, it will begin to fall. Am I saying that because this acheivement will be largely fogotten all Western civilisation will collapse? Of course not, that’s silly. But it does worry me that we’re simply going to let things like this go, that we’ve already allowed the space shuttle program to pass by, that NASA has had its funding cut. There are burgeoning space programs from China and India, but itt worries me that we’re simply abandoning our curiousity and our wonderment, our awe in the face of the fantastic, fascinating, mind-bogglingly vast universe we live in in favour of simply sitting where we are and watching Made in Chelsea.  Because I mean, really, just what the hell does that say about us? What does that say about the future?

The universe is awesome. It’s huge. It’s exciting. And if we really want to be the infinitely curious, ever-learning, fascinated and wide-eyed people that brought us to this world of art, the internet and modern medicine. Wwith our cabability to push boundaries further than we have ever pushed them before, we should going up there right now. The stars are up there, and it’s high time we went and saw them in person.