one knew for sure what they would run into, or when.
For a while, the case for an open (or infinite) universe gained ground. Infinity is a tolerable abstraction because, like all absolutes, it is as self-limiting as it is unquantifiable. Something that has no shape or computable dimensions, however keenly one may try to comprehend it, has no being. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, even among the learned.
In time, however, unable to bolster their respective positions, cosmologists reached an impasse -- and a compromise. It became fashionable to argue that, for lack of a more convincing explanation, perpetual space-time and cosmic confinement may be one and the same. The choice, they offered, lay in the mind’s eye of poets and stargazers and dreamers and a science fiction writer or two. It was, pardon the irresistible witticism, pretty much an open and shut case. Adding to the confusion, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps in an attempt to blur the distinction between knowledge and whimsy, someone suggested that reality is a hologram. Someone else theorized that the universe has no reality except in God’s boundless imagination. And another millennium came and went in a cosmos unconcerned with the pitiable struggles and contests of a wretched organism that keeps breeding itself out of existence.
And then it happened, not unexpectedly perhaps, but with devastating finality.
“WE ARE ALONE!” banner headlines proclaimed. “HUMANKIND: AN ACCIDENT” they screamed impiously on all the front pages.
Carefully worded, unadorned, brutally prosaic, eloquently detached, spreading across the page, the article ignited passions, provoked outrage or apoplectic stupor, clouded the mind, froze the spirit.
“An international team of astrophysicists has released details of a study which confirms that ‘intelligent life’ is confined to planet Earth, and that the odds of a similar biogenic manifestation occurring elsewhere in the universe are close to nil.
“Dismissing critics who charge that such view smacks of ‘cosmic egocentricity,’ the study recommends that the search for extraterrestrial life be halted and that efforts and assets be refocused on heretofore neglected earthbound priorities such as overpopulation, climate change, poverty, hunger, disease and diminishing natural resources.
“Drafted by the Yearly Astrophysical Hagiographic Watch Experiment in Hyperspace (YAHWEH), the 2,000-page document asserts that, ‘life is the aftermath of a spontaneous and unrepeatable paradox,’ and that humankind, is ‘an experiment gone wrong.’
“Alluding to Albert Einstein’s celebrated rebuff, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ a spokesman for YAHWEH said that ‘God had indeed played dice with the universe and lost. Perched atop a speck of dust in the limitless void,’ the study concluded, ‘aided by providence and propelled by natural selection, the human race is an occurrence -- an accident -- the result of an endless succession of unpremeditated chance events, all of which continue to unfold as we travel through time, as the present conjugates itself forever and ever and ever.’
“Supporting YAHWEH’s conclusions, a joint communiqué issued by the world’s spiritual leaders upheld the scientific findings. In an extraordinary gesture of humility and conciliation, quoting Boethius -- ‘As far as you are able, join faith to reason’ -- the communiqué conceded that ‘God, the epitome of perfection,’ had let his imagination run wild when He fashioned humans, and that unlike humans who never seem to learn from past mistakes, ‘He had then been mindful not to repeat such abomination elsewhere in His dominion.’“
From that moment on, and for the first time since the dawning of the age of reality, everyone knew that God would never be reached for comment, no matter how hard one tried. And in classrooms all across the land, children learned about the Punic Wars and the square of the hypotenuse and Charlemagne and the mighty Ganges and about life in a drop of pond water. The children grew up and ego devoured the innocence of youth. In time, apes became extinct and man vanished soon after from the face of the earth. Only angels survived the merciful finale; angels, little green Martians, the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot, the Abominable Snowman, Sasquatch, the Chupacabra and all the other creatures that populate our dreams.
DREAMFARER
We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.
The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands
in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak
is because it was out of the way
and served no large commercial purpose.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
You must’ve heard. Touchdown took place early this morning on a desolate stretch of the Tharsis Bulge in the shadows of cloud-ringed Mount Olympus. Violent squalls of swirling carbon dioxide had delayed final descent. It took all of my piloting skills and the capsule’s exceptional maneuverability to help maintain the right downward thrust-to-weight ratio for a near-perfect landing.
Bent by gravity, distorted by cosmic rays and electromagnetic waves, sounds of euphoria, distant, almost alien, soon began to crackle on the radio. It was Mission Control. I heard the thunderous applause of a thousand jubilant specialists. Bone-tired and listless, I acknowledged Earth perhaps more tersely than I’d intended. I asked for everyone’s indulgence, turned off the transmitter and surrendered to sleep.
A frozen silence now fills my ears. I’m peering beyond the pockmarked spaceport, through rising gales of pelting sand and dust. Before me, stretches a crumpled terrain the color of anger. Its disfigured visage splits into winding trenches that look like dry riverbeds. Here and there, jagged nickel-iron meteorites protrude from the sandy surface. Water, if it ever existed, has either long since evaporated or is now permanently frozen deep beneath the surface. I’ll know soon enough. To the east, the sky is a rich brassy copper. Farther north it assumes a ruddy hue. Another storm is fast approaching. Brooding, it will erupt with untold fury as invisible demons claw at the tortured landscape and obscure it from view.
What I see of Mars through the porthole, and what I will face tomorrow as I alight on the planet’s surface will best be told in pictures. Cameras have no soul, only eyes. That’s what keeps them honest. They will record the awesome spectacle with poetic unconcern.
What I feel is less easily defined, far more prone to understatement or exaggeration. Feelings, like dreams, are hard to apprehend and just as slippery. I shall not risk distorting them by analyzing them just yet; perhaps when I return to Earth; if I return to Earth. This is Mars, I keep telling myself, the fourth planet from the Sun, an old friend now at last chanced upon face to face.
Sunrise: my first on Mars. Will it be my last? Remote, aloof, no bigger than the moonlit eye of a prairie wolf, the sun sets Olympus Mons’ barren ridges afire, sending a kaleidoscopic scattering of ochre, burnt umber and blood-red into the thin golden sky. Wispy contrails of ice crystals levitate against the forbidding blackness of space. How very strange for a dead planet to be enshrined in vestments of such daunting beauty.
I shut my eyes but a star-studded canopy spreads out against my closed eyelids. This is Mars or else I must be dreaming. Only in a dream can the folly, the arrogance, the deceptive face of reality seem so vivid. Mars? I may as well have journeyed to Venus or mighty Jupiter or enigmatic Saturn or self-effacing Pluto, or some other celestial neighborhood, undiscovered, unsuspected, barely imagined, not unlike the unexplored regions of the psyche, perhaps even like this dream.
Forgive
