IT HAS been described as "the first interplanetary library", stashed onboard Nasa's Phoenix Mars lander nine months ago and scheduled to touch down in the Martian "Arctic" in the early hours of this morning. Once ensconced on the planet's brick-coloured landscape, it will await any… er, callers.
If, following its long voyage from Earth, the unmanned spacecraft survived the nail-biting seven-minute descent through the Martian atmosphere – and avoided the so-called "curse of Mars" which has afflicted half of all probes dispatched to the planet since the 1960s – its robotic arm will delve into the Martian surface. There it will seek, to quote Nasa's mission statement, "clues to the geologic history and biological potential of the Martian Arctic", where water ice is now known to exist just below ground level.
But while the robot probe establishes the hard reality of Mars, its onboard "library", a DVD compiled by the Planetary Society, will offer anybody – or should that be anything? – which cares to investigate it a comprehensive if bewildering sample of how humankind has visualised the Red Planet over the past century and more, in sometimes luridly fanciful science fiction, art and broadcast material, as well as scientifically informed speculation.
NASA on Monday released its first images from the Phoenix Mars Lander. Picture: AFP/Getty Images
Christened "Visions of Mars", the silica glass DVD, designed to last for several centuries, was compiled by the Pasadena-based Planetary Society – the world's largest grassroots space interest organisation. Yesterday it hosted a 700-delegate gathering in Pasadena, "Planetfest '08: New Visions of Mars", and other related events across the United States. The DVD was the idea of Louis Friedman, executive director and co-founder of the Society, who describes it as "the Planetary Society's gift to those who will someday expand the human presence to other worlds. We hope astronauts will one day retrieve this first Martian library and enjoy the visionary works and good wishes sent from our time to theirs."
In the unlikely eventuality of there being Martians (with region-free DVD players to boot) they will see themselves as others see them – and may not be too impressed. The compilation contains work by such giants of science fiction as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Paul Anderson and Arthur C Clarke. But it also includes early classics such as H G Wells's War of the Worlds, published in 1898, which set the template for an entire genre of malevolent invaders from the Red Planet. Accompanying images will include Flash Gordon film posters (complete with cardboard spaceship interiors), and cover artwork for Edgar Rice Burrough's Martian tales which set a trend in the kind of pneumatic spacewomen (was it the effects of low gravity, we used to wonder) who adorned the covers of pulp sci-fi comics in the 1950s.
Audio files include Orson Welles's famous 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, with its "news bulletin" said to have ignited widespread panic across the United States, while other recordings include the actor Patrick Stewart – Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation – introducing a "Mars Radio" section of the DVD.
On a more serious level, the DVD, which also carries the names of some 250,000 people from throughout the world in a token of goodwill across space and time, includes recorded messages from some of the real visionaries whose writings and broadcasts have spurred the exploration of space. Against a backdrop of tropical birdsong in his Sri Lankan haven, the late Arthur C Clarke, recorded in 1993, sends greetings to those future generations whom he envisages as engaged in the epic task of "terraforming" Mars – changing its inhospitable environment (average temperature minus 60C, atmosphere 95 per cent carbon dioxide, unfeasibly low atmospheric pressure) to render it ultimately inhabitable by human colonists, in what Clarke calls "a home of heart's desire".
Carl Sagan, the evangelising astronomer and communicator who helped found the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) Institute, addresses the "new Martians" from near his home at Ithica, New York (listeners can hear the nearby waterfall – a truly alien concept on Mars). Sagan, recorded before his death in 1996, talks about the "kind of dance" performed by science fiction and science over the past century, particularly regarding Mars. "The scientists make a find which inspires the science-fiction writers," he says, "and a host of young people read the science fiction and are excited and inspired to find out more about Mars, which they do, and that feeds again into another generation of science fiction and science.
"That sequence has played a major role in out present ability to get to Mars.
"I don't know why you're on Mars," the astronomer continues, speculating that his future listeners may be on the planet as part of a mission to perhaps deflect an asteroid which is threatening to impact on Earth. "Maybe you're there because we recognise that if there are human communities on many worlds, the chances of us being rendered extinct by some catastrophe on one world is much less." Or perhaps, he concludes, humans will be living on Mars simply because "there is a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process. For 99 per cent of our tenure on Earth we've been wanderers, and the next place to wander to is Mars."
One can't help thinking of another author and visionary enshrined in the little disc, Ray Bradbury, who was due to address yesterday's conference in Pasadena, and whose Martian Chronicles did something to steer Mars fiction away from the bug-eyed monster camp to a more lyrical image of the planet. Interviewed back in 1976 when the first images were transmitted from Mars by the Viking probe, Bradbury, regarded by some as Mars's first poet-in-non-residence, famously exclaimed: "Fools, fools. There is life on Mars, and it's us. We are the Martians now."
Whether we admit it or not, most of us would probably like there to be life on Mars – of the benign sort, naturally. However, it's pretty certain that if and when the "Visions of Mars" DVD is eventually listened to, the listener will be human. The only speculation remaining is whether that human will be clad in a spacesuit, protection against an implacably hostile environment, or whetherhe or she will be a fully acclimatised "human Martian", a true space colonist living on a dramatically terraformed Mars with a breathable atmosphere.
Whatever their circumstances, the DVD will offer them an bewildering multiplicity of visions of their adopted planet. "Take me to your leader" was the classic introductory gambit of many a B-movie alien. Now that we're doing a bit of planet-invading ourselves, "Let me take you to our library" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
• For further details, visit www.planetary.org
The full article contains 1161 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
