Transitory Humanity

Is the martian man fated to destruction. As the human population rises into the tens of billions, Earth no longer seems able to sustain us. It is like we are a cancerous growth. We flourish and expand unchecked until we kill our host and thus ourselves, maybe our “suicide gene.” Is a symptom of our humanity, the constant need to conquer, “veni, vidi, vici, morti.” Ass our host begins to show signs of exhaustion, we look to stars not just in spiritual wonder but like rats on a sinking ship. “And Mars has never ceased to be what is was to us from our very beginning-a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.” (Red Mars 3) Is altogether surprising that we would do unto Mars what we did unto earth. “Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.” (Red mars 158) As much as the Reds ideology is poetical beautiful it is unfeasible under the constraints of humanity. Leaving nature untouched means hindering human growth, individuals can do it; masses, countries, civilizations cannot. History shows such stability is beyond us. Even in science-fiction, humans cannot remain contained to a single world without destroying ourselves in some magnificent fashion. So, shikata ga nai, we do what we must; we pray on science to save us from ourselves.

Technology gave us the tools to brake free of slow evolution. We no longer have to wait the countless eons to develop gills to breath underwater, we can construct artificial ones. “Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation.” (Red Mars 178) Yet this intelligence, this ability to change, seems not to be able shrug off our destructive tendencies. Indeed, each step in which we advance the ability to feed, heal, and house people, the general demographics of suffering don’t ameliorate. As soon as we create more to give, its appears we create (or procreate) more people to give to. The green revolution nearly doubled the food production of the world, so we nearly doubled the population. The frontier must ever expand to meet over ever expanding appetite.

Travel through space, colonize Mars, build a space elevator weighing six billion tons, and yet create a society just as flawed as the modern day. Rebellion, wage slavery, and overpopulation. These seem illogical and yet in Red Mars‘ fictional history, such developments are the most plausible elements of the whole narrative. Each evolution of technology is not then an evolution of humanity but rather a transition. This is what allows science fiction as a genre to comment so clearly on our present. The game changes but the rules do not. Still, science or some miracle of genius might yet change the rules, and that is the moment for which we all wait.