For-Real Space Alien Would Be Reformer
Maybe it’s just a photographic illusion, but I swear that in some of those historic photos from Mars, you can spot Hale-Bopp comet cultist Marshall Applewhite hiding behind the rock known as “Barnacle Bill.”
So that’s where the People’s Gate caravan landed. Talk about frequent flier miles!
And hey, isn’t that O.J. Simpson, Sam Waterston and James Brolin, the crew of “Capricorn One” from the camp movie of the same name, waving the American flag from high atop one of the “Twin Peaks”?
Who knew Mars was so crowded.
Ah, I’m probably just imagining these things. The real images delivered courtesy of Pathfinder reveal a stretch of barren, rocky terrain that looks like the worst part of Arizona. I almost expect to see Clark Griswold, circa the first “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” wandering into the picture as he searches for a gas station.
But Clark wouldn’t be battling heat exhaustion; he’d be freezing. The noontime temperature in the reddish-brown desert, we’re told, is zero degrees, with a wind chill of 25 below. So if you’re a Martian and you absolutely have to go outside, remember to wear layers and keep your head-and-antennae covered.
This Mars mission really is an amazing technological triumph, as evidenced by the giddy reaction from all the techno-nerds at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who seem to think that cute little Sojourner truck is a real person, or at least a pet - Planetary Rover, if you will. When they’re not playing songs such as “Twist and Shout” and the theme from “Mad About You” for their toy truck, they’re assigning names such as “Yogi,” “Wedge” and “Couch” to various bumps in the Martian landscape.
Wedge? Remember when we used to assign glorious names from Greek mythology to our celestial discoveries? I guess that all died with Pluto.
At least Sojourner was named after abolitionist Sojourner Truth. That’s a better selection than Tonka or Humvee.
Not that I blame the slap-happy geeks at the JPL for getting a little Goofy, pun intended. It must be a real rush to don the 3-D glasses and use a computer to operate a pet truck from a distance of 119 million miles - even if its top speed is a half-inch per second. I mean, there are days when I can’t get my TV clicker to work from a distance of six feet.
It seems as if everyone is rooting for Sojourner. After all, the past few years haven’t exactly been the Golden Age for space travel, what with the Mir mishaps and the troubles with Hubble and the ho-hum shuttle missions that don’t even merit live coverage from the networks any more. Now is the perfect time for this fascinating other-worldly journey.
As cold and lifeless as those pictures are, they’re breathtaking. Who among us hasn’t gazed at the photos and imagined what it would be like to be standing right there? Maybe hit a fungo or a 9-iron, just for the heck of it. Or throw a Mars rock and watch it bounce along the dusty surface.
Because of Pathfinder, someone who is probably of college age right now might someday have a chance to execute that fantasy and actually set foot on the Red Planet. NASA’s Mars program has scheduled a number of missions over the next several years, including a spacecraft that will bring samples of rock and soil back to our planet sometime early in the next century. By 2010, a multinational project to send humans to Mars could be underway.
In the meantime, millions of Earth-bound creatures are fascinated with the great beyond as never before. “Men In Black,” the hip take-off on sci-fi movies, is a huge hit. Roswell, N.M., was recently overtaken by UFO enthusiasts. The Mir fender-bender drew global attention.
And now, the Pathfinder frenzy. Mars is drawing more attention than anything going on in the world we know.
Why do we care so much? Why is it so important to find out if Mars ever could have supported life forms or if aliens might have landed here? What makes us think that even if we did make the fantastic discovery that we are not alone, it would change anything?
Maybe it’s because we’ve screwed up so badly here at home. We figure if we could just make contact with something vaguely human but from another world, we’d get it right this time. We’d all get along.
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