Making The Technoid Teddy-Bearish
Next thing you know, they’ll be making a Beanie Baby named Sojourner.
I mean, the country has had a romance with space before, but this is the first time that they’ve found a NASA space traveler quite so, well, adorable. Ever since the 2-foot-long, 1-foot-high, 23-pound robot rolled out of its air bags and onto the rusty Martian soil, it’s become a national mascot.
The scientists are so excited that one described himself in “hog heaven,” though that may be an insult to the real thing. The Pathfinder teammates sound as if they would like to pat their little offspring right on its alpha proton X-ray spectrometer.
As for the country, the trip to the red planet has gotten some 100 million hits on the beyond-this-world wide web. This is more people than are going to line up for the opening weekend of “Contact.”
I, too, am enjoying this virtual vacation on Mars. In an era when long-term planners worry about the next quarter, I’m glad we can still think in Carl Sagan-esque periods of time about billion-year-old floods. When many of us have trouble seeing beyond our own national borders, it’s great to glance at a world 119 million miles away.
But I confess that I am most intrigued by the way we have welcomed this high-tech traveler into our species. No sooner had it landed than Sojourner was magically anthropomorphized. This was no mere tool, no vehicle. It wasn’t even an “it.”
The scientists gave Sojourner more than a name. They gave her a personal pronoun. Rover scientist Henry Moore bragged that “She is the robotic equivalent of Neil Armstrong.” Then he announced that “she’s your field geologist.” Moore even said that she wanted to thank the taxpayers for her existence.
Having given Sojourner a gender, I suppose it was only moments before they gave her a romantic interest. When she went picking her way some 16 inches to the rock dubbed Barnacle Bill, deputy project manager Brian Muirhead said, “Sojourner and Barnacle Bill are holding hands.” Dr. Matthew Golombek went a bit further to suggest that Sojourner “nestled up and kissed affectionately Barnacle Bill.”
What a hussy! Sojourner hasn’t even been there a week and she’s soul-kissing the natives. I don’t want to know what happened when she got her spectrometer snout on that bear-shaped hunk named Yogi. If this goes on, we’ll have to screen out the NASA Web page from the children.
But this is not a treatise on sexism in space speech. At least not this time. It’s about the instinct to make something as cool as a remote controlled vehicle into something warm and wiggly. It’s about the human penchant to humanize. Even a high-tech robot.
When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he sounded like a robot: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But when Sojourner landed on Mars, it -excuse me - she was made into a flirt. The scientists treated this robot as a colleague, even piping in the theme song to “Mad About You” as her wake-up music.
Down here on Earth, we have a different experience with technology. Those with our feet on the ground, not the flood plains of Mars, often feel that the high-tech world has become an alien life experience. It’s the unidentified flying object coming our way. And it’s not user-friendly.
If anything, technology has been dehumanizing everyday life. Real life is turning into its virtual version. Too many voices have been replaced by voice mail. Some days, we interact more with a keyboard than with each other. Even the information operator has been replaced by a series of annoying electronic requests: What City? What Number? What Nonsense?
In what we call cyberspace, more of us enter chat rooms than know how to chat in a living room. And it seems we are all being forced to make our mental hardware fit new software.
This Romance with the Rover reminds us that there’s another side to this story. The human side, the unique and reassuring desire to absorb, adopt, and adapt. It’s behind the bumper sticker on the car, the sweet talk to the recalcitrant computer, the naming of rocks and high-tech explorers.
Right now, even the scientists among us are heaven-bent on humanizing something so foreign you’d think it was a Martian. As for the surrogate Sojourner, “Go get ‘em, Sweetheart.” But stay away from the little Martian rock star they’ve named the Couch.
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