Exploring where few dare to go

By Barry Smith

"This region ... spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains and desolate sandy wastes, wearisome to the eye from their extent and monotony. It is a land where no man permanently abides ..."

Sounds kind of like the pictures sent back by the Mars rover, doesn't it?

Well, it's not.

It's not even Death Valley. Nope, it's how Washington Irving described "The Great American Desert" back in 1836.

The Great American Desert, if you're not familiar, is what we today know generally as Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and eastern Colorado.

In the opinion of some people less than 200 years ago, much of the American West was a wasteland - uninhabitable, worthless, pointless except perhaps as a test of human endurance one had to survive in order to get to Oregon or California.

In fact, some members of my family in Illinois (not far from where the Donner family started its fateful trip) still aren't quite convinced people actually live in Nevada.

I bring all this up because of a column I read recently by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post about exploration of Mars.

The pictures sent back so far "look like - well, they look like pictures of a lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show craters and boulders. They show red sand," Applebaum noted.

"Death Valley, the most desolate of American deserts, at least contains strange cacti, vicious scorpions, the odd oasis. Mars has far less than that. Not only does the planet have no life, it has no air, no water, no warmth. The temperature on the Martian surface hardly rises much above zero degrees Fahrenheit, and can drop several hundred degrees below that.

"Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, isn't the kind of place where you'd want to raise your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever going to visit, as some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well."

She goes on to lambaste the idea of human space exploration. The more I read, the more I began to think she must be descended from the people who were convinced Columbus would sail off the edge of the Earth.

Of course Mars is uninhabitable - under existing technology.

I would argue that Las Vegas is pretty much uninhabitable. Oh, people would live there, and have for hundreds of years, without the support of air-conditioning, automobiles and Hoover Dam. But I'll bet you my last dollar that a million of 'em wouldn't.

Obviously, we managed to overcome a few technological obstacles since the Oregon Trail was beaten down by wagon wheels. I think the Donner Party probably would have had a different attitude if told, upon leaving Independence, Mo., that they would be arriving in Sacramento in about four hours and the in-flight movie was "Santa Clause 2."

I also read a comparison of the Mars rover to Lewis and Clark, if only the explorers had been able to mount a digital camera on the bow of a keelboat and send it up the Missouri River while they sat back in Washington, D.C., and examined the pictures.

Yet no digital camera would have been able to record such a passage as a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Patrick Gass, did in 1804:

"The best authenticated accounts informed us, that we were to pass through a country possessed by numerous, powerful and warlike nations of savages, of gigantic stature, fierce, treacherous and cruel; and particularly hostile to white men. And fame had united with tradition in opposing mountains to our course, which human enterprize and exertion would attempt in vain to pass."

OK, so I'm more romantic than scientist when it comes to exploration. It's because there is more to discover than fuel cells and freeze-dried coffee. Our universe expands.

President Bush has given NASA new reason for hope with his call to send astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond.

"The human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements," Bush said. "We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves."

Of course, Bush's announcement immediately became fodder for political speculation. That's a good thing. We should be debating how many tax dollars are spent on expanding our universe, as compared with how many are spent fixing the one we're living in now.

(Just so you know, I looked up the Lewis and Clark expedition to find out Thomas Jefferson appropriated $2,500 for the trip. It ended up costing $38,000. Some things never change.)

Applebaum, in her criticism of manned space exploration, seized on the expense and risks involved to recommend that Bush and other leaders stop thinking about sending more humans away from Mother Earth.

"The result," she wrote, "inevitably will be billions of misspent dollars, more lethal crashes - and a lot more misguided rhetoric about the 'inspiration of discovery,' as if discoveries can only be made with human hands."

I agree that discoveries aren't made by human hands. They're made by human minds - those willing to go where few others dare.

Barry Smith is editor of the Nevada Appeal. Contact him at editor@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1221.