The dance of the moon, Venus, and Mars in the western sky after sunset last week had me taking the long view – and not just across the ecliptic plane. For three nights in a row I watched the crescent moon, fat with earthshine, climb past brilliant Venus and fainter, more distant Mars. In my lifetime, human beings and human machines have been to all three places. Little robotic rovers are rambling around on Mars right now.

I wonder now if I’ll live long enough to witness the next giant leap for mankind: a human landing on Mars. It’s a massive undertaking, and it would have to be an international effort. But perhaps it could also be a unifying one.

Mars is an order of magnitude farther away than the moon, and that much harder to get to. It’s also cold, airless, and exposed to harmful radiation from space. But these obstacles could all be overcome in time. The important thing is getting there.

The Earth is now home to more than seven billion people. Collectively, they own and operate some 1.2 billion motor vehicles. Sixty million new cars are built each year, with metals pulled from the planet’s crust and rubber wrenched from its rainforests. Most of them run on fossil fuels, which are probably, at least in the solar system, unique to Earth. There won’t be any fossil fuels on Mars, because there probably weren’t any plants, let alone plant-eating dinosaurs.

The machines we’ve sent to Mars and the other planets come from the same place all those cars do. They are made of Earth-stuff. To go into space, humanity had to first invent heavy industry. Two centuries of heavy industry have begun to change the planetary climate in ways that we are just beginning to see.

But the inner solar system is abundant with materials. And, because of our ability to extract stuff from the earth and turn it into spaceships, we can now get there. Mars is closer to the main body of the asteroid belt, and asteroids are rich in metals. Even the surface of the moon contains usable stuff. The sun provides the energy, which small nuclear reactors could augment. In the future, much of the building material for space missions will come from space itself.

Side effects viagra on line ordering are generally commonly occurring inquiries throughout every medicine. Other method includes transplanting stool from healthy people to those in need. viagra no prescription This is an buy sildenafil cheap all-natural solution designed to improve your ability to get it up or keep it up. Two-dimensional echocardiography was performed, utilizing an ultra-sound Sonos cialis free consultation 5500, Philips gear with S12 MHz sectorial probe. On Mars, if we don’t find any indigenous life, a little man-made global warming might be a good thing. Mars does have an atmosphere, though it’s tenuous and mostly made up of carbon dioxide. But if we could somehow make more air, a small greenhouse effect would take hold and the planet would begin to warm. Subsurface ice would thaw. Lichens and other hardy plants could be introduced alongside industrial sites. Eventually, through a process called terraforming, the air could become breathable – in a thousand or so years.

But what if the process could be sped up by the introduction of cars? From what I’ve seen, a lot of Mars looks like New Mexico, minus the cactus. New Mexico isn’t at all unpleasant to drive through, though it is kind of eerie in its emptiness.

Those places are disappearing on Earth. Seven billion people in more than a billion vehicles can get just about anywhere. But Mars remains largely unexplored. Most of what we know about the place comes from a few friends with wheels: Opportunity, Spirit, and Curiosity.

The car has beaten humankind to Mars. Perhaps the rovers should bear plaques that read: “We came in peace for vehicles everywhere.”

The last man to drive on a world other than Earth, Eugene Cernan, died in January at the age of 82. He and geologist Harrison Schmidt explored their lunar landing site in a rover that looked like a dune buggy. Cernan had piloted the lunar module to within ten miles of the surface in the dress rehearsal Apollo 10 mission, and returned as commander of Apollo 17. When he stepped into the lunar module for the final time on December 19, 1972, it marked the end of an era. Human beings have not been back to the moon since.

But we sure have manufactured a lot of cars. Imagine if we diverted a quarter of that mass and energy to space. We could build space stations and mining ships. We could ensure our long-term future by inhabiting multiple worlds. We could have walkable cities here on Earth, and introduce industry and motor vehicles to Mars, releasing greenhouse gases on a planet where climate change would be welcome.

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On Interstate 19 in Arizona, which connects the city of Tucson with the Mexican border at Nogales, the signs are in kilometers. According to CNN, America’s only metric highway is a remnant of the Jimmy Carter era, when the idea of adopting the metric system in the United States was briefly taken seriously.

Every country in the world – almost – uses the metric system. And everyone knows why: the math is easier. All you have to do to convert between units is move the decimal point. It’s the world’s official system of measurement. Our American inch is defined in statute as precisely 2.54 centimeters.

The metric system is the one part of the French Revolution to sweep the world. Today, the only remaining non-metric countries are Liberia (founded by American slaves who returned to Africa), Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), and the United States.

My late friend Dave Alvernaz once suggested to me that the metric system hadn’t caught on here because it lacked the conceptual equivalent of a foot. Your foot is always there at the end of your leg, he pointed out, available to stick into a box or pace off a room. Three of them make a yard, and most of us are between five and seven feet tall. It’s a utilitarian measurement, based on the human body.

The metric system is based on the size of the Earth. The original definition of a meter was one ten-millionth (10^-7) the distance along a meridian from the equator to the pole. Because not even this distance is constant (Earth bulges in different places), the official definition of a meter has since been tied to the speed of light. This is important to scientists and engineers seeking exact measurements of small distances on the atomic scale and large distances between the planets and stars.

All space missions have used the metric system since the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in November 1999. Designed to orbit Mars and monitor its weather, the ship burned up in the Martian atmosphere. According to Wired magazine: “A NASA review board found that the problem was in the software controlling the orbiter’s thrusters. The software calculated the force the thrusters needed to exert in pounds of force. A separate piece of software took in the data assuming it was in the metric unit: newtons.”

The new National Geographic Network Series Mars, set in the near future, uses entirely metric units. When the crew landed 75 kilometers from base camp, I had to calculate: “Okay, so a little less than fifty miles…”
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Based on a decimal fraction of the size of the Earth, the metric system makes no more intrinsic sense on Mars than miles and feet. But it’s the easiest system to use, and it’s already the one in use by a majority of humankind. Perhaps if we had listened to Jimmy Carter 40 years ago, the Mars Climate Orbiter would not have crashed, and I would know my height in centimeters.

Like most Americans, I think in inches, feet and miles. Using the metric system is like learning a new language, something else Americans are notoriously reluctant to do.

The car culture, too, has its own language and patterns of thought, which make it difficult to change. We think of longer distances not in terms of miles but driving times: Bangor is two hours from Portland and four from Boston. It’s assumed that we are not talking about airplanes or bicycles. Car travel is part of our unspoken collective consciousness.

When I stopped using a car as my primary form of transportation, I found that I thought about the pattern of the day differently. How long did it take to walk to the bus stop? What did I need to take with me? How was the weather? When did the last bus leave downtown? What time did the sun set?

I recently saw the film Arrival. It was ostensibly about aliens but it was really about language. With a nod to Kurt Vonnegut, the film postulates that if humans can learn the aliens’ language deeply enough to think in it, they can see the Universe from a different perspective. Language drives perception, as much as vice versa.

I thought about that in the days after watching the film. And I thought that if we could begin to talk about cars and time and distance differently, without all the popular assumptions, we could perhaps begin to conceive of another way to live.

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Star Trek debuted on TV fifty years ago this month, and BBC America aired uncut episodes of the original series all weekend. Naturally, I watched until my eyes bled.

As a kid interested in anything to do with space, I discovered the show on my parents’ black and white TV, the same TV on which we watched the real-life moon landing. But it wasn’t until the show was canceled and went into syndication that I saw it in color and became intimately familiar with the characters.

It’s the greatest show in the history of television. Future incarnations like The Next Generation were slicker and more consistent, but the makers of the original show had no budget, no computer-generated special effects, no network support, and no established cultural universe to fall back on. They made it up as they went along, and half a century later, we’re still talking about it.

Even the stupid episodes were good. A personal favorite is “A Piece of the Action,” in which the Enterprise visits a planet in the beginnings of industrialization whose inhabitants, based on a book left behind by a previous starship, have patterned their whole society on the gangs of old Chicago.

In the best scene, Kirk tries to drive a car. As a man of the future, he is unfamiliar with the clutch and gears. The normally unflappable Spock is unnerved. “Captain,” he says, “you are an excellent starship commander. But as a taxi driver, you leave much to be desired.”

This scene is shamelessly betrayed in the first “reboot” Star Trek film, when a young Kirk leads an airborne cop on a chase in what is supposedly his stepfather’s prized antique automobile. Wait a minute, I thought – Kirk can’t drive.

While I’ve enjoyed many of the subsequent movies and series, none of them live up to the inventive brilliance of the original show (though The Wrath of Khan comes close). The minute the focus shifted from thoughtful storytelling to the creation of an ongoing “franchise,” Star Trek began to lose much of its magic.

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In his novel Imperial Earth, published in 1976 but set in 2276, Arthur C. Clarke’s main character arrives on Earth from Saturn’s moon Titan as a delegate to America’s 500^th birthday celebration. Clarke, who in the 1940s predicted the invention of the communications satellite, is known for “hard” science fiction that, as much as possible, relies on the known laws of physics.

He sets his spaceport 50 miles outside Washington DC, and populates the highways of the future with automated electric cars. It’s against the law to drive manually. This is, in fact, another prediction in the process of coming true. Several companies are currently working on driverless cars, and a few have been road-tested, with mixed results.

Even casual Star Trek fans are familiar with the characters’ preferred mode of travel: the transporter. It’s easy to see that the ability to beam from place to place would quickly make cars obsolete. The concept is a bit farfetched, but not quite as impossible as the faster-than-light warp drive that powers the ship.

Incidentally, the invention of the transporter was driven not by some visionary idea of future travel, but by the need to produce an hour-long TV show on a budget. As producer Gene Roddenberry explained in The Making of Star Trek (1968): “The fact that we didn’t have the budget [to land the ship] forced us into conceiving the transporter device – ‘beam’ them down to the planet – which allowed us to be well into the story by script page two.”

In his 1970 novel Ringworld, Larry Niven gives us something similar, with “transfer booths,” which allow people to travel instantaneously all over the Earth. The effect of this is to homogenize the planet, so that one city eventually looks like another. A depressing thought, but, again, there would be no need for cars in such a future.

It’s hard to find a work of science fiction in which humans use cars the way we do now. The implication seems clear: our future dreams and aspirations don’t include cars. On some subconscious level, we don’t want our descendants to be driving when they are living in yesterday’s science fiction.

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