Will You Meet God?

© Laurence B. Winn

Jun 1, 2000

If you met a race of space explorers, aliens hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ahead of us technologically - If you could ask just one question and get it answered, what would it be?

Perhaps, like Ellie Arrow (Jodie Foster) in the WB movie Contact you would ask, "How did you do it? How did you manage to survive your technological adolescence without killing yourselves?"

In the absence of contact with a group of friendly, helpful aliens, the better question might be, "How will we know the answer when we see it?" And that is the question to ask because, as you can see from reading "Halloween", a meeting with friendly, helpful aliens is an extremely unlikely prospect.

To help us deal with such a grown-up question, we can do what all children and, one supposes, childlike species do. Play. Among the most constructive activities occurring today are games, specifically those dealing with ways to get off this rock or with traversing and living in the airless void between worlds.

The Mars Society sponsors the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island in the Canadian arctic. The reason for the Society's interest is that the cold and dry arctic climate exhibits similarities to the Martian environment. This is a game called "pretending to live on Mars".

A brand new game, which might be called "pretending to drive a rover on Mars", is afoot with a Mars Society project to develop a pressurized Mars analog rover. Chapters or individuals who wish to present concepts are being encouraged to do so at a special session of the Third International Mars Society Convention at Toronto, Canada, in August.

NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) started playing the game years ago in Antarctica, which is thought to resemble the surface of Mars the way it was several billion years ago. Combining remoteness, isolation and harsh weather, the Antarctic Space Analog Program makes use of technologies intended for space outposts to reduce waste management problems and apply solar energy instead of diesel engines to power camp sites. A multi-legged all-terrain robot called Dante, designed to explore active volcanos, is similar to devices that might be used to explore the surface of the moon and Mars.

Biosphere 2, the brain child of a private firm called Space Biospheres Ventures, started its game of pretending to live on a space colony back in the early '90s. The project, much maligned by the popular press, failed in its publically-announced goal of supporting eight human "biospherians" for two years when oxygen had to be injected into the habitat. The project did provide some useful insights into closed-loop systems, not least of which was the information that aging concrete sequesters large amounts of oxygen in the form of calcium carbonate.

In a similar vein, though with much less fanfare, the Portland, Oregon chapter of the National Space Society began running lunar base simulation exercises for the Young Astronauts in the mid-1980s. They used lava tubes, volcanically-formed caves which are common both on the moon and in central Oregon. They came up with the idea following one NASA scientist's proposal that lunar lava tubes could be used to protect a moonbase from radiation, space debris and the extreme temperature variations of the surface.

LunaCorp is planning to offer amusement park-style simulator rides across the lunar terrain to visit Apollo landing sites and to drill for water at the moon's south pole. Passengers will be immersed in a 360-degree, full-motion system using input from a real robot on the moon's surface. According to the LunaCorp web site, provision will be made to train visitors to guide the robots across the lunar surface by telepresence technology. If LunaCorp pulls it off, it'll be a great game.

Certainly, games are not the real thing, but they are a means of focusing on the goal while awaiting the arrival of the key element, consensus for the politically unlikely adventure of settling space. What will that consensus entail? Perhaps we already have it in hand, without realizing it, in the form of a little book by Dr. Spencer Johnson called Who Moved My Cheese?.

Cheese is a metaphor for what you want out of life. The maze is where you look for it. Amusing, written for all ages, taking perhaps an hour to read, Cheese is a parable about the personal implementation of frontier theory. Accepting change as an axiom of existence, the story's mouse-sized protagonist advises us to "Smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old", and warns "If you do not change, you can become extinct." Check out the headlines. The cheese is getting old. You, we, need to strap on our hiking boots, slap our expedition hats on our noggins and head out.

The answer to the question, "How did you do it? How did you manage to survive your technological adolescence without killing yourselves?" is simple. It is also full of exciting prospects.

Will you get rich? Advance science? Be a hero? Become famous? Will you meet God?