The Delusional Martian (Part 2 of 2)

Even if not Delusional, Striving for Mars Shows Stark Avoidance (Vol. 5; Issue 17)

Even if AI programs and engineering breakthroughs make Mars achievable by, say, 2100, an immense problem remains: Humanity ignores the pollution of its host planet Earth. Instead, it contemplates colonizing a possibly unattainable and environmentally hostile alternative planet. In psychoanalytic terms, such avoidance is called displacement. The classic cliché of kicking the dog when angry at your boss illustrates the idea. You’re angry here, but you take your anger there. The displacement specific to the Mars fantasy involves leaving our trashed planet here, and heading off to a distant, dangerous one holding some kind of promise.

The problem brings to mind a story told by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (2000). He observed an indigenous tribe, perhaps in New Guinea, with an unusual mortality myth. These aboriginal peoples lived in elevated huts supported by wooden stilts. They defecated into a hole in the floor of their dwellings. Death occurs, they believed, to avoid feces reaching the floor of their living quarters. In other words, mortality exists to prevent fellow natives from drowning in seas of shit. By analogy, we disregard the seas of shit right here on planet Earth—most created by us.

Some historians trace the origins of human civilization to the capacity to separate living quarters from waste products. For example, as early as 2500 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization implemented city-wide sewer systems—the earliest documented evidence of such advanced engineering. Individual homes featured latrines connected to sewer lines—including covered drains and manhole covers. Such sewage separation systems had never occurred in any prior civilization—as far as archeologists thus far know.

Unlike the inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization, we contemporary humans create contaminants far more lethal than urine and feces. Factories spew particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and lead into the atmosphere. The byproducts of controlled nuclear reactions create radioactive materials like Iodine-131, Cesium-137, Plutonium, and Technetium-99. Iodine-129 has a half-life of 15.7 million years; Technetium-99 remains radioactive for some 220,000 years. How ironic that these poisons last far longer than the approximately 5000 year history of any organized human civilization. Can you even imagine the hubris of leaving behind dangerous wastes literally millions of times longer than any human settlement existed? Our species, homo sapiens, only emerged around 200,000 years ago.