White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 1, 2

Tobias Bengtson, the delegate for Sweden, scorned the last speaker’s response to a magnificent leap into an expanding future. He reminded the assembly of the words of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the great Russian aeronautical engineer, who had said that Earth was the cradle of mankind, but that mankind could not remain for ever in the cradle. ‘This great nineteenth-century visionary woke up the human race to its destiny in space. The dream has grown more real, more accurate, more pressing, as the years have progressed. A glorious prospect must not be allowed to slip away. A few deaths, a little expense, along the way must not deflect the nationalities from achieving our destiny, the conquest of all solar space, from the planet Mercury right out to the heliopause. Only then will the dreams of our forefathers – and our mothers – be fulfilled.’

Other speakers rose, many arguing that terraforming was a necessity. Why go to Mars if not to create more living space? Some warned that Mars would become a United States dependency, others that a ruling was required, otherwise competing nations would use Mars not as living space, but as a battlefield.

‘I am going to talk practicalities,’ said a delegate from the Netherlands. ‘I have listened to a lot of airy-fairy talk here today. The reality is that we have now acquired this entire little planet of waste land. What are we to do with it? It’s no good for anything.’ He thumped the desk for emphasis. ‘Who’d want to live there? You can’t grow anything on it. But we can dump our dangerous nuclear waste on Mars. It would be safe there. You can build a mountain of waste by one of the poles – it might even make the place look a bit more interesting.’

It was Leo Anstruther’s turn to speak. The antagonism generated against the previous delegate’s speech gave him the opportunity to put his argument forward. He walked deliberately to the rostrum, where he scrutinised the assembly before speaking.

‘Do you have to act out the dreams of your mothers and fathers?’ he asked. ‘If we had always done so, would we not still be sitting in a jungle in the middle of Africa, going in fear of the tribe in the next tree? EUPACUS – and not simply NASA – has achieved a great feat of organisation and engineering, for which we sincerely congratulate them. But this arrival of a crew of men and women on the Red Planet must have nothing to do with conquest. Nor should we turn the place into a rubbish dump. Have we lost our reverence for the universe about us?’

My boss went on to say that he had nothing but contempt for people who merely sat at home. But going forward did not mean merely proliferation; proliferation was already bringing ruin to Earth. Everyone had to be clear that to repeat our errors on other planets was not progress. It more closely resembled rabbits overrunning a valuable field of wheat. Now was our chance to prove that we had progressed in Realms of Reason, as well as in Terms of Technology.

What, after all, he asked, were these dreams of conquest that mankind was supposed to approve? Were they not violent and xenophobic? We had not to permit ourselves to live a fiction about other fictions. To attempt to fulfil them was to take a downward path at the very moment an upward path opened before us, to crown our century.

The old ethos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been crude and bloody, and had brought about untold misery. It had to be abandoned, and here was a God-given chance to abandon it. He disapproved of that too readily used metaphor that said ‘a new page in history had been turned’. Now was the time to throw away that old history book, and to begin anew as a putative interplanetary race. Delegates had to consider dispassionately whether to embark on a new mode of existence, or to repeat the often bloody mistakes of yesterday. ‘All environments are sacrosanct,’ Anstruther declared. ‘The planet Mars is a sacrosanct environment and must be treated as such. It has not existed untouched for millions of years only to be reduced to one of Earth’s tawdry suburbs today. My strong recommendation is that Mars be preserved, as the Antarctic has been preserved for many years, as a place of wonder and meditation, a symbol of our future guardianship of the entire solar system – a planet for science, a White Mars.’ The General Secretary declared a break for lunch.

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