The Martian chronicles

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids; in fact, it’s cold as hell.

I learned this little fact, not from NASA, not from my schooling, but from Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s longtime lyricist who penned the words to Rocket Man back in 1972.

It came to mind when I saw the latest NASA images of Mars, where last week the US landed a car — that’s right, a 2,000-pound drone rover named Curiosity — in search of water and other life-sustaining properties on the Angry Red Planet.

Actually, that “Angry Red Planet” thing seems a bit overdone. Sure, it’s rusty looking, a little salmon-colored at times, but not fiery red by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, it’s cooled down considerably since the “Angry Red Planet” tag got applied. Maybe it had anger management therapy since then.

So what does Mars have in store for us?

There are four objectives for Curiosity:

• Determine whether Mars could ever have supported life;

• Study the climate;

• Study the geology of the planet;

• Plan for a human mission to Mars.

This last one is pretty amazing. NASA says it plans to send humans there by 2050. This can only mean biospheres and colonization by 2100 or so. And this can only mean condos and Starbucks franchises by 2103.

Still. What can we expect from Mars?

Unfortunately, most of what I “know” about Mars comes from popular culture. Songs like Rocket Man, which point out that the temperatures are less than hospitable for humans — something like minus-80 degrees Celsius. Or as Elton sang, “cold as hell.” (There’s a paradox for you.)

We know that “it’s lonely out in space,” but it’s not exactly “such a timeless flight,” as Elton would have it: it’s about 18 months long, covering 352 million miles. (Bring along an iPad; you will get restless.)

The real news here is that NASA is not abandoning space exploration. It wants data, and in a time of human history when we may not be too sure about Earth’s own survival at times, it’s kind of amazing that seeking information about distant planets (or even close-by planets) remains a human dream, an aspiration. Science still matters! Science still inspires!

US rovers have successfully landed on Mars since 1976 (unless you happen to believe in that James Brolin/OJ Simpson/Sam Waterston film Capricorn One, which posits that the Mars landing was a government conspiracy faked out in the Mojave desert. Hmmm…). Early rovers back then beamed back the first images of the Mars surface, which were remarkably similar to what we’re seeing today: it looks like the Mojave desert up there. Rocky terrain, suitable for a remote-controlled rover, and maybe not much else.

But give them time. The Curiosity rover can do amazing things. The car-sized robot can roll over obstacles as big as 30 inches in height (that’s even bigger than the latest Manila potholes), and it’s much sturdier than earlier rovers, running on decaying plutonium isotopes (no environmentally-friendly version yet). Its computers are faster than earlier rovers, but contain less storage space (2GB of flash memory) than your average cell phone back on Earth. But they will beam back amazing new information.

Or not. Maybe there are no signs of life on Mars. Maybe Curiosity is simply the world’s most expensive webcam, sending back photos of… nothing. A salmon-colored wasteland.

Or maybe it’s like “The Janitor of Mars,” Martin Amis’s sci-fi story in which a group of humans land on the planet, only to find the only one left there is a janitor, an infinitely superior Martian who is cleaning up the mess left over from the last war the “Angry Red Planet” waged with a nearby galaxy. He tells Earthlings they’re similarly doomed.

Or maybe it’s like the Ray Bradbury planet in The Martian Chronicles: a shell of its former greatness and civilization on which humans struggle to find a new home away from a dying Earth.

Or maybe it’s like the Mars-scapes cooked up by Philip K. Dick in books like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where disgruntled Earthlings take on blue-collar jobs and escape the off-planet bleakness through hallucinogens.

Or maybe it’s like H.G. Wells’ Mars: full of long-legged metallic pods preparing to wage battle against our planet, only to be felled by the simple bacteria that causes the common cold. Unlikely, but still within the realm of scientific possibility.

Or maybe it’s like that lousy Brian De Palma movie, Mission to Mars, where it’s revealed that Martians fled their Eden-like planet after an asteroid hit, planting the seeds for life on Earth (which looks alarmingly like Gary Sinise).

Or if you listen to pop psychology gurus like John Grey, maybe it’s the place where men are from, while women are from that other planet close to Earth, Venus. And we’re stuck in the middle listening to all the bickering.

We don’t really know yet what Mars has to offer. Certainly, it seems like potential real estate to some people: a place where humans can expand their horizons, stretch their legs, like pioneers of yore. As soon as Curiosity landed, NASA scientists were already crowing that it’s “our new home on Mars.”

Not even the character in Elton John’s song could understand “all that science” that led him to climb aboard his capsule and head towards the red planet. “It’s just my job five days a week,” he sings, and you have to wonder what he does on the weekends out in space.

For the NASA scientists, the motivation’s a bit clearer: it’s like an adventure movie to them. A $2.6 billion adventure movie. And they want a good opening weekend. “This movie cost you (taxpayers) less than seven bucks per American citizen, and look at the excitement we got,” said Dr. Charles Elachi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. True, the scientists seemed pretty excited by the first images of Curiosity touching down — almost like an Avengers premiere.

One thing we do know: the desire to reach Mars has been sparked. It will shape a great deal of scientific research in the next decades, until that goal is reached. Because once humans get an itch, they tend to scratch it until it either goes away, or there’s an unsightly spreading rash and horrible-looking sores.

So when can we expect to see our first glimpses of little green men?

Well, I think it’s gonna be a long, long time…